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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N. K. Jemisin. This was a fantastic read, rich without being overwhelming, believably complex, and fascinating. Sometimes I find political fantasy tedious, or I struggle to care about the various factions (or even to understand them properly). None of that here; I was sucked in right away. Yeine Darr has been called to Sky, the city which holds power over all the rest of the kingdoms. She is disdained for her dark skin, what the people of Sky see as her barbarian ways, but she has the right to be there, named as heir to the king. Thrust into a hotbed of political intrigue from uneasy obscurity, she's struggling just to stay alive. There are strange gods--I love how the book meditates on how humans should relate to gods, how they might interact, what a moral way to treat a god is, what does one do with gods? There are nations whose citizens' lives depend on the impulses and grudges of just a couple of people in Sky. There's a lot of really bleak stuff. But good stuff! Very good stuff. Definitely one of the best books I've read this year.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation - Jeff Chang. This book is expansive, even more so than I would've naturally expected it to be. You can't write about music in a vacuum, and to get any understanding of what created hip-hop, the bigger picture is necessary: the way cities were abandoned by government, whole cultures & neighborhoods & families essentially left to rot, the rising fear of cities & their darker residents. Chang does a good job showing how this atmosphere produced hip-hop, and how tensions between, say, the art world & graffiti artists affected the burgeoning culture. His obvious love infuses the work. Occasionally I felt like he threw around names and references without enough background information; I think I got most of them, but I wonder how the text would read at those points to someone who didn't grow up in the US in the NYC metro area around the '80s & '90s. Also, his publisher did him a real disservice in apparently not proofing the book at all: there are tons of typos, a few of which actually make sentence comprehension challenging. Anyway: in general this book does what it set out to do well. It's moving & persuasive; sometimes I feel like it veers a bit close to the line between romanticizing poverty & demonstrating the incredible energy & hope & art that can be forged from living in poverty. But overall, yes, good stuff.

The Sound of Paper: Inspiration & Practical Guidance for Starting the Creative Process - Julia Cameron. I kind of have a weakness for creativity books & organizing books, even when they are ridiculous, & given Cameron did The Artist's Way, from which 750 Words was born, when I saw this on the shelf at the library I thought I would grab it. There are some useful little exercises; everything's broken up into short, easily digestible chapters. However, like with many creativity books, I think Cameron is mostly speaking to a select group of people. It's one thing to say, as she does in The Artist's Way, that artist's dates & finding things to set up a little artist's corner in your house don't have to cost a lot of money (though of course, "a lot" is relative). It's another for her to say these things & then go on to talk about her Manhattan apartment with a view of the Hudson, how she takes 45-minute cab rides to performances, & how she then goes to live in Taos for half the year. Also, she says ridiculous things like describing a road as "straight as an Indian's part" (SRSLY WTF). So... I feel quite mixed about this book, really. I'd like to see a creativity book written by someone who doesn't have a lot of money & who consciously offers advice based on that perspective--I suspect if anyone has done this, it's a zine (yo, any of my zine peeps want to do something like this with me??).

Undercurrents: Queer Culture & Postcolonial Hong Kong - Helen Hok-Sze Leung. This academic book offers a starting point for queerness in Hong Kong; it's a look at how to complicate the way queerness there is perceived both by the West & by those who might be said to be connected to queer culture in Hong Kong. There's a lot of film analysis (although reading about films I've never seen is more interesting here than it often is for me), as well as a chapter dedicated to the contradictory legacy of the late singer & actor Leslie Cheung, whose sexuality & the way he chose (or not) to present it was alternately hailed & derided by queer communities through his life. Another chapter demonstrates how the Western gaze looking at trans identities in Hong Kong can so very much miss the damn point.

This is a fairly short book, at 120 pages, but there is a lot here worth chewing over. I have limited energy for academic writing, & so this took me a while to get through, but it was worth it.

The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas. Re-read. Ariel is a PhD student whose supervisor disappeared. The subject of her research, a 19th century author named Thomas Lumas, wrote a novel called The End of Mr. Y. Everyone said to have stumbled upon a copy of this rare book is said to have been cursed. When Ariel finds one, she ends up going down the rabbit hole in a bizarre exploration of thought & the nature of reality as she discovers a place called the Troposphere.

The philosophical meta bits were rather more wearying than they had been in the past, but in general I still enjoyed this novel a lot. I like how Ariel isn't a hugely sympathetic character; I like the vaguely video-game-ish nature of how Ariel travels through the Troposphere (which may be affected by Ariel's experience of having played console video games--&, I suspect, Thomas', as video games come up in Popco too); I admire how Thomas works in a sharp critique of animal testing (which is just excruciating to read). In short: it's no Popco (though what is?), but yes, I do like this one.

The Parson's Widow - Marja-Liisa Vartio. (Disclaimer: I know the translators, one of whom is my favorite professor of all time.) This is a Finnish novel from the '60s about life in a Finnish rural village at a time that seems to be in the first half of the 20th century. It centers around Adele, the titular parson's widow, & Alma, her maid. Adele's late husband, the parson, was obsessed with a collection of stuffed birds (stuffed as in taxidermy, not as in teddy bears!) he owned, an obsession transmitted to Adele & which is the source of much of the friction between Adele (& the parson) & everyone else in the book. This is often grimly humorous: when the parsonage is on fire, villagers rush to help & are shouting things like, "Save the church records! The baptismal font!" Other people suggest that, while there's time, the things that ought to be saved include the bed linen or the china. The parson? He's shouting, "The birds! The birds!" & berating Adele for trying to carry out anything else. Poor Alma is set the periodic task of cleaning the birds, & has to put up with comments from Adele about how she shouldn't sit these two particular birds next to each other on the windowsill while being aired, as they would never be seen together in nature. I did find it hard, though, to see such obsession & concern with dead birds & very little concern with birds while living.

Anyway: the other theme of the novel is how stories are told & remembered, & where memory & truth & fiction & perspective all cross over each other. Much of the narrative is taken up with reminiscence, & Adele is constantly badgering Alma to tell an old story again, while interjecting every other sentence with a comment about how Alma's gotten it wrong: previously she'd said the woman in the story was wearing a flowered dress or did this or that, & now Alma's telling it out of order, etc. This is all done with a great deal of humor, but it's also difficult to read sometimes because it's clear that the parson's widow is not mentally healthy. It's a complicated novel, & while I enjoyed it, at the same time I found it difficult to witness Adele's behavior. So in a way reaching the end was a relief.

Date: 2010-09-09 02:53 am (UTC)
rosabel: (Default)
From: [personal profile] rosabel
I was just thinking of you the other day as I was walking through Barnes & Noble*, and Thomas's newest book was displayed mighty proudly there as "from the author of The End of Mr. Y." I need to check this one out, too, as I absolutely loved Popco, which I would not have sought out had I not seen your recommendation. :)

I feel quite mixed about this book, really. I'd like to see a creativity book written by someone who doesn't have a lot of money & who consciously offers advice based on that perspective

OMG, that book sounds very snooty! I've seen another creativity book that was really fun, but I can't remember the title of it at all. It was another one of those One Activity Per Day type of things, and it was aimed more at visual arts than anything else. What does a "creativity" book usually entail? Exercises to keep the mind creative, or creating actual projects ranging from writing to drawing to making collages? I think the only other books on the subject I've encountered are aimed at scrapbooking moms (because they always seem to focus on how to make books about your kids' accomplishments...), which is fine for peeps who do scrapbooking, but I just find the concept of SP odd especially if again you are expected to spend money on buying stamps, stickers, borders, special paper, etc.

But frankly, most of my views on non-drawing/painting based creativity books are based on stereotypes. I need to go enlighten myself. :)

*K. gets gift cards to the store as a part of a rewards program. Yes, I do feel the need to explain why I was in B&N...

Date: 2010-09-11 08:22 am (UTC)
littlebutfierce: (oofuri moms)
From: [personal profile] littlebutfierce
I haven't read Thomas' new one yet, which is big fail on my part! I didn't even KNOW about it until a month or two ago. The library has several copies but the hold list is pretty long. The large-print versions don't have any holds on them, but from past experience I find it a bit odd to read them (since my eyesight is okay enough to not need them)--especially in public if there are sex scenes, ahahaha.

I think there are creativity books w/daily projects, probably, but I don't tend to see them so much (or they're the kind of scrapbooking type ones that you mentioned). The ones I'm a sucker for are the ones about how to break out of a creative rut or how to keep going once you've done so, heh. Not that reading them necessarily spurs me into actually taking their advice (when I don't think it's rubbish), sadly!

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