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Jun. 29th, 2008 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionAir - Geoff Ryman. One of those books that make me wonder what took me so long to read it (& now I feel all prepped for WisCon next year, as Ryman is one of the Guests of Honor; he also won the Tiptree a couple of years ago).
Chung Mae lives in Kizuldah, a tiny village in the country of Karzistan. Though she is illiterate, she carves out a living as the village's fashion expert, providing style advice to the other women. All this changes when Air comes. Although her village has never been online by any means, they are subject to a worldwide test of Air, which is basically internet in your head w/o having to have anything clunky like a computer. This ends in tragedy, when Old Mrs. Tung, Mae's neighbor & friend, is killed & her thoughts & memories poured into Mae's head. Kizuldah has to come to terms with the fact that the world is changing, & "progress" being forced on them whether they want to or not.
Mae sets out to mediate between the village & the encroachment of Air, & the West, & what follows is a pretty nuanced look at the conflict between tradition, & "progress," & cultural imperialism, & exotification, & capitalism & getting by & lots more. Mae is an awesome tough-ass character. The only thing that annoyed me was her bizarre pregnancy; to me it felt forced in, like, here's this book about a woman. Surely someone has to be pregnant in it? But overall I loved the book; it was fascinating & terrifying & disturbing.
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. From 1989, & feeling more dated than I would've expected, it took some effort to get through this one. Divided into sections loosely based on themes, fiction & poetry mingle with nonfiction narrative & academic pieces… only the latter two usually seemed to be so short as to be really unsatisfying. My favorite pieces were the ones that talked about Asian women labor & tenant leaders. Also, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow's "The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?" is still very timely in its analysis of why mainstream feminism fails, & alienates, women of color (specifically Asians in this case).
Succubus on Top - Richelle Mead. The sequel to Succubus Blues finds Georgina Kincaid trying to make her new relationship with author Seth Mortensen work. Trouble is, she's a succubus: so they can't have sex or even make out too intensely, because she'll suck away part of his life. Which, um, also sucks. She's also trying to figure out the mystery of a new illegal drug in town that seemingly makes mortals feel like gods, w/some ill effects for her friends... & then there's her friend Bastien, an incubus determined to bring down a local conservative talk show host. Not quite as much fun as the last book, somehow, but still excellent fluff. I'll keep reading!
Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live - Martha Beck. Sort of mediocre self-help book, of the type I still find myself reading anyway. Maybe my problem is that I listen to my "essential self" (as Beck puts it) more than most of the other people this book is intended for; at the same time, I have trouble getting started w/whatever said essential self is supposed to be doing. I thought this book didn't really make allowances for mental illness & how that impacts this sort of thing, even though she makes a big deal about therapy & emotional wounds.
I also disliked her constant capitalistic emphasis on how your own North Star will make you money--I bet she'd just write me off as being wounded or brainwashed or something. She also had this list of statements that she thinks everyone should believe, & one of them was something like, "I will always have lots of money." And, um? Despite what she says, there are real, valid, & compelling reasons why people might not believe that (institutionalized -isms of the sort her book never brings up). Meh.
Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. This is a collection of newspaper articles Lacaba wrote during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was reporting on the anti-Marcos protests bubbling up in the Philippines during that time. While I've already read several other eyewitness accounts of these events, Lacaba didn't bore me; his writing is lively & I was impressed w/how tenaciously he participated in demonstrations. The occasional phrase or line in untranslated Tagalog usually threw me, unfortunately, but midway I noticed there were notes in the back that included translations.
Reading the articles, I was struck by how fierce the student protesters were, & how central they seemed to be for a while--they did make efforts (some seeming clumsier than others) to link up w/labor & the poor, but for some time it seemed that the students were the vanguard of anti-Marcos sentiment. I don't mean to fall into the trap of sentimentalizing any sort of "good ol' days" as far as protest--it just seemed quite different from what I'm used to hearing about.
Romancing the Dead - Tate Hallaway. The third Garnet Lacey book finds her searching for Sebastian, her vampire boyfriend-recently-turned-fiance, who's abruptly disappeared. And lo, hijinks ensue. This book didn't strike me as fun as the last two, largely because I'm tired of having the marriage thing come up yet again in a paranormal series (even if it is a romance). Garnet's nerves about commitment just, um, got on my own nerves. I did like to see her come to terms w/the goddess Lilith, who lives inside her & about whom Garnet has been pretty ambivalent.
Wolf Tales - Kate Douglas. Pluses: smutty porny polyamorous paranormal fiction (& hey, at least one of the characters isn't white). Minuses: my eternal pet peeve--that is, love that blooms so quickly as to be unrealistic (to my mind--I hate "love at first sight" plotlines, particularly when the first sight part is mystically fueled). And the whole Mystical Hidden Race of People thing. Also, Douglas re-uses some phrases far too many times, including some bizarre ones--like referring to pussies "weeping" when the women are aroused & wet. To me, "weeping" connotes, I don't know, an open sore oozing pus. Or perhaps a little cunt frowning & wiping her eyes because her sexual partner ran off prematurely.
Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. The subject matter made this a difficult & emotional read for me. Some of the essays explore war as something personally experienced. But overall the book seems more tilted towards those of us who maybe never lived through a war ourselves, but for whom war looms large in our personal & familial history regardless (as Dora Wang writes in her piece, "I have never seen war, but I have always known the taste of it."), & I think this is what I found most gut-wrenching & also validating about it.
The essays that most touched me were the ones by people who grew up with sporadic & confusing hints of what their families might have endured during war, & whose parents tried desperately to protect their children from ever realizing this pain existed. Like many of the contributors to this anthology, I'm still trying to figure out what war means to my family, piecing together narratives from half-remembered hints during my childhood (wartime anecdotes as way-inappropriate bedtime stories from my grandfather, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, for example) & trying to get the courage to solicit more of this history from my relatives. The task is made harder by the collective amnesia imposed by the American myth-makers--for example, the invisibility of the Philippine-American War, which Luis Francia explores here, saying, "I write not only about the memory of a war, but also about the war of and on memory, the struggle to replace a history I barely recognize with one I do..."
Also very interesting to me was Maya Lin talking about the process of designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, & also Christopher Lee discussing his uncle, who was the first Chinese officer in the Merchant Marine.
Chung Mae lives in Kizuldah, a tiny village in the country of Karzistan. Though she is illiterate, she carves out a living as the village's fashion expert, providing style advice to the other women. All this changes when Air comes. Although her village has never been online by any means, they are subject to a worldwide test of Air, which is basically internet in your head w/o having to have anything clunky like a computer. This ends in tragedy, when Old Mrs. Tung, Mae's neighbor & friend, is killed & her thoughts & memories poured into Mae's head. Kizuldah has to come to terms with the fact that the world is changing, & "progress" being forced on them whether they want to or not.
Mae sets out to mediate between the village & the encroachment of Air, & the West, & what follows is a pretty nuanced look at the conflict between tradition, & "progress," & cultural imperialism, & exotification, & capitalism & getting by & lots more. Mae is an awesome tough-ass character. The only thing that annoyed me was her bizarre pregnancy; to me it felt forced in, like, here's this book about a woman. Surely someone has to be pregnant in it? But overall I loved the book; it was fascinating & terrifying & disturbing.
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. From 1989, & feeling more dated than I would've expected, it took some effort to get through this one. Divided into sections loosely based on themes, fiction & poetry mingle with nonfiction narrative & academic pieces… only the latter two usually seemed to be so short as to be really unsatisfying. My favorite pieces were the ones that talked about Asian women labor & tenant leaders. Also, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow's "The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?" is still very timely in its analysis of why mainstream feminism fails, & alienates, women of color (specifically Asians in this case).
Succubus on Top - Richelle Mead. The sequel to Succubus Blues finds Georgina Kincaid trying to make her new relationship with author Seth Mortensen work. Trouble is, she's a succubus: so they can't have sex or even make out too intensely, because she'll suck away part of his life. Which, um, also sucks. She's also trying to figure out the mystery of a new illegal drug in town that seemingly makes mortals feel like gods, w/some ill effects for her friends... & then there's her friend Bastien, an incubus determined to bring down a local conservative talk show host. Not quite as much fun as the last book, somehow, but still excellent fluff. I'll keep reading!
Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live - Martha Beck. Sort of mediocre self-help book, of the type I still find myself reading anyway. Maybe my problem is that I listen to my "essential self" (as Beck puts it) more than most of the other people this book is intended for; at the same time, I have trouble getting started w/whatever said essential self is supposed to be doing. I thought this book didn't really make allowances for mental illness & how that impacts this sort of thing, even though she makes a big deal about therapy & emotional wounds.
I also disliked her constant capitalistic emphasis on how your own North Star will make you money--I bet she'd just write me off as being wounded or brainwashed or something. She also had this list of statements that she thinks everyone should believe, & one of them was something like, "I will always have lots of money." And, um? Despite what she says, there are real, valid, & compelling reasons why people might not believe that (institutionalized -isms of the sort her book never brings up). Meh.
Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. This is a collection of newspaper articles Lacaba wrote during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was reporting on the anti-Marcos protests bubbling up in the Philippines during that time. While I've already read several other eyewitness accounts of these events, Lacaba didn't bore me; his writing is lively & I was impressed w/how tenaciously he participated in demonstrations. The occasional phrase or line in untranslated Tagalog usually threw me, unfortunately, but midway I noticed there were notes in the back that included translations.
Reading the articles, I was struck by how fierce the student protesters were, & how central they seemed to be for a while--they did make efforts (some seeming clumsier than others) to link up w/labor & the poor, but for some time it seemed that the students were the vanguard of anti-Marcos sentiment. I don't mean to fall into the trap of sentimentalizing any sort of "good ol' days" as far as protest--it just seemed quite different from what I'm used to hearing about.
Romancing the Dead - Tate Hallaway. The third Garnet Lacey book finds her searching for Sebastian, her vampire boyfriend-recently-turned-fiance, who's abruptly disappeared. And lo, hijinks ensue. This book didn't strike me as fun as the last two, largely because I'm tired of having the marriage thing come up yet again in a paranormal series (even if it is a romance). Garnet's nerves about commitment just, um, got on my own nerves. I did like to see her come to terms w/the goddess Lilith, who lives inside her & about whom Garnet has been pretty ambivalent.
Wolf Tales - Kate Douglas. Pluses: smutty porny polyamorous paranormal fiction (& hey, at least one of the characters isn't white). Minuses: my eternal pet peeve--that is, love that blooms so quickly as to be unrealistic (to my mind--I hate "love at first sight" plotlines, particularly when the first sight part is mystically fueled). And the whole Mystical Hidden Race of People thing. Also, Douglas re-uses some phrases far too many times, including some bizarre ones--like referring to pussies "weeping" when the women are aroused & wet. To me, "weeping" connotes, I don't know, an open sore oozing pus. Or perhaps a little cunt frowning & wiping her eyes because her sexual partner ran off prematurely.
Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. The subject matter made this a difficult & emotional read for me. Some of the essays explore war as something personally experienced. But overall the book seems more tilted towards those of us who maybe never lived through a war ourselves, but for whom war looms large in our personal & familial history regardless (as Dora Wang writes in her piece, "I have never seen war, but I have always known the taste of it."), & I think this is what I found most gut-wrenching & also validating about it.
The essays that most touched me were the ones by people who grew up with sporadic & confusing hints of what their families might have endured during war, & whose parents tried desperately to protect their children from ever realizing this pain existed. Like many of the contributors to this anthology, I'm still trying to figure out what war means to my family, piecing together narratives from half-remembered hints during my childhood (wartime anecdotes as way-inappropriate bedtime stories from my grandfather, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, for example) & trying to get the courage to solicit more of this history from my relatives. The task is made harder by the collective amnesia imposed by the American myth-makers--for example, the invisibility of the Philippine-American War, which Luis Francia explores here, saying, "I write not only about the memory of a war, but also about the war of and on memory, the struggle to replace a history I barely recognize with one I do..."
Also very interesting to me was Maya Lin talking about the process of designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, & also Christopher Lee discussing his uncle, who was the first Chinese officer in the Merchant Marine.