(no subject)

[furyofvissarion]

PopCo - Scarlett Thomas. The second time around, I love this book even more than I did the first time. This time I was able to relax & enjoy the story more; when I first read it, I was drawn into the mystery around the Stevenson-Heath manuscript & just wanted to know what happened already. Plus, I wanted to see how all the stuff at PopCo would play out. Now I was able to savor the experience more.

I love how Thomas gets so right the experience of being an odd child, & being comfortable w/that oddness until you get to be a certain age, & then everything goes to hell as you try to navigate peer pressure & school & what you know is right for you. I also love the relationship that Alice has w/her grandparents, & how she uses them as her guide for authenticity: if she's being the Alice that they would recognize, then she's being the real Alice. This also ties into Alice's increasing discomfort w/the status quo as far as consumerism & the forming of identity via what you buy, & how we grow up taking these things for granted to the point where we can't even see them:

I think about the miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves... therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what's it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is part of my life, too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy. It's the enemy voice in your ear that tells you your kitchen is too untidy, or your bathroom does not sparkle; that your hair isn't shiny enough, your legs not thin enough, your address book not bulging enough, your clothes not cool enough. My grandparents did not collaborate. So how did I slip so easily over to the other side? Perhaps it was because no one told me that anyone was even at war.

And, not to make this a book review solely consisting of quotes, but I wish more people were like Alice when she discovers that her coworker Ben is vegan:

I consider saying something like, So what can you eat, then? Or, Doesn't that get really boring? Or, I could never give up cheese. However, I suspect that these sorts of things must sound a bit cliched if you're a vegan. Logic suggests that Ben must eat all sorts of things or he would waste away and die of either starvation or boredom, so I say nothing and carry on buttering my toast...

Oh, & the book starts out on a night train with Alice drinking green tea in her little sleeper car! What's not to love?

The Expert Expat: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad - Melissa Brayer Hess and Patricia Linderman. I suspect this guide would be useful to someone who's never been abroad & is faced w/moving abroad suddenly w/o a chance to research anything on the Internet. As it is, I didn't feel that this book was particularly useful to me: almost everything relevant to me I'd heard of before. I realize it generally takes at least some money to move abroad, but the book seems predominantly aimed towards diplomats or high-powered businesspeople--those w/quite a lot of resources & money at their disposal (there's not really any discussion on how to move abroad cheaply; it's more like how much of your household goods can you ship if your employer's paying for it, & how much if not?).

Dreaming in Libro: How a Good Dog Tamed a Bad Woman - Louise Bernikow. Fluffy memoir about Bernikow's life with her boxer, Libro, who was found on the street in Manhattan. I got a little tired of hearing about her & her artsy neighbors (opera singer, etc.), who seem possibly to be gentrifying forces in their upper Manhattan neighborhood. This was a reasonably fun & quick read & probably soon forgotten.

It's So You: 35 Women Write about Personal Expression through Fashion & Style - Edited by Michelle Tea. Sorely disappointing. The tone of most of the essays seems to be, "I was always a fashion rebel, even as a kid, & then I joined subcultures & got to wear even more cool stuff! Awesome! Didn't I look great?" Okay, I get that you can be deeply into fashion & be a feminist. Can we get a little more analysis? There was some discussion of weight issues & fashion, & a wee bit of talking about race, but not much. There was some talk about gender & sexuality as reflected in fashion--a lot of the usual "When I first came out, I had to wear overalls & hide my skirts or none of the dykes would talk to me!" stuff that we've heard billions of times before. No one talked about, say, sweatshops, or cultural appropriation in fashion, except when Jennifer Blowdryer says, "Some days I like to misappropriate black culture, Ab Fab-style." Overall, the book felt so same-y, & definitely not talking about the kinds of things I find interesting about fashion.

Comments

[wrdnrd]

[rolls eyes] Oh, just from the title that last book sounds awful. "Personal expression thru' fashion & style" smacks more of self-absorption than it does of anything approaching self-exploration. Sigh.

[furyofvissarion.livejournal.com]

*cough* It's a Seal anthology. ;)

[wrdnrd]

Well, um, yes i know. [is confused] So? I mean, i don't like everything they do. I *hated* East Toward Dawn (which made my fact-checking job on it all the more painful). And, y'know, anything by that Muscio freak. Heck, i'm still trying to figure out how i feel about Michelle Tea, and i loved Valencia.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

That last one sounded interesting from the title. Alas the content did not match up!

[furyofvissarion.livejournal.com]

I know! I think spurring my friends to all post about this stuff in their LJs (hm... maybe I should start a pseudo-meme) would be more interesting, alas.