Reading Wednesday Meme: Hangover Edition

[mystickeeper]

• What are you currently reading?
Right now I'm reading The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson. I'm on page 68, and I'm struggling really hard. It's set in Heian Japan & written by a white woman from the US, and I just have a really hard time getting past this cultural appropriation. I feel weird reading it. I keep thinking of a post by

Comments

[etrangere]

I found Wood's first X-Men pretty disapointing, but not awful by any means. Just - not as good as I was hoping it would be. I liked his Alpha & Omega mini much more.

[lavendersleeves]

I quite liked the Fox Woman (except for the sex scenes and also the way she combines words of two languages instead of just using the freaking word, like hakama-pants, OMG).

Kij Johnson is a writer who loves Japan and the Heian period very much--as do I, in fact. I've read almost all of the works. I've been to the sites. Not writing about something you love, just because it isn't the culture you were born into, seems unfair to me. Writers are always writing about things beyond their own personal experiences.

(And speaking of which, Liza Darby's _Tale of Murasaki_ is a beautifully written book by a white American, and Peg Kerr writes very compellingly about being young, male, and gay in the early 80s in NY during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in her book _The Wild Swans_).