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Hello, book-folk! I seem to have started a Business Ladies Club. Yesterday, the delightful Erika Moen had a post up on her Patreon discussing how she and a few of her female colleagues regularly met to discuss their experiences in running a business, and it occurred to me that I knew a few self-employed women and that it might be super useful to have a monthly get-together to compare experiences and offer support. So I put up a Facebook post about the idea, got a couple of responses, thought "Sweet! Three people is a good start!", started a Facebook group, and went grocery shopping...and came back to find that one of them had added ten more people, several of whom were in the process of introducing themselves. Well! The first rule of improv (and God knows I'm improvising here) is "Yes, and...". And clearly there's a need here, heh. We'll see how the actual meetups go! (At the very least, thanks to one of my favorite local feminist artists, we have a name and badge already, haha.)
So, onto the books!
What I've just finished reading
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Memoirs are tricky beasts. Humans are storytelling creatures, who recall episodes and fragments and improve the breadth and depth of those recollections by stringing them together into a narrative...and yet, those recollections are shaped by that narrative just as much as the narrative is shaped by our experiences, which makes it tricky to discern which came first.
Whether in service to the truth or to storytelling or both, Boylan takes the popular memoirist's tack of relating her memories in a series of vignettes, some comic, some tragic, many both (as her friend Richard Russo puts it, "You love that place between what's funny and what's terribly sad"). It's a tricky line to walk, keeping to the fundamental truth of events while also ensuring thematic coherence, but it's done admirably here, beautifully illustrating the evolution of Boylan's coming to terms with her gender dysphoria, as well as the rippling-outward effects her eventual transition had on her family. If I have any complaint, it's that the perspective occasionally feels more than a little emotionally removed; Boylan clearly (and for obvious reasons) has a strong ability to examine even extremely emotional events from a perspective of distance, and there are times when that works against the narrative's accessibility - she comes across as more calm and withdrawn than I suspect was actually the case in many of these situations. Still, as someone who deals with strong emotion through distance and analysis as well, it certainly felt familiar.
(This has little to do with the book, but deserves a link anyway: her solemnization of my friend's wedding was among the most heart-rendingly beautiful such pieces I've ever heard. I almost wish I could get married again just to have her do the service.)
Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie. The Heisenbergian nature of my reading choices strikes again - I have a weakness for well-read paperbacks that are maybe a little worse for the wear, and my friend's Boston Airbnb had a copy of Poirot in the Orient, an omnibus edition of three Poirot mysteries. This first one I had incredibly mixed feelings about; I can see why Christie remains so popular - her plot-construction remains second to none in the mystery genre, and she has a keen if cynical eye for human nature. But man oh man, some of her attitudes have not aged well. (I particularly cringed at the narrator's description of the Arab workers as funny-looking, with "their heads all tied up as if they had toothache." Cripes.) Of course, it's not precisely a secret that Christie held Particular Views, and they weren't really out of line with the culture of the time, but still...reading her makes me wonder what will stand out as equally cringe-worthy in our current popular writing, eighty years from now.
What I'm currently reading
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie. I...may have slipped the paperback into my backpack to read on the plane. *shifty eyes* (Dear Boston Airbnb friend - if you read this, I promise to mail it back to you when I'm done.) I'm only a little way through this, and so far all the action's been in England so there's been a minimum of racism, but whoo boy is the cultural sexism in full force. It's sort of a shame, because the rich charming fashionable heiress who's ambivalent about getting married for fear of giving up her independence is a far more interesting and sympathetic character to me than any of the others, but it seems pretty clear she's only being set up to be murdered. Now that I think about it, Murder in Mesopotamia also was about the murder of a powerful and independent-minded woman, although her power mostly came about in a covert and manipulative way...sigh. Still, these wouldn't be bad studies in the toxicity of gender dynamics in 1930s England.
What I plan to read next
I need to finish Blood of Ambrose and Come As You Are, plus I've recently acquired a couple of yoga books in preparation for learning to teach C2 classes. Unfortunately, buying them and letting them sit on your coffee table doesn't really do a lot to help you absorb the information...maybe if I strap them to my skin and let them absorb through osmosis while I work today...?
So, onto the books!
What I've just finished reading
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Memoirs are tricky beasts. Humans are storytelling creatures, who recall episodes and fragments and improve the breadth and depth of those recollections by stringing them together into a narrative...and yet, those recollections are shaped by that narrative just as much as the narrative is shaped by our experiences, which makes it tricky to discern which came first.
Whether in service to the truth or to storytelling or both, Boylan takes the popular memoirist's tack of relating her memories in a series of vignettes, some comic, some tragic, many both (as her friend Richard Russo puts it, "You love that place between what's funny and what's terribly sad"). It's a tricky line to walk, keeping to the fundamental truth of events while also ensuring thematic coherence, but it's done admirably here, beautifully illustrating the evolution of Boylan's coming to terms with her gender dysphoria, as well as the rippling-outward effects her eventual transition had on her family. If I have any complaint, it's that the perspective occasionally feels more than a little emotionally removed; Boylan clearly (and for obvious reasons) has a strong ability to examine even extremely emotional events from a perspective of distance, and there are times when that works against the narrative's accessibility - she comes across as more calm and withdrawn than I suspect was actually the case in many of these situations. Still, as someone who deals with strong emotion through distance and analysis as well, it certainly felt familiar.
(This has little to do with the book, but deserves a link anyway: her solemnization of my friend's wedding was among the most heart-rendingly beautiful such pieces I've ever heard. I almost wish I could get married again just to have her do the service.)
Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie. The Heisenbergian nature of my reading choices strikes again - I have a weakness for well-read paperbacks that are maybe a little worse for the wear, and my friend's Boston Airbnb had a copy of Poirot in the Orient, an omnibus edition of three Poirot mysteries. This first one I had incredibly mixed feelings about; I can see why Christie remains so popular - her plot-construction remains second to none in the mystery genre, and she has a keen if cynical eye for human nature. But man oh man, some of her attitudes have not aged well. (I particularly cringed at the narrator's description of the Arab workers as funny-looking, with "their heads all tied up as if they had toothache." Cripes.) Of course, it's not precisely a secret that Christie held Particular Views, and they weren't really out of line with the culture of the time, but still...reading her makes me wonder what will stand out as equally cringe-worthy in our current popular writing, eighty years from now.
What I'm currently reading
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie. I...may have slipped the paperback into my backpack to read on the plane. *shifty eyes* (Dear Boston Airbnb friend - if you read this, I promise to mail it back to you when I'm done.) I'm only a little way through this, and so far all the action's been in England so there's been a minimum of racism, but whoo boy is the cultural sexism in full force. It's sort of a shame, because the rich charming fashionable heiress who's ambivalent about getting married for fear of giving up her independence is a far more interesting and sympathetic character to me than any of the others, but it seems pretty clear she's only being set up to be murdered. Now that I think about it, Murder in Mesopotamia also was about the murder of a powerful and independent-minded woman, although her power mostly came about in a covert and manipulative way...sigh. Still, these wouldn't be bad studies in the toxicity of gender dynamics in 1930s England.
What I plan to read next
I need to finish Blood of Ambrose and Come As You Are, plus I've recently acquired a couple of yoga books in preparation for learning to teach C2 classes. Unfortunately, buying them and letting them sit on your coffee table doesn't really do a lot to help you absorb the information...maybe if I strap them to my skin and let them absorb through osmosis while I work today...?
