Reading Wednesday
What did you just finish?
Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Noah is the current host of The Daily Show; he is therefore someone I have seen on a daily basis for the last year (here he is hanging out with my cat), though I don't know much about him outside of that. This book is a series of essays about his childhood, structured more by theme than chronology, and doesn't get into his life as a comedian or moving to America or anything like that.
I have to admit that the writing style put me off for the first few pages. It reads almost like a transcript of a standup routine (which I suppose is unsurprising, since that's what he does), and unfortunately what sounds good out loud can sound rushed and overly simplified in writing. But once I had settled into the book it stopped bothering me, and I ended up really enjoying how strongly Noah's voice comes through.
Noah is the son of a black South African woman and a white Swiss-German man; he was born and raised in South Africa under apartheid, where his parents' relationship was, as the title says, a crime, and his existence often had to be kept secret. A great deal of the book is about the details of living under apartheid:
Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don’t mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ’em black. It’s simpler that way.”
Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say?
“Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!”
“Excuse me. I’m Japanese.”
“Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”
He also writes about his difficulty fitting in. Because he is mixed race, Noah looks "colored" (a legal and social classification in South African referring to people of mixed European and African heritage, but where the interracial relationships usually took place many generations ago and which by now has its own specific traditions and community), but doesn't actually have that background or speak Afrikaans, the language associated with colored people. He identifies as black, since he was raised by his mother and her family, but differs from the typical black South African in both appearance and perspective (his mother insisted that he learn English as his first language and sent him to expensive private schools). All of this makes makes his book fascinating to read, because he's forever the outsider looking in, able to analyze and describe society in a way that's more difficult when you're wholly immersed in it.
Noah covers a lot of very bleak topics in this book: apartheid, the difficult transition to democracy, poverty, his mother's abusive relationship with his stepfather who eventually shot her. There is a scene where a stranger threatens to rape his mother, forcing her to jump out of a moving car with two small children, by page 10. And yet it's also a very funny book! It's not even dark humor, exactly, more a swift-footed jump between seriousness and comedy, quickly shifting perspective between the tragedy of the moment to the comedy of looking back on it later. There were several stories that had me dying with laughter (the demon shit! Hitler the dancer!), and others that had me near tears (the reunion with his father, oh my god).
Overall this was a really fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I just wish Noah had written more for me to read!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells. Book #2 of the Raksura series! After the adventures of the previous book, Moon and the rest of the Indigo Cloud Court need to find somewhere new to live. They move into what seems to be the perfect place - a home carved out of a giant living tree - but the magic seed that makes it work is missing, and without it the tree will inevitably rot and die within a year or two. Moon and co. set off to find a new seed or track down the thieves who took the old one; complications inevitably ensue.
I liked this book more than the first one! It has some truly excellent worldbuilding set-pieces (the main giant tree, large enough to support an entire city within its trunk and farms and forests in its branches; another city inside a giant thornbush; a third city built on top of a giant turtle-esque sea monster, with wizards to prevent it from diving down and drowning all the inhabitants; a creepy museum of stolen artifacts and the taxidermied bodies of intelligent species), and the plot is tighter, aided by the ability to focus on a single macguffin. I continue to like Moon as a character - he's mistrustful and awkward and good-hearted - and I liked seeing how his various relationships deepened. I'm especially into his romance (possibly too strong a word for it! They're very casual) with Jade, the fierce Queen he's mated to, who chafes at her subordinate role in the Court, as well as his friendship with Chime, another awkward outcast.
On the other hand, I still really want a book where Moon just stays at a normal Raksuran Court, so that I can get a better sense of what the social structure is like when everyone's not in the midst of a life-and-death situation. I also was sort of bothered by the resolution of the Rift plot; he seems to be clearly established as a serial killer, and then they just... let him go? I mean, I understand that 'Raksuran jail' does not seem to be a thing that exists, so I'm not sure what they should have done instead, but it does seem odd to me that they've just set an incredibly powerful sociopath free to wander the world and no one seems concerned for his future victims. Even a sentence or two of "Man, I wish we could have helped the next group of groundlings he encounters. :( Oh, well!" would have made me feel better about it.
Nonetheless, this is a fun series! Thank you to everyone who has recommended it to me over the years.
Vibrant India by Chitra Agrawal. I was very interested in this cookbook because a) I love Indian food, and b) the author lives in Brooklyn, as do I. Unfortunately I did not find it to be very useful. Part of this is simply personal; I'm a lazy cook, and usually am not willing to do recipes that require hours of preparation. I know dosa is basic to South Indian cuisine! But realistically, I am just never going to soak dal for hours, and then grind it and wait for the dough to rise, and then finally make the dosa. A lot of the recipes here require that sort of effort. My other problem with the book was the fusion recipes - they weren't appealing to me. "Cucumber, Sprouted Mung Bean, and Pomegranate Salad" or "Butter Lettuce “Dosa” Wrap with Curried Potato and Chutney" or "Ben’s Curry Leaf Popcorn" are interesting ideas, sure, but just not for me.
On the other hand, I did like several of the vegetable curry recipes, as well as the multitude of sambar and rasam varieties. It's also always nice to see a book that focuses on a region of Indian food that is not the Punjab, which vastly dominates Indian restaurants in the US.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
It's October! :D That means it's time for my annual read of a bunch of scary stuff. First up, we have Deadlight Jack by Mark Onspaugh, in which a monstrous circus ringleader lures children away into the swamp. It could be better written, but it's entertaining me so far.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/27633.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Noah is the current host of The Daily Show; he is therefore someone I have seen on a daily basis for the last year (here he is hanging out with my cat), though I don't know much about him outside of that. This book is a series of essays about his childhood, structured more by theme than chronology, and doesn't get into his life as a comedian or moving to America or anything like that.
I have to admit that the writing style put me off for the first few pages. It reads almost like a transcript of a standup routine (which I suppose is unsurprising, since that's what he does), and unfortunately what sounds good out loud can sound rushed and overly simplified in writing. But once I had settled into the book it stopped bothering me, and I ended up really enjoying how strongly Noah's voice comes through.
Noah is the son of a black South African woman and a white Swiss-German man; he was born and raised in South Africa under apartheid, where his parents' relationship was, as the title says, a crime, and his existence often had to be kept secret. A great deal of the book is about the details of living under apartheid:
Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don’t mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ’em black. It’s simpler that way.”
Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say?
“Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!”
“Excuse me. I’m Japanese.”
“Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”
He also writes about his difficulty fitting in. Because he is mixed race, Noah looks "colored" (a legal and social classification in South African referring to people of mixed European and African heritage, but where the interracial relationships usually took place many generations ago and which by now has its own specific traditions and community), but doesn't actually have that background or speak Afrikaans, the language associated with colored people. He identifies as black, since he was raised by his mother and her family, but differs from the typical black South African in both appearance and perspective (his mother insisted that he learn English as his first language and sent him to expensive private schools). All of this makes makes his book fascinating to read, because he's forever the outsider looking in, able to analyze and describe society in a way that's more difficult when you're wholly immersed in it.
Noah covers a lot of very bleak topics in this book: apartheid, the difficult transition to democracy, poverty, his mother's abusive relationship with his stepfather who eventually shot her. There is a scene where a stranger threatens to rape his mother, forcing her to jump out of a moving car with two small children, by page 10. And yet it's also a very funny book! It's not even dark humor, exactly, more a swift-footed jump between seriousness and comedy, quickly shifting perspective between the tragedy of the moment to the comedy of looking back on it later. There were several stories that had me dying with laughter (the demon shit! Hitler the dancer!), and others that had me near tears (the reunion with his father, oh my god).
Overall this was a really fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I just wish Noah had written more for me to read!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells. Book #2 of the Raksura series! After the adventures of the previous book, Moon and the rest of the Indigo Cloud Court need to find somewhere new to live. They move into what seems to be the perfect place - a home carved out of a giant living tree - but the magic seed that makes it work is missing, and without it the tree will inevitably rot and die within a year or two. Moon and co. set off to find a new seed or track down the thieves who took the old one; complications inevitably ensue.
I liked this book more than the first one! It has some truly excellent worldbuilding set-pieces (the main giant tree, large enough to support an entire city within its trunk and farms and forests in its branches; another city inside a giant thornbush; a third city built on top of a giant turtle-esque sea monster, with wizards to prevent it from diving down and drowning all the inhabitants; a creepy museum of stolen artifacts and the taxidermied bodies of intelligent species), and the plot is tighter, aided by the ability to focus on a single macguffin. I continue to like Moon as a character - he's mistrustful and awkward and good-hearted - and I liked seeing how his various relationships deepened. I'm especially into his romance (possibly too strong a word for it! They're very casual) with Jade, the fierce Queen he's mated to, who chafes at her subordinate role in the Court, as well as his friendship with Chime, another awkward outcast.
On the other hand, I still really want a book where Moon just stays at a normal Raksuran Court, so that I can get a better sense of what the social structure is like when everyone's not in the midst of a life-and-death situation. I also was sort of bothered by the resolution of the Rift plot; he seems to be clearly established as a serial killer, and then they just... let him go? I mean, I understand that 'Raksuran jail' does not seem to be a thing that exists, so I'm not sure what they should have done instead, but it does seem odd to me that they've just set an incredibly powerful sociopath free to wander the world and no one seems concerned for his future victims. Even a sentence or two of "Man, I wish we could have helped the next group of groundlings he encounters. :( Oh, well!" would have made me feel better about it.
Nonetheless, this is a fun series! Thank you to everyone who has recommended it to me over the years.
Vibrant India by Chitra Agrawal. I was very interested in this cookbook because a) I love Indian food, and b) the author lives in Brooklyn, as do I. Unfortunately I did not find it to be very useful. Part of this is simply personal; I'm a lazy cook, and usually am not willing to do recipes that require hours of preparation. I know dosa is basic to South Indian cuisine! But realistically, I am just never going to soak dal for hours, and then grind it and wait for the dough to rise, and then finally make the dosa. A lot of the recipes here require that sort of effort. My other problem with the book was the fusion recipes - they weren't appealing to me. "Cucumber, Sprouted Mung Bean, and Pomegranate Salad" or "Butter Lettuce “Dosa” Wrap with Curried Potato and Chutney" or "Ben’s Curry Leaf Popcorn" are interesting ideas, sure, but just not for me.
On the other hand, I did like several of the vegetable curry recipes, as well as the multitude of sambar and rasam varieties. It's also always nice to see a book that focuses on a region of Indian food that is not the Punjab, which vastly dominates Indian restaurants in the US.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
It's October! :D That means it's time for my annual read of a bunch of scary stuff. First up, we have Deadlight Jack by Mark Onspaugh, in which a monstrous circus ringleader lures children away into the swamp. It could be better written, but it's entertaining me so far.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/27633.html. Please comment there using OpenID.