book reviews, an ongoing series
I've tried like three times this past week to sit down and review, but I think the problem is I read some heavier stuff this go-round and the thought of thinking was just not appealing. But I promised myself I would read Harry Potter after I got this next set reviewed, so here I go. Apologies in advance if I end up giving some of these short shrift.
Trash, Dorothy Allison
Fell somewhere between Bastard Out of Carolina (which I loved) and Skin (which I didn't much like at all). I guess, even being from the country (yes, western PA is its own little backwater world in many ways), I do feel a connection to being down home. It is a wierd attachment that I find hard to explain, especially to Dee, who finds horribly gross and backwards some things which make perfect sense to me. Yet, even with this roots thing going on, I found it hard to connect with this book, which was more about the things from back home I am embarassed about than the things I miss. There's a lot of pride in this book, and a lot of hate, and a lot of rawness. The antiheroes here hate the people like me for not being trash. I guess there is a lot of privilege in being able to escape and only come back when you well and truly want to.
Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
I have no idea why this won a Pulitzer. The pacing was uneven, I couldn't stand the style, it was sensationalist, the decriptive narrative was a Hemingway hack job, and the denouement was a vastly unsatisfying reward for having to slog through the rest of the book. What, exactly, was the point here?
Proficient Motorcycling, David L. Hough
Really essential read for any rider. A lot of good information presented clearly with appropriate photos, diagrams, and analogies. The reader is not talked down to (unless you are an idiot hotdogger, in which case you wouldn't be reading this book anyway). It literally fell apart in my hands as I read it, though. I would like to re-read it next spring before the new riding season starts, but before then I am going to take it to the unversity printing services and have it re-bound.
Sea of Light, Jennifer Levin
This was a book about lesbian swimmers. Which is wierd b/c I've only known one who knew she was gay while she was still swimming. And in general women's lockerrooms are just as stiflingly heterocentric as men's lockerrooms are. So the parts where there was some waxing about how athletes and swimmers are just naturally all sexed up by being around perfect naked bodies all the time...erm...no. After practice I generally hurt too bad to wash my hair, stuffed my still drippy self into my school clothes, and went home. And the steroid stuff was kinda wack, b/c American swimming is notoriously clean. Aaaaand, the whole, let's take a sprinter and make her into a distance swimmer thing....doesn't happen. Ever. You might take a distance swimmer and turn her into a 400 IMer, or a sprinter and turn her into a 200 IMer, but you don't go from doing 100s to doing 1650s. Sorry, nope, doesn't happen. But really I'm nitpicking, b/c unless you have a swimming background, you wouldn't know this crap anyway. And I can't imagine that the book was written for lesbian swimmers as opposed to lesbians in general, b/c I'd surmise the former category is not large enough to pique a publisher's interest. Anyway. I liked the book. I thought the coach was written unevenly. Although in real life I'd expect suffering people to have conflicting motives and desires, in literature I'd expect them to behave a little more ideally in order to drive whatever your theme is--which I'm still not entirely clear on. The Cuban voodoo stuff seemed entirely out of place and I think the whole narrative would have been strengthened if we had learned about the character's families through their respective descriptions only rather than wasting page space half-fleshing out minor characters. And, while a cute idea, I can say from personal experience that being in the throes of a new relationship while being a varsity athlete is not, um, feasible. Anyway. I didn't much care, b/c the book was cute and the main characters made a sweet couple. The end.
Lamb, I forget
I was going to do a full re-review on this after my re-read, focusing more on the philosophical aspects, but I found there was less there than I remembered. In fact, the single line I found most helpful was the one I remembered from the first reading--something (I paraphrase) about the weakness of the Tao being that it prizes inaction over action. Which reminds me, I have yet to read Tao Te Ching. But Harry Potter first, dammit!
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
I was supposed to read this for a rugby book club ages ago but I admit now that I only skimmed the book b/c at the time I was pretty depressed and it was all I could do drag myself to the meetings, much less actually do any reading. Anyway, does anyone else think she died? Given an ambiguous ending, I always think the character dies. Even given the post-script. So, I finally see more acutely why all my favorite feminist blogs are always referencing this book when they talk about reproductive rights. It's not just the general narrative sketch, it's all the little details about gender/sex essentialism and power. Very good stuff.
Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Riki Wilchins
This is billed as a primer to post-modernism, and I intended to read it as a primer for tackling Butler (b/c hey, if Rank's read her, then dammit I will too). It was a relatively quick read, and an interesting way to learn something about Foucault and Derrida (sorry, still can't stomach full-out philosophical reading). I think what I got most out of it was an exploration of discourse--what makes it, what controls it, what unmakes it. I didn't quite realize the depth of the discurse mindset prior to this. If anything, this book has made me less enthusiastic about Butler, something I didn't think was possible. But hey, I made it through Female Masculinity (three times!), so onwards and upwards. Seriously, the utility of post-modernism seems pretty limited (look at me talking out of my ass after reading a 100-page primer! W00t!), and I'm actually looking forward to seeing how I can better understand it so as to either confirm or change my view.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano.
This was the most delightful serious book I've read in ages. There should be a law that people who want to write a book on an academic topic have to pass a panel of 'readability' judges before they are allowed to publish. This book was great. Highly recommended, and includes so much more than the title suggests. I kind of wish I had a group to discuss this with, b/c it's so chock-full of stuff I barely know where to start. The really excellent treatment of 'what about the menz?', the spot on smackdown of my own effeminiphobia, the clear-headed analysis of the gender divisiveness running rampant in the queer community, the T in LGBT, sensitive personal experiences, balloon-popping society's gender/sex hypocrises....really, I am going to read this again in a couple months and try to give it a better treatment. And maybe try to find an active discussion on it somewhere. Super interesting book.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
I've put off reviewing this for long enough. I've only read it five or six times by now, and I think it's time to finally give it a review. This is probably the best fiction I've read this year (The Pleasure of my Company comes in second). Although I can only assume that professional, objective reviewers waxed effusive over it b/c of its sheer quality, I've been a DTWOF reader for years and Bechdel's style and meticulous inking and storyboarding are nothing new to me. My connection to this book is disturbingly personal instead.
There were quite a few panels in the book that really made me catch my breath. I considered reposting them here, but decided it would be pointless. No one is inside my head but me, so no one is going to get the flashfire I did when looking at them. It's something about the combination, I think. The PA roots, the abusive father, the time warp. All combined to make not Fun Home but Close To Home. In too many ways, too close to home. I won't say it could have been my story, b/c there are significant differences. But I will say that I still get creeped out looking at the panels with the Cub Cadet.
Unlike some, who complained that the literary references made the book too highbrow, I actually enjoyed them, even though I only have a passing familiarity with some of the works referenced. I can also, perhaps better than most, understand why the author chose this method for conveying a theme. The area where I grew up has its own peculiar non-culture culture. It's not the flat-out redneckiness of the WV folks over the hill, it's not earthy farmer country, it's not straight-up industrial grit, it's not....anything really. It's my home, and it has its bright points, but really it's more like The Land Culture Forgot. In the reaches of the Bald Eagle Mountains in Central PA, where Fun Home is based, it's even more insular. It's really hard to write a book that people connect with when you don't have a defined culture to be your background and to pull descriptive stereotypes from. Rural PA isn't anything. It just is. When you describe the place, you need to create your own frame of reference just to give your audience an idea what you're talking about. Bechdel used the books she and her father connected over. It adds an interesting layer to the work, using literary criticism to drive a narrative and expound a theme, but I think that in the end, she chose to use this method b/c there was no other choice. This was her experience and how she made sense of it. Lord only knows, I'll probably end up using the freaking Church to frame my memoir. Now that's scary.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest this book may be triggering for people who have experienced emotional abuse. Depending on your own experiences, the denouement may or may not be satisfying. For me, it made sense, despite my life having taken a different path. Nevertheless, unless you have an irrational hatred for graphic novels or literary criticism, I highly recommend this book.
I feel almost dirty for having written such a dinky little review for a book that affected me the way this did.
My Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein
In the final analysis (yes, this is the last time I'll be posting on this book, too), I found this to be a trainwreck. While there is some inherent merit in being kind to oneself and taking some time to think about what you feel to be your best qualities vs. what society would like you to display, in the end, trying to relate all this stuff to gender turned the book into mush. Gender is everything! Gender is nothing! Gender is meaningful only to you! Gender is meaningful only to society! Kindness and self-introspection are great starting blocks, but you kind of have to link them with reality to get anywhere, which Bornstein does not do. I also found her perfect gender pyramid, while an interesting idea (that I'm sure some gender studies major has written a thesis on), to be a laughable stretch to how she suggested dismantling it. The portions where she tried to tie the two ideas together were painful, and the chatty tone grated on me to no end. It's disturbing how many gender-interested people list this as a favorite book. In the end, I found more to critique to than to like, and I found a very interesting thematic foil to this book in Whipping Girl, most especially in Serano's subversion = inversion = status quo hypothesis. I don't think it necessary to state which book I recommend. (myjesusisbetter, do you want this back?)
Trash, Dorothy Allison
Fell somewhere between Bastard Out of Carolina (which I loved) and Skin (which I didn't much like at all). I guess, even being from the country (yes, western PA is its own little backwater world in many ways), I do feel a connection to being down home. It is a wierd attachment that I find hard to explain, especially to Dee, who finds horribly gross and backwards some things which make perfect sense to me. Yet, even with this roots thing going on, I found it hard to connect with this book, which was more about the things from back home I am embarassed about than the things I miss. There's a lot of pride in this book, and a lot of hate, and a lot of rawness. The antiheroes here hate the people like me for not being trash. I guess there is a lot of privilege in being able to escape and only come back when you well and truly want to.
Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
I have no idea why this won a Pulitzer. The pacing was uneven, I couldn't stand the style, it was sensationalist, the decriptive narrative was a Hemingway hack job, and the denouement was a vastly unsatisfying reward for having to slog through the rest of the book. What, exactly, was the point here?
Proficient Motorcycling, David L. Hough
Really essential read for any rider. A lot of good information presented clearly with appropriate photos, diagrams, and analogies. The reader is not talked down to (unless you are an idiot hotdogger, in which case you wouldn't be reading this book anyway). It literally fell apart in my hands as I read it, though. I would like to re-read it next spring before the new riding season starts, but before then I am going to take it to the unversity printing services and have it re-bound.
Sea of Light, Jennifer Levin
This was a book about lesbian swimmers. Which is wierd b/c I've only known one who knew she was gay while she was still swimming. And in general women's lockerrooms are just as stiflingly heterocentric as men's lockerrooms are. So the parts where there was some waxing about how athletes and swimmers are just naturally all sexed up by being around perfect naked bodies all the time...erm...no. After practice I generally hurt too bad to wash my hair, stuffed my still drippy self into my school clothes, and went home. And the steroid stuff was kinda wack, b/c American swimming is notoriously clean. Aaaaand, the whole, let's take a sprinter and make her into a distance swimmer thing....doesn't happen. Ever. You might take a distance swimmer and turn her into a 400 IMer, or a sprinter and turn her into a 200 IMer, but you don't go from doing 100s to doing 1650s. Sorry, nope, doesn't happen. But really I'm nitpicking, b/c unless you have a swimming background, you wouldn't know this crap anyway. And I can't imagine that the book was written for lesbian swimmers as opposed to lesbians in general, b/c I'd surmise the former category is not large enough to pique a publisher's interest. Anyway. I liked the book. I thought the coach was written unevenly. Although in real life I'd expect suffering people to have conflicting motives and desires, in literature I'd expect them to behave a little more ideally in order to drive whatever your theme is--which I'm still not entirely clear on. The Cuban voodoo stuff seemed entirely out of place and I think the whole narrative would have been strengthened if we had learned about the character's families through their respective descriptions only rather than wasting page space half-fleshing out minor characters. And, while a cute idea, I can say from personal experience that being in the throes of a new relationship while being a varsity athlete is not, um, feasible. Anyway. I didn't much care, b/c the book was cute and the main characters made a sweet couple. The end.
Lamb, I forget
I was going to do a full re-review on this after my re-read, focusing more on the philosophical aspects, but I found there was less there than I remembered. In fact, the single line I found most helpful was the one I remembered from the first reading--something (I paraphrase) about the weakness of the Tao being that it prizes inaction over action. Which reminds me, I have yet to read Tao Te Ching. But Harry Potter first, dammit!
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
I was supposed to read this for a rugby book club ages ago but I admit now that I only skimmed the book b/c at the time I was pretty depressed and it was all I could do drag myself to the meetings, much less actually do any reading. Anyway, does anyone else think she died? Given an ambiguous ending, I always think the character dies. Even given the post-script. So, I finally see more acutely why all my favorite feminist blogs are always referencing this book when they talk about reproductive rights. It's not just the general narrative sketch, it's all the little details about gender/sex essentialism and power. Very good stuff.
Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Riki Wilchins
This is billed as a primer to post-modernism, and I intended to read it as a primer for tackling Butler (b/c hey, if Rank's read her, then dammit I will too). It was a relatively quick read, and an interesting way to learn something about Foucault and Derrida (sorry, still can't stomach full-out philosophical reading). I think what I got most out of it was an exploration of discourse--what makes it, what controls it, what unmakes it. I didn't quite realize the depth of the discurse mindset prior to this. If anything, this book has made me less enthusiastic about Butler, something I didn't think was possible. But hey, I made it through Female Masculinity (three times!), so onwards and upwards. Seriously, the utility of post-modernism seems pretty limited (look at me talking out of my ass after reading a 100-page primer! W00t!), and I'm actually looking forward to seeing how I can better understand it so as to either confirm or change my view.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano.
This was the most delightful serious book I've read in ages. There should be a law that people who want to write a book on an academic topic have to pass a panel of 'readability' judges before they are allowed to publish. This book was great. Highly recommended, and includes so much more than the title suggests. I kind of wish I had a group to discuss this with, b/c it's so chock-full of stuff I barely know where to start. The really excellent treatment of 'what about the menz?', the spot on smackdown of my own effeminiphobia, the clear-headed analysis of the gender divisiveness running rampant in the queer community, the T in LGBT, sensitive personal experiences, balloon-popping society's gender/sex hypocrises....really, I am going to read this again in a couple months and try to give it a better treatment. And maybe try to find an active discussion on it somewhere. Super interesting book.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
I've put off reviewing this for long enough. I've only read it five or six times by now, and I think it's time to finally give it a review. This is probably the best fiction I've read this year (The Pleasure of my Company comes in second). Although I can only assume that professional, objective reviewers waxed effusive over it b/c of its sheer quality, I've been a DTWOF reader for years and Bechdel's style and meticulous inking and storyboarding are nothing new to me. My connection to this book is disturbingly personal instead.
There were quite a few panels in the book that really made me catch my breath. I considered reposting them here, but decided it would be pointless. No one is inside my head but me, so no one is going to get the flashfire I did when looking at them. It's something about the combination, I think. The PA roots, the abusive father, the time warp. All combined to make not Fun Home but Close To Home. In too many ways, too close to home. I won't say it could have been my story, b/c there are significant differences. But I will say that I still get creeped out looking at the panels with the Cub Cadet.
Unlike some, who complained that the literary references made the book too highbrow, I actually enjoyed them, even though I only have a passing familiarity with some of the works referenced. I can also, perhaps better than most, understand why the author chose this method for conveying a theme. The area where I grew up has its own peculiar non-culture culture. It's not the flat-out redneckiness of the WV folks over the hill, it's not earthy farmer country, it's not straight-up industrial grit, it's not....anything really. It's my home, and it has its bright points, but really it's more like The Land Culture Forgot. In the reaches of the Bald Eagle Mountains in Central PA, where Fun Home is based, it's even more insular. It's really hard to write a book that people connect with when you don't have a defined culture to be your background and to pull descriptive stereotypes from. Rural PA isn't anything. It just is. When you describe the place, you need to create your own frame of reference just to give your audience an idea what you're talking about. Bechdel used the books she and her father connected over. It adds an interesting layer to the work, using literary criticism to drive a narrative and expound a theme, but I think that in the end, she chose to use this method b/c there was no other choice. This was her experience and how she made sense of it. Lord only knows, I'll probably end up using the freaking Church to frame my memoir. Now that's scary.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest this book may be triggering for people who have experienced emotional abuse. Depending on your own experiences, the denouement may or may not be satisfying. For me, it made sense, despite my life having taken a different path. Nevertheless, unless you have an irrational hatred for graphic novels or literary criticism, I highly recommend this book.
I feel almost dirty for having written such a dinky little review for a book that affected me the way this did.
My Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein
In the final analysis (yes, this is the last time I'll be posting on this book, too), I found this to be a trainwreck. While there is some inherent merit in being kind to oneself and taking some time to think about what you feel to be your best qualities vs. what society would like you to display, in the end, trying to relate all this stuff to gender turned the book into mush. Gender is everything! Gender is nothing! Gender is meaningful only to you! Gender is meaningful only to society! Kindness and self-introspection are great starting blocks, but you kind of have to link them with reality to get anywhere, which Bornstein does not do. I also found her perfect gender pyramid, while an interesting idea (that I'm sure some gender studies major has written a thesis on), to be a laughable stretch to how she suggested dismantling it. The portions where she tried to tie the two ideas together were painful, and the chatty tone grated on me to no end. It's disturbing how many gender-interested people list this as a favorite book. In the end, I found more to critique to than to like, and I found a very interesting thematic foil to this book in Whipping Girl, most especially in Serano's subversion = inversion = status quo hypothesis. I don't think it necessary to state which book I recommend. (myjesusisbetter, do you want this back?)