Wednesday book meme thing
Feb. 28th, 2018 07:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseWhat I've just finished reading
Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. My previous complaints about structural patriarchy still stand, but man. I was completely sucked in to the second half of this story. I loved that, despite screwing up big-time where her sister was concerned, Orual worked hard to become a strong ruler after her petty and small-minded father died; I enjoyed seeing her growth and enjoyed even more seeing where she couldn't grow, where she was stuck; it was a very human story. And then, in the much-shorter second part, she's confronted with all those shortcomings and stuck places—the kind of late-stage character growth you almost never see in stories, but that's fantastically important (and common!) in life. Dammit, Lewis. You and your fabulous insight into human nature won me over...again.
Love is Love: A Comic Book Anthology to Benefit the Survivors of the Orlando Pulse Shooting, by a whole mess of folks. This is one of those "bought ages ago (in this case, around the time of the Pulse shooting) and been sitting on my bedside table" books; I picked it up for some before-bed reading because I was too tired to go and get my Kindle. I'm not sure what made me think it'd be good bedtime fare—I think I had some vague impression it was going to be a quick, easy, affirming read, mostly from the cover. Eight stories in, when I was uncontrollably crying, I realized I'd miscalculated a bit, heh.
That's not to say that it isn't encouraging and affirming—one of the requirements for contribution was to keep it positive, and there are many fiercely supportive tales amongst the various one- and two-page comics. But it's not an easy read, and it's definitely not quick. The format ranges from single-panel pieces to whole small arcs to illustrated poetry to (in one of my favorite contributions) a poem that's clearly meant to be a spoken-word piece; I might have to try it out sometime at a poetry slam (with attribution, of course). All of them are pretty emotionally raw, as you'd expect for art created in the wake of such a horrific tragedy. One particular image, a close-up of a victim's phone still displaying the dying text they'd sent telling their partner they loved them, haunts me particularly. Worth the time, and potentially cathartic, but not easy.
What I'm currently reading
Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. I'm trying to avoid berating myself for not making it through this as quickly as I would like, and instead just focus on reading a bit at a time. It's useful information, but takes more effort to process and integrate than a novel, so often when I have reading time I gravitate towards the latter. That said, I'm noticing a difference in my C2 teaching; not so much from any particular piece of advice as a general sense that I have a better idea of what I'm doing. I have more trust that the knowledge will be there, and more flexibility in my planning; if something doesn't quite pan out in class, I don't panic and freeze trying to figure out a workaround. I don't know how much of this is just from experience and how much from reading, but I plan to continue with both.
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. I'm only a couple of chapters in, and primarily struck by the structure of the story—it's felt like nothing so much as a dreamscape, with little moments of seeming coherence that nonetheless seem to function on an opaque and alternate set of rules, interspersed among action sequences that follow nothing so much as dream logic, always with an undercurrent of strong emotion—fear? dread?—that threatens to overwhelm the whole thing. Having just listened to Symphony for the City of the Dead and its excellent rundown of twentieth-century Russian history and art, it's basically exactly what I'd expect from a Russian writing under Stalin.
Girl Waits With Gun, by Amy Stewart. Another Audible Daily Deal I picked up some time ago. I'm not quite sure how to categorize it; I honestly don't think the author's quite sure whether she's telling a period family drama, a quirky domestic tale, a plucky girl detective story, or a gangster action tale. That said, despite a somewhat slow pace, I'm finding myself somewhat charmed by the story's refusal to fit into any one archetype; the personalities of the three sisters (the competent if staid spinsters Constance and Norma, who take care of their much younger and more artistically inclined future-flapper sister Fleurette) are extremely well-drawn, and their family dynamics (both supportive and repressive) remarkably fleshed out. Maybe the story's not sure where it's going, but the characters are interesting enough that I'm happy to hang around and find out.
What I plan to read next
I just picked up Hidden Figures on another Audible Daily Deal! Also, my mother wants to do a book-club reading of The Secret History of Wonder Woman this month—I may do a separate entry about that and see if I can recruit more participants!
Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. My previous complaints about structural patriarchy still stand, but man. I was completely sucked in to the second half of this story. I loved that, despite screwing up big-time where her sister was concerned, Orual worked hard to become a strong ruler after her petty and small-minded father died; I enjoyed seeing her growth and enjoyed even more seeing where she couldn't grow, where she was stuck; it was a very human story. And then, in the much-shorter second part, she's confronted with all those shortcomings and stuck places—the kind of late-stage character growth you almost never see in stories, but that's fantastically important (and common!) in life. Dammit, Lewis. You and your fabulous insight into human nature won me over...again.
Love is Love: A Comic Book Anthology to Benefit the Survivors of the Orlando Pulse Shooting, by a whole mess of folks. This is one of those "bought ages ago (in this case, around the time of the Pulse shooting) and been sitting on my bedside table" books; I picked it up for some before-bed reading because I was too tired to go and get my Kindle. I'm not sure what made me think it'd be good bedtime fare—I think I had some vague impression it was going to be a quick, easy, affirming read, mostly from the cover. Eight stories in, when I was uncontrollably crying, I realized I'd miscalculated a bit, heh.
That's not to say that it isn't encouraging and affirming—one of the requirements for contribution was to keep it positive, and there are many fiercely supportive tales amongst the various one- and two-page comics. But it's not an easy read, and it's definitely not quick. The format ranges from single-panel pieces to whole small arcs to illustrated poetry to (in one of my favorite contributions) a poem that's clearly meant to be a spoken-word piece; I might have to try it out sometime at a poetry slam (with attribution, of course). All of them are pretty emotionally raw, as you'd expect for art created in the wake of such a horrific tragedy. One particular image, a close-up of a victim's phone still displaying the dying text they'd sent telling their partner they loved them, haunts me particularly. Worth the time, and potentially cathartic, but not easy.
What I'm currently reading
Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. I'm trying to avoid berating myself for not making it through this as quickly as I would like, and instead just focus on reading a bit at a time. It's useful information, but takes more effort to process and integrate than a novel, so often when I have reading time I gravitate towards the latter. That said, I'm noticing a difference in my C2 teaching; not so much from any particular piece of advice as a general sense that I have a better idea of what I'm doing. I have more trust that the knowledge will be there, and more flexibility in my planning; if something doesn't quite pan out in class, I don't panic and freeze trying to figure out a workaround. I don't know how much of this is just from experience and how much from reading, but I plan to continue with both.
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. I'm only a couple of chapters in, and primarily struck by the structure of the story—it's felt like nothing so much as a dreamscape, with little moments of seeming coherence that nonetheless seem to function on an opaque and alternate set of rules, interspersed among action sequences that follow nothing so much as dream logic, always with an undercurrent of strong emotion—fear? dread?—that threatens to overwhelm the whole thing. Having just listened to Symphony for the City of the Dead and its excellent rundown of twentieth-century Russian history and art, it's basically exactly what I'd expect from a Russian writing under Stalin.
Girl Waits With Gun, by Amy Stewart. Another Audible Daily Deal I picked up some time ago. I'm not quite sure how to categorize it; I honestly don't think the author's quite sure whether she's telling a period family drama, a quirky domestic tale, a plucky girl detective story, or a gangster action tale. That said, despite a somewhat slow pace, I'm finding myself somewhat charmed by the story's refusal to fit into any one archetype; the personalities of the three sisters (the competent if staid spinsters Constance and Norma, who take care of their much younger and more artistically inclined future-flapper sister Fleurette) are extremely well-drawn, and their family dynamics (both supportive and repressive) remarkably fleshed out. Maybe the story's not sure where it's going, but the characters are interesting enough that I'm happy to hang around and find out.
What I plan to read next
I just picked up Hidden Figures on another Audible Daily Deal! Also, my mother wants to do a book-club reading of The Secret History of Wonder Woman this month—I may do a separate entry about that and see if I can recruit more participants!
