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Sep. 3rd, 2008 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionHouse of Many Ways - Diana Wynne Jones. The third Howl book sees Charmain Baker, a stifled bookworm, sent to housesit for her Great-Uncle William, who's ill & is taken away by the elves to be healed. Except he's actually a wizard, & his house, the titular one of many ways, leads her to many places, including the Royal Mansion & the past, & taking care of a wizard's house, including his multiplying bags of laundry, is not easy when you've never done a day of housework in your life. While working for the king to catalog old documents in his library, she meets Sophie & Howl (in a v. amusing form), who are trying to solve a mystery for the king.
I enjoyed this book a lot, although it didn't grab me in the way that, say, Chrestomanci or Deep Secret or the Dalemark books do--but then that's kind of how I feel about Howl generally. Charmain reminds me a lot of a young Christopher Chant, in that she doesn't see how truly obnoxious she is, & also neither of them are any great shakes at housekeeping. I found Christopher at his worst a lot more sympathetic than Charmain (& I wonder if there's some ingrained sexism at play in my reaction there), but I did warm to Charmain slowly as she realizes what a jerk she is.
I also appreciated that this book, advertised as a Howl book, contains a fair amount of Howl. The Magicians of Caprona & Witch Week, both fine novels, are touted as part of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but they're more like With Special Guest Star Chrestomanci!, because he comes in during, like, the last fifteen minutes of the books. Anyway--a fun read, & worth the wait. It's not, you know, moreChrestomanci Janet Chant, but still!
Race Manners for the 21st Century: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans in an Age of Fear - Bruce A. Jacobs. Jacobs talks about how rage-inducing, confrontational talk radio has poisoned the way that Americans talk about race in their daily lives. He offers suggestions, both for blacks & whites, at the end of each chapter, on how to change this. I don't always agree with him--sometimes I think that he expects POCs to be just a wee bit too patient & accommodating--but I think there's enough useful stuff, especially for white folks, to make this a decent tool. This edition of the book, updated after 9/11, does talk about Arab Americans & other minority groups somewhat as well. And much of what he addresses particularly to black readers is applicable to those of other races, even if the subtitle focuses solely on black & white relations.
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White - Frank H. Wu. This is a dense book, sometimes a bit too much so for my own tastes, but I was so glad to read it. There were so many bits that induced little squees of "Yes, that's IT EXACTLY!" from me (Wu talks about his own experiences with this in reading other Asian American writers). Chapter by chapter, Wu takes apart the major stereotypes about Asian Americans: the perpetual foreigner, the model minority, the dogeater. He also talks about interracial coalitions, racial profiling, & what the new multiracial movement means for race in the US. Occasionally the book went a little over my head, & I particularly found the delineation of racist thought regarding mixed-race relationships a bit repetitive & wearing after a while, but still, this book is so on point about so many things.
Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities - Timothy Beatley. Reading this was alternately depressing & uplifting. There are so many ways to make cities more sustainable, while keeping their human, livable, appealing natures. Beatley talks about a lot of cities in Europe that do this, whether through aggressive promotion of public transit & bicycling (& equally aggressive dissuasion of driving), ecological building techniques (for industrial, commercial & residential), preservation of green space, etc. Because the book is aimed at helping US urban planners find strategies to import here, each chapter also talks about what the US is doing wrong in each category, & what particular obstacles need to be overcome. A lot of this is cultural, of course--we have the stupid libertarian streak that says that government should never tell us what to do w/our land, & we have a God-given right to urban sprawl if that's what we want, & to have government get involved more extensively would just be communist!!!1
Anyway, there are persuasive arguments about green living being more financially appropriate for different income groups (ie. there are benefits to being able to bike to work, living in a small house near amenities & not having to have multiple cars, etc.). However, I do wonder how financially attainable living in many of the ecological housing developments is for working-class people. Beatley says that such developments, for example in the Netherlands, are uniformly popular, which is great--I know that in the US certainly we have to overcome the idea that more compact living is unaesthetic & undesirable--but I wonder what the income spread of residents is.
In addition, reading this book made me want to see another volume that covers other parts of the world. While Europe in some respects is way ahead of the US in green urbanism, I don't believe for a second that there is nothing elsewhere worth talking about, & I'd love to read about it.
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam - Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera. This fierce collection is a response to "so-called new American poetry anthologies [with] the usual lot of dry poets shitted out of the bowels of Ivy League schools and other stamp-of-approval institutions designed to stamp out creativity and promote mediocrity. They deliberately exclude socially responsible poetry.... They ignore poets who could care less about being the kind of poet who in neatly polished poem after neatly polished poem perpetrates a fraud on reality." So says co-editor Tony Medina in the introduction, & that is why I pretty much ate up this anthology, because a lot of poetry leaves me cold for these sorts of reasons. Here we have what seems to be an extremely diverse group of people writing frankly & familiarly about poverty, racism, sexism, & similar things often ignored by more "respectable" poets. Mind you I thought a fair chunk of the writing was poorly done or cliched, but the good pieces--& there were a lot--more than made up for it. I'm not up for deep poetical analysis, so I'll just say if the idea of this book appeals to you then go read it.
The Wealth Inequality Reader - Edited by Dollars & Sense and United for a Fair Economy. Why is there such a great & growing wealth divide in the US? Why is it a racial divide? Isn't the "death tax" wrong? Don't rich people make it all through their own gumption without relying on state resources like poor people? Ha ha ha, you can probably guess my answers to these questions; this anthology debunks all this kind of stuff, in a series of short essays. It's not fascinating reading, but it is depressingly necessary & a good primer.
Wicked Game - Jeri Smith-Ready. I didn't think I would like this book, but I did; it was just the kind of light, amusing read I needed when the library put this on hold for me. Smith-Ready has a take on vampires slightly different from the most common ones floating around today: hers become trapped mentally in the era in which they die, increasingly unable to cope w/the passage of time & the world changing until they freak out & die. Former con artist Ciara Griffin discovers this when she becomes a marketing intern for a radio station whose DJs are all vampires, experts in the music of the eras they died in. Vampires in this world also have a serious case of OCD, stemming from their inability to control the world around them. I'm still trying to make up my mind as to whether or not Smith-Ready's portrayal of mental illness is respectful or not; for the most part I thought it was, but there were a few moments I'm not sure about. Another thing I noticed was that the oldest vampire DJ, Monroe, is kept mostly offstage by something that seems logical--he is a black man who died in the '20s, & his experience of white women like Ciara is that he could be lynched for talking to them, so he avoids her--but nevertheless results in one of the few characters of color being shunted into the background.
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction - Robert J.C. Young. This book did just what I wanted it to: give me a broad overview of postcolonial thought, as well as some places & names to investigate further specific ideas I wanted to follow. I thought Young's second-person interludes were annoying, though (along the lines of "Imagine you're in a refugee camp")--I get that he wants the reader to change their POV, but his technique was heavy-handed & I thought the space in this small book could've been better used.
Ill Wind - Rachel Caine. Just what the doctor ordered; I am pleased that this series is as fun on re-reading as it was the first time, maybe even more so. Joanne Baldwin is a Weather Warden, part of a secret agency of humans that tries to mitigate the worst of the damage that Mother Earth throws at humans. In this first book in the series, she's on the run because someone thinks she killed a bigshot Warden. Joanne loves fast cars, fast men, & expensive clothes, which sometimes can be obnoxious in a protagonist but isn't here. Also, I love love love that Caine puts in the science stuff--it's not just Wardens waving their hands & suddenly the weather changes; Caine explains how they have to heat certain molecules here & give a little push there, etc. etc. Yum. I do get annoyed w/how "exotic" (which usually seems to mean not-white-looking) the Djinn are.
Heat Stroke - Rachel Caine. Our favorite cranky & impulsive Weather Warden is dead, only she's not: she gets brought back as a Djinn, the magical creatures that the Wardens enslave in order to augment their powers. Except turning a human into a Djinn doesn't work v. well--not only is she not a great Djinn, it turns out there may actually be a kind of rift in the universe caused by her transformation. Oops! Still breezy fun.
Chill Factor - Rachel Caine. Well, this week Joanne is back to being human again, & she's got to get into Las Vegas to stop a psycho teenager from destroying the world. I have to say not even Caine's fast & exciting narrative can make me feel one iota of fondness for Las Vegas, but the story is still interesting. Also I keep seeing the free-the-Djinn stuff as a nice metaphor for anti-speciesism.
Windfall - Rachel Caine. I feel like some of the story momentum Caine has built up stalls out here a bit in book 4 of the Weather Warden series; while anecdotes about Joanne having to scrape together a living as a cheesy weathergirl for a local TV station are funny, & do end up being connected to the plot in a small way, they still felt like detours. Or wrong turns. Plus I really hate that now we have Eamon, a violent psycho who abuses Joanne's sister Sarah but somehow still apparently loves her? What? That's not quite as cut & dry as I'm making it sound--I hope Joanne is wrong in her assessment (I've read the next book but can't recall). But I just don't like that storyline at all. I guess I have a limit on reading about sexualized violence against women, even if it's not v. graphic at all. Bad Bob Biringanine forcing the Demon Mark on Joanne in the first book was totally presented as a rape (which it was), & her ordeal at the hands of Quinn was also sexual violence/torture. I... just get tired of it, I guess. Bring on the big explosions & weather going batshit--it's not violence per se that puts me off a narrative.
I enjoyed this book a lot, although it didn't grab me in the way that, say, Chrestomanci or Deep Secret or the Dalemark books do--but then that's kind of how I feel about Howl generally. Charmain reminds me a lot of a young Christopher Chant, in that she doesn't see how truly obnoxious she is, & also neither of them are any great shakes at housekeeping. I found Christopher at his worst a lot more sympathetic than Charmain (& I wonder if there's some ingrained sexism at play in my reaction there), but I did warm to Charmain slowly as she realizes what a jerk she is.
I also appreciated that this book, advertised as a Howl book, contains a fair amount of Howl. The Magicians of Caprona & Witch Week, both fine novels, are touted as part of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but they're more like With Special Guest Star Chrestomanci!, because he comes in during, like, the last fifteen minutes of the books. Anyway--a fun read, & worth the wait. It's not, you know, more
Race Manners for the 21st Century: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans in an Age of Fear - Bruce A. Jacobs. Jacobs talks about how rage-inducing, confrontational talk radio has poisoned the way that Americans talk about race in their daily lives. He offers suggestions, both for blacks & whites, at the end of each chapter, on how to change this. I don't always agree with him--sometimes I think that he expects POCs to be just a wee bit too patient & accommodating--but I think there's enough useful stuff, especially for white folks, to make this a decent tool. This edition of the book, updated after 9/11, does talk about Arab Americans & other minority groups somewhat as well. And much of what he addresses particularly to black readers is applicable to those of other races, even if the subtitle focuses solely on black & white relations.
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White - Frank H. Wu. This is a dense book, sometimes a bit too much so for my own tastes, but I was so glad to read it. There were so many bits that induced little squees of "Yes, that's IT EXACTLY!" from me (Wu talks about his own experiences with this in reading other Asian American writers). Chapter by chapter, Wu takes apart the major stereotypes about Asian Americans: the perpetual foreigner, the model minority, the dogeater. He also talks about interracial coalitions, racial profiling, & what the new multiracial movement means for race in the US. Occasionally the book went a little over my head, & I particularly found the delineation of racist thought regarding mixed-race relationships a bit repetitive & wearing after a while, but still, this book is so on point about so many things.
Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities - Timothy Beatley. Reading this was alternately depressing & uplifting. There are so many ways to make cities more sustainable, while keeping their human, livable, appealing natures. Beatley talks about a lot of cities in Europe that do this, whether through aggressive promotion of public transit & bicycling (& equally aggressive dissuasion of driving), ecological building techniques (for industrial, commercial & residential), preservation of green space, etc. Because the book is aimed at helping US urban planners find strategies to import here, each chapter also talks about what the US is doing wrong in each category, & what particular obstacles need to be overcome. A lot of this is cultural, of course--we have the stupid libertarian streak that says that government should never tell us what to do w/our land, & we have a God-given right to urban sprawl if that's what we want, & to have government get involved more extensively would just be communist!!!1
Anyway, there are persuasive arguments about green living being more financially appropriate for different income groups (ie. there are benefits to being able to bike to work, living in a small house near amenities & not having to have multiple cars, etc.). However, I do wonder how financially attainable living in many of the ecological housing developments is for working-class people. Beatley says that such developments, for example in the Netherlands, are uniformly popular, which is great--I know that in the US certainly we have to overcome the idea that more compact living is unaesthetic & undesirable--but I wonder what the income spread of residents is.
In addition, reading this book made me want to see another volume that covers other parts of the world. While Europe in some respects is way ahead of the US in green urbanism, I don't believe for a second that there is nothing elsewhere worth talking about, & I'd love to read about it.
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam - Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera. This fierce collection is a response to "so-called new American poetry anthologies [with] the usual lot of dry poets shitted out of the bowels of Ivy League schools and other stamp-of-approval institutions designed to stamp out creativity and promote mediocrity. They deliberately exclude socially responsible poetry.... They ignore poets who could care less about being the kind of poet who in neatly polished poem after neatly polished poem perpetrates a fraud on reality." So says co-editor Tony Medina in the introduction, & that is why I pretty much ate up this anthology, because a lot of poetry leaves me cold for these sorts of reasons. Here we have what seems to be an extremely diverse group of people writing frankly & familiarly about poverty, racism, sexism, & similar things often ignored by more "respectable" poets. Mind you I thought a fair chunk of the writing was poorly done or cliched, but the good pieces--& there were a lot--more than made up for it. I'm not up for deep poetical analysis, so I'll just say if the idea of this book appeals to you then go read it.
The Wealth Inequality Reader - Edited by Dollars & Sense and United for a Fair Economy. Why is there such a great & growing wealth divide in the US? Why is it a racial divide? Isn't the "death tax" wrong? Don't rich people make it all through their own gumption without relying on state resources like poor people? Ha ha ha, you can probably guess my answers to these questions; this anthology debunks all this kind of stuff, in a series of short essays. It's not fascinating reading, but it is depressingly necessary & a good primer.
Wicked Game - Jeri Smith-Ready. I didn't think I would like this book, but I did; it was just the kind of light, amusing read I needed when the library put this on hold for me. Smith-Ready has a take on vampires slightly different from the most common ones floating around today: hers become trapped mentally in the era in which they die, increasingly unable to cope w/the passage of time & the world changing until they freak out & die. Former con artist Ciara Griffin discovers this when she becomes a marketing intern for a radio station whose DJs are all vampires, experts in the music of the eras they died in. Vampires in this world also have a serious case of OCD, stemming from their inability to control the world around them. I'm still trying to make up my mind as to whether or not Smith-Ready's portrayal of mental illness is respectful or not; for the most part I thought it was, but there were a few moments I'm not sure about. Another thing I noticed was that the oldest vampire DJ, Monroe, is kept mostly offstage by something that seems logical--he is a black man who died in the '20s, & his experience of white women like Ciara is that he could be lynched for talking to them, so he avoids her--but nevertheless results in one of the few characters of color being shunted into the background.
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction - Robert J.C. Young. This book did just what I wanted it to: give me a broad overview of postcolonial thought, as well as some places & names to investigate further specific ideas I wanted to follow. I thought Young's second-person interludes were annoying, though (along the lines of "Imagine you're in a refugee camp")--I get that he wants the reader to change their POV, but his technique was heavy-handed & I thought the space in this small book could've been better used.
Ill Wind - Rachel Caine. Just what the doctor ordered; I am pleased that this series is as fun on re-reading as it was the first time, maybe even more so. Joanne Baldwin is a Weather Warden, part of a secret agency of humans that tries to mitigate the worst of the damage that Mother Earth throws at humans. In this first book in the series, she's on the run because someone thinks she killed a bigshot Warden. Joanne loves fast cars, fast men, & expensive clothes, which sometimes can be obnoxious in a protagonist but isn't here. Also, I love love love that Caine puts in the science stuff--it's not just Wardens waving their hands & suddenly the weather changes; Caine explains how they have to heat certain molecules here & give a little push there, etc. etc. Yum. I do get annoyed w/how "exotic" (which usually seems to mean not-white-looking) the Djinn are.
Heat Stroke - Rachel Caine. Our favorite cranky & impulsive Weather Warden is dead, only she's not: she gets brought back as a Djinn, the magical creatures that the Wardens enslave in order to augment their powers. Except turning a human into a Djinn doesn't work v. well--not only is she not a great Djinn, it turns out there may actually be a kind of rift in the universe caused by her transformation. Oops! Still breezy fun.
Chill Factor - Rachel Caine. Well, this week Joanne is back to being human again, & she's got to get into Las Vegas to stop a psycho teenager from destroying the world. I have to say not even Caine's fast & exciting narrative can make me feel one iota of fondness for Las Vegas, but the story is still interesting. Also I keep seeing the free-the-Djinn stuff as a nice metaphor for anti-speciesism.
Windfall - Rachel Caine. I feel like some of the story momentum Caine has built up stalls out here a bit in book 4 of the Weather Warden series; while anecdotes about Joanne having to scrape together a living as a cheesy weathergirl for a local TV station are funny, & do end up being connected to the plot in a small way, they still felt like detours. Or wrong turns. Plus I really hate that now we have Eamon, a violent psycho who abuses Joanne's sister Sarah but somehow still apparently loves her? What? That's not quite as cut & dry as I'm making it sound--I hope Joanne is wrong in her assessment (I've read the next book but can't recall). But I just don't like that storyline at all. I guess I have a limit on reading about sexualized violence against women, even if it's not v. graphic at all. Bad Bob Biringanine forcing the Demon Mark on Joanne in the first book was totally presented as a rape (which it was), & her ordeal at the hands of Quinn was also sexual violence/torture. I... just get tired of it, I guess. Bring on the big explosions & weather going batshit--it's not violence per se that puts me off a narrative.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 03:42 am (UTC)please note dedication.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 07:37 pm (UTC)Hurrah!
I loved it, although I would have liked to have seen more of Howl being Howl.
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Date: 2008-09-09 12:57 am (UTC)