Booklog 12: Day late but not a dollar short
December booklog. I don't know why I consistently read depressing stuff in December! This year I also cut that with a bunch of comfort re-reads though.
- Destined to Witness, by Hans Massaquoi
This is the story of a guy who grew up as one of the few black children in Nazi Germany. I found it really compelling: unsurprisingly, his experience in Nazi-run Hamburg was not entirely positive, but this is not at all about how terrible it was in a simplistic way. It was terrible, but for Massaquoi it was the terrible of family, of the life immediately around you where you can't even describe it until you've been elsewhere and seen that it can be different. He desperately wanted to be in the Hitler Youth. He loved Hitler, even. I found that perspective absolutely compelling.
I actually really wished there was more on that, and I found I liked the book less as it took him away from that. His experience living in Africa was interesting, but by the time he got to America I was just all, "but there's so much you haven't talked about!" I wanted to hear more about how he processed the knowledge of what his country had done. I wanted to hear more about the process of going from loving Hitler as a focus for national and personal pride to hating Hitler as a focus of great evil. I felt a bit bad for feeling that way, since I can't possibly blame the guy for wanting to talk about his whole life and not just the part of it that is most personally resonant to me, but still.
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
I saw this mentioned somewhere, and immediately remembered how much I LOVED it as a youngster, and how much I wanted to read it again. So I did. It is if anything improved on reading it as an adult too. I must have been about fourteen or fifteen when I last read it, and I think I took its genius for granted... understandably, because it's not a showy sort of book. It's a work of functional genius, of doing something very complicated so well that you can barely even tell it takes any effort. And holy MOLY it does that. It's amazing.
Also, I understand the problem many people have with the gender politics of this book, and they're not wrong? But I was reading it almost expecting to be horrified by it, and instead what I found myself thinking was 'wow, these rabbits have better gender politics than my government, because at least they actually appreciate that the female rabbits do hard work'.
- Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
This is a sequel to The Shining, about what happens when Dan Torrance grows up, joins Alcoholics Anonymous, and works really hard to not become his dad. It's not as good as The Shining - I don't feel like this is a classic, in the way that really is, it's FUCKING scary! - but it is a decent sequel. Out of the characters, I liked Abra best, and I felt she helped it not disappear to much into self-reflection. I don't feel like I have much to say about it.
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
I hadn't been thinking about reading this, but I saw it on Gutenberg and was like, well, I have been meaning to read that, so why not now. And I'm glad I did. This is really readable, really compelling. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt and "the banality of evil": if the Nuremberg trials showed that for the Nazi death machine, this shows that banality of evil for slavery.
I found it interesting how carefully it was written and put together - it starts with rather interminable stuff from white abolitionists all about how "and you'd better listen to this guy because these horror stories are from the NICEST slave-owning areas, not even the worst bits!", because of course this black guy who'd actually LIVED it wouldn't be enough on his own. (And that was literally true, of course, it wouldn't have been PUBLISHED without that white support.) And then within the main text, I felt like Douglass was so close, always, to just going "THIS IS FUCKING SICK WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING STOP READING THIS AND STOP IT, STOP IT NOW" but he couldn't. He had to be very measured, very... restrained. He had to be very polite. He couldn't go on a rant about how even religiousness wouldn't make someone treat their slaves like people, he had to sit there and explain it calmly and in words that would be least likely to offend. I clearly have no experience of being a slave, but I know (albeit not on the same scale) what it's like to sit on anger, to have to choke it down and accept an injustice and phrase things in the most palatable way possible when what you really want to do is scream every horrible detail. It lent the experience of reading it a really direct resonance to me, and made it much more upsetting than I was expecting. And I was expecting it to be upsetting! I can only imagine how absolutely gutting this must be to read for those whose ancestors were the slaves Douglass was talking about.
- Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
A book of short stories set in China. I liked them, they were beautiful, but I don't feel like I really understand what she was trying to say with them, if anything. They seemed to be set in the same universe, and the repetition of themes like losing a parent and losing a child seemed to imply that there was greater cohesion than I felt. I got the sense that this was a writer tapping into something - maybe something within modern Chinese culture, maybe something within her own life - that I wasn't quite privy to.
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
I wanted to like this more than I did! I thought it was way more sci-fi than it actually is. I mean, come on, they're actually clones who are expected to die for their 'originals' as they donate organs, and the bit you focus on is a LOVE TRIANGLE? For THAT MANY PAGES? Nope. There should have been waaaaay more of the fun plot stuff and way less teenage hormones and feelings. The main character was okay - and this book does get points from me for having a heroine who has a bunch of sex which she is not shamed for - but I don't think we got, like, ANYTHING on even how she feels about being a clone. I just. I want to know about that! I felt like it only just kicked off, after aaages, and then the book was done! "You're a clone and there's this whole history about the clone rights movement that you don't know about but it's affected your whole life and stuff" is the START of a novel, not the bloody end.
- An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage
Food as a way of understanding human society and its development and changes! This didn't teach me much I didn't already know, since I find the history of famines fascinating and have read probably more than is good for me on the Irish potato famine, Holodomor, and the North Korean famine of the 90s, and at least some on the Chinese famine under Mao (note to self: I want to read more about that), but the perspective was good. I haven't read anything with the breadth of this with food as a focus before, and I found that refreshing. It is weirdly polemical in places, and I wanted to go, dude, okay, please stick to the interesting history and not your opinion about free market regulation. But I am glad I read it.
- Saturn's Children by Charles Stross
I have Charles Stross I hadn't read! I had actually been actively not reading this, because while I love Stross, I heard this was about a sex bot and also a Heinlein thing, and 1. a straight dude take on a sexbot sounded AWFUL and 2. I have never read Heinlein and have yet to hear anything that would make me want to. So I was MAJORLY dubious.
And I was pleasingly wrong! I picked it up finally because I heard someone say it was actually about what happens to the sexbots when humanity has died out, and that story sounded much more interesting. And it IS. And there's no ickiness in the treatment of said sexbots - Freya is a PERSON, and the various skeevy implications of sentient sex bots are totally part of the story in a really fundamental way. (And if anyone wants trigger warnings, I don't think any of it is particularly likely to be triggering, but the themes are there and I will give specifics if you want them.) It's actually really fun Stross, I thought, and I have already looked up how much the sequel is on Amazon.
- Champagne for One and Homicide Trinity by Rex Stout
I wanted some comfort reading and felt like some Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe goodness. I got it too! Although omg, Champagne for One, which is the one with all the single mothers, is weird in a bunch of ways... it's like Archie has all this BAGGAGE about women that the rest of the text doesn't support. Archie is the only one who goes on about it, and so it comes over like he's the one with the weird issues. So I read Homicide Trinity as being nearest to read (... it is pathetic how often that is part of my criteria for choosing a book) and also less weird, and it IS less weird! Although I think the novels are better, it was really fun.
I read 130 books this year according to my log. That seems okay; I am happy with that. I'd like to match it in 2014, I think. I drastically failed at my ambition to write more this year - I wrote zero words, for the first time ever since I was, like, eight, and I am not particularly happy about it. So 2014, I want to seriously kick my own arse about that.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/126154.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- Destined to Witness, by Hans Massaquoi
This is the story of a guy who grew up as one of the few black children in Nazi Germany. I found it really compelling: unsurprisingly, his experience in Nazi-run Hamburg was not entirely positive, but this is not at all about how terrible it was in a simplistic way. It was terrible, but for Massaquoi it was the terrible of family, of the life immediately around you where you can't even describe it until you've been elsewhere and seen that it can be different. He desperately wanted to be in the Hitler Youth. He loved Hitler, even. I found that perspective absolutely compelling.
I actually really wished there was more on that, and I found I liked the book less as it took him away from that. His experience living in Africa was interesting, but by the time he got to America I was just all, "but there's so much you haven't talked about!" I wanted to hear more about how he processed the knowledge of what his country had done. I wanted to hear more about the process of going from loving Hitler as a focus for national and personal pride to hating Hitler as a focus of great evil. I felt a bit bad for feeling that way, since I can't possibly blame the guy for wanting to talk about his whole life and not just the part of it that is most personally resonant to me, but still.
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
I saw this mentioned somewhere, and immediately remembered how much I LOVED it as a youngster, and how much I wanted to read it again. So I did. It is if anything improved on reading it as an adult too. I must have been about fourteen or fifteen when I last read it, and I think I took its genius for granted... understandably, because it's not a showy sort of book. It's a work of functional genius, of doing something very complicated so well that you can barely even tell it takes any effort. And holy MOLY it does that. It's amazing.
Also, I understand the problem many people have with the gender politics of this book, and they're not wrong? But I was reading it almost expecting to be horrified by it, and instead what I found myself thinking was 'wow, these rabbits have better gender politics than my government, because at least they actually appreciate that the female rabbits do hard work'.
- Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
This is a sequel to The Shining, about what happens when Dan Torrance grows up, joins Alcoholics Anonymous, and works really hard to not become his dad. It's not as good as The Shining - I don't feel like this is a classic, in the way that really is, it's FUCKING scary! - but it is a decent sequel. Out of the characters, I liked Abra best, and I felt she helped it not disappear to much into self-reflection. I don't feel like I have much to say about it.
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
I hadn't been thinking about reading this, but I saw it on Gutenberg and was like, well, I have been meaning to read that, so why not now. And I'm glad I did. This is really readable, really compelling. It reminded me of Hannah Arendt and "the banality of evil": if the Nuremberg trials showed that for the Nazi death machine, this shows that banality of evil for slavery.
I found it interesting how carefully it was written and put together - it starts with rather interminable stuff from white abolitionists all about how "and you'd better listen to this guy because these horror stories are from the NICEST slave-owning areas, not even the worst bits!", because of course this black guy who'd actually LIVED it wouldn't be enough on his own. (And that was literally true, of course, it wouldn't have been PUBLISHED without that white support.) And then within the main text, I felt like Douglass was so close, always, to just going "THIS IS FUCKING SICK WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING STOP READING THIS AND STOP IT, STOP IT NOW" but he couldn't. He had to be very measured, very... restrained. He had to be very polite. He couldn't go on a rant about how even religiousness wouldn't make someone treat their slaves like people, he had to sit there and explain it calmly and in words that would be least likely to offend. I clearly have no experience of being a slave, but I know (albeit not on the same scale) what it's like to sit on anger, to have to choke it down and accept an injustice and phrase things in the most palatable way possible when what you really want to do is scream every horrible detail. It lent the experience of reading it a really direct resonance to me, and made it much more upsetting than I was expecting. And I was expecting it to be upsetting! I can only imagine how absolutely gutting this must be to read for those whose ancestors were the slaves Douglass was talking about.
- Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
A book of short stories set in China. I liked them, they were beautiful, but I don't feel like I really understand what she was trying to say with them, if anything. They seemed to be set in the same universe, and the repetition of themes like losing a parent and losing a child seemed to imply that there was greater cohesion than I felt. I got the sense that this was a writer tapping into something - maybe something within modern Chinese culture, maybe something within her own life - that I wasn't quite privy to.
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
I wanted to like this more than I did! I thought it was way more sci-fi than it actually is. I mean, come on, they're actually clones who are expected to die for their 'originals' as they donate organs, and the bit you focus on is a LOVE TRIANGLE? For THAT MANY PAGES? Nope. There should have been waaaaay more of the fun plot stuff and way less teenage hormones and feelings. The main character was okay - and this book does get points from me for having a heroine who has a bunch of sex which she is not shamed for - but I don't think we got, like, ANYTHING on even how she feels about being a clone. I just. I want to know about that! I felt like it only just kicked off, after aaages, and then the book was done! "You're a clone and there's this whole history about the clone rights movement that you don't know about but it's affected your whole life and stuff" is the START of a novel, not the bloody end.
- An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage
Food as a way of understanding human society and its development and changes! This didn't teach me much I didn't already know, since I find the history of famines fascinating and have read probably more than is good for me on the Irish potato famine, Holodomor, and the North Korean famine of the 90s, and at least some on the Chinese famine under Mao (note to self: I want to read more about that), but the perspective was good. I haven't read anything with the breadth of this with food as a focus before, and I found that refreshing. It is weirdly polemical in places, and I wanted to go, dude, okay, please stick to the interesting history and not your opinion about free market regulation. But I am glad I read it.
- Saturn's Children by Charles Stross
I have Charles Stross I hadn't read! I had actually been actively not reading this, because while I love Stross, I heard this was about a sex bot and also a Heinlein thing, and 1. a straight dude take on a sexbot sounded AWFUL and 2. I have never read Heinlein and have yet to hear anything that would make me want to. So I was MAJORLY dubious.
And I was pleasingly wrong! I picked it up finally because I heard someone say it was actually about what happens to the sexbots when humanity has died out, and that story sounded much more interesting. And it IS. And there's no ickiness in the treatment of said sexbots - Freya is a PERSON, and the various skeevy implications of sentient sex bots are totally part of the story in a really fundamental way. (And if anyone wants trigger warnings, I don't think any of it is particularly likely to be triggering, but the themes are there and I will give specifics if you want them.) It's actually really fun Stross, I thought, and I have already looked up how much the sequel is on Amazon.
- Champagne for One and Homicide Trinity by Rex Stout
I wanted some comfort reading and felt like some Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe goodness. I got it too! Although omg, Champagne for One, which is the one with all the single mothers, is weird in a bunch of ways... it's like Archie has all this BAGGAGE about women that the rest of the text doesn't support. Archie is the only one who goes on about it, and so it comes over like he's the one with the weird issues. So I read Homicide Trinity as being nearest to read (... it is pathetic how often that is part of my criteria for choosing a book) and also less weird, and it IS less weird! Although I think the novels are better, it was really fun.
I read 130 books this year according to my log. That seems okay; I am happy with that. I'd like to match it in 2014, I think. I drastically failed at my ambition to write more this year - I wrote zero words, for the first time ever since I was, like, eight, and I am not particularly happy about it. So 2014, I want to seriously kick my own arse about that.
This entry was originally posted at http://soupytwist.dreamwidth.org/126154.html. Please comment there using OpenID.