furyofvissarion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
furyofvissarion) wrote2009-03-07 10:45 am
furyofvissarion) wrote2009-03-07 10:45 am
Entry tags:
- andy and dave hamilton,
- angela davis,
- anne langley,
- anthology,
- bikes,
- charlaine harris,
- class,
- edward gray,
- fantasy,
- gender,
- immigration,
- john franklin,
- ktl vaughn,
- libraries,
- lori handeland,
- meg rosoff,
- mystery,
- nushin arbabzadah,
- paul bryers,
- race,
- smut,
- susan vaught,
- sustainability,
- werewolves,
- ya
(no subject)
Women, Race & Class - Angela Davis. Somehow I never read this before! A lot of the things Davis talks about I already knew vaguely, but it was good to be reminded or learn more details. She dissects the suffrage movement & the racism & classism within (& their support for US imperialism), how the image of the black male rapist was set up to justify lynching (& how this resulted in a lot of people abandoning the cause of black equality), how various workers' parties ignored issues of race (Eugene Debs thought blacks didn't need any particular defense of their rights!), & the racism in the birth control movement. I folded down a billion corners while I was reading (sorry, library!). Very very worth reading.
Cyclecraft: The complete guide to safe and enjoyable cycling for adults and children - John Franklin. What it says on the tin. Very useful, especially bits on how to negotiate in traffic, & also parts on what to do in certain situations—from a physics sort of standpoint, anyway, which is part of what flummoxes me about riding my bike sometimes!
The Role of the Academic Librarian - Anne Langley, Edward Gray and KTL Vaughn. I thought this would be more philosophical, but instead it turned out to be more of a “how to be a good academic librarian” book, w/sections on how to communicate effectively, etc. Not really what I was looking for, but I could see how it would be v. useful to some folks.
How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff. Comfort re-read. I remember the first time I read this I thought I wouldn't like it, that Daisy's chatty teen-girl voice, & how Rosoff denotes it with lots of Capital Letters & no quotation marks for some dialogue, would put me off, but it doesn't. And the story is sort of horrifying & moving at the same time. Rosoff is American but moved to the UK in the '80s, when I think she was in her 30s. So she doesn't really have trouble making Daisy sound American, but there's one bit I noticed, where Daisy says that people at home in the US, on hearing that her mother is dead, say Oh I AM sorry. Well, that's British intonation; Americans would say I'm SORRY to HEAR that! Or: Oh, I'm SORRY. Anyway—just one bit that threw me out of the story a little this time. Obviously not enough to remove the book from my favorites list!
Blowout - Susan Vaught. Nabbed this at the library because I loved Stormwitch. In this book, published as Trigger in the US, we meet Jersey Hatch, a teenager leaving a brain-injury center after a year of rehab following him taking a bullet to the head. It becomes obvious to the reader fairly quickly that Jersey attempted suicide, even if he doesn't remember it & won't let himself believe it for a while. Jersey, a former star athlete, now has physical difficulties & his brain doesn't work like it should. Moreover, he wants to learn why he shot himself & why his best friend hates him. It's a moving & chilling story—one of the cover blurb mentioned it being “darkly funny” or something like that, but nothing Jersey went through struck me as funny. One thing that really bugged me was the presence of a stereotypical helpful-yet-prickly black grandmother—the grandmother of Jersey's former best friend—who is the main person helping Jersey figure out what happened to him & what to do now. Kind of ironic coming from an author that won a Carl Brandon Award.
Grave Sight - Charlaine Harris. Reread. The Harper Connolly books are super-creepy! They're much darker than the Sookie Stackhouse books, & without the moments of actual laugh-out-loud humor. I still enjoy them, but this reread made me feel a little freaked out about being home alone at night.
From Outside In: Refugees and British Society - Edited by Nushin Arbabzadah. This anthology offers fiction & nonfiction pieces from a wide variety of refugees in the UK: Chilean, Hungarian, Somali, Sierra Leonean, Ugandan Asian, and Vietnamese, to name a few. I liked that a point was made to include the voices of children as well. Unfortunately I felt that breadth was offered up as a replacement for depth; all the pieces are quite brief & I definitely wanted them to be longer. However, they were all worth reading in one way or another; I feel like a lot of the anthologies I've read recently were disappointing, but this one was overall well written.
Highlights included "Pakoras on the Picket Line," Shereen Pandit's account of protesting apartheid in the face of public indifference and menace in the form of South African government agents; "Acclimatisation," a poem by George Szirtes on being a child refugee from Hungary; and Darija Stojnic's "Baked Beans," in which a Bosnian family receives a box of food from the council & is disgusted by baked beans.
The introduction to the collection talks about how refugees are seen as "other," very un-British, despite the fact that refugees have been coming to the UK for hundreds of years & that some very famous people in the UK are refugees or descendents of them. I appreciate the desire to broaden the image of refugees & provide a more informed picture, but the brief introduction to each section includes a list of accomplished refugees from the countries discussed within, and it just makes me feel like a game of "good immigrant" is being played.
Dark Moon - Lori Handeland. I don't tend to like vampire or werewolf stories where being supernatural means automatic evil. My annoyance was greater w/this novel, where being a werewolf means automatic evil, unless you're one of two werewolves without the “demon”--you turn into a wolf but you don't hunger to eat people. Yawn. One of them, named Damien, had been “like all the rest, until he'd run afoul of an Ozark Mountain magic woman. He'd been blessed to lose the demon and cursed to remember all that he'd done while having it.” I think I've seen this story on TV somewhere, only it was about vampires... Also Elise, the protagonist, is the other such werewolf & is described as “'the perfect werewolf... Power without pain, strength without evil.'” Yawn again. The plot revolves around Ojibwe & gypsy magics, & there are definitely annoying comments connected to both.
Kobal: The Mysteries of the Septagram - Paul Bryers. The only reason I took this book out from the library was because it mentions reindeer herders of Lapland on the back cover. Basically Jade is a normal girl living a boring life in London & she starts having weird headaches & telepathic powers & then someone tries to kill her & she learns her parents aren't who she thought they were, yadda yadda. I suppose it's all the sorts of things I would have loved as a child & the intended audience of the book—but it doesn't translate all that well to adult reading, I think.
Also, at one point a Swedish priest living in Lapland says something about how this far north there's “'little difference between us, Finn, Swede or Norwegian, we are all the same. Norseman, all.'” I could understand, say, the Sami feeling a stronger identity as a Sami than as whatever nationality they technically are—but I do not think a Finn is likely to identify as a Norseman!! Also, secret religious orders whose members are apparently immortal, & who seem to have been forced underground for being too violent for the modern day? Just reminds me of the one episode of Bonekickers we watched—not a compliment, believe me!
The Self Sufficient-ish Bible: An Eco-Living Guide for the 21st Century - Andy & Dave Hamilton. This is almost a coffee-table book about green living for urban folks who want to live more sustainably but don't want to move out to the country & live off the grid. There are gorgeous full-page photos & the layout is quite attractive. This probably accounts for the shocking cover price (30 pounds!!). That said, there's lots of useful information in here on growing food, making your home more energy-efficient (though as usual a lot of the tips are useless for those of us who rent), how to travel more greenly, etc. I did think that the environmental impact of meat, period (whether factory farmed or not), was conveniently glossed over—they mention how the craze for soy products contributes to deforestation but say nothing at all about how much soy goes to feed animals raised for slaughter. Their section on traveling sustainably falls prey to the whole “oooh, exotic” thing. But overall, a very pretty & inspiring book—I wouldn't buy it, though, not for the price, given that the information is generally available elsewhere (if it were cheaper I might buy it just to have all the reference info together, but not for 30 pounds!).
Cyclecraft: The complete guide to safe and enjoyable cycling for adults and children - John Franklin. What it says on the tin. Very useful, especially bits on how to negotiate in traffic, & also parts on what to do in certain situations—from a physics sort of standpoint, anyway, which is part of what flummoxes me about riding my bike sometimes!
The Role of the Academic Librarian - Anne Langley, Edward Gray and KTL Vaughn. I thought this would be more philosophical, but instead it turned out to be more of a “how to be a good academic librarian” book, w/sections on how to communicate effectively, etc. Not really what I was looking for, but I could see how it would be v. useful to some folks.
How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff. Comfort re-read. I remember the first time I read this I thought I wouldn't like it, that Daisy's chatty teen-girl voice, & how Rosoff denotes it with lots of Capital Letters & no quotation marks for some dialogue, would put me off, but it doesn't. And the story is sort of horrifying & moving at the same time. Rosoff is American but moved to the UK in the '80s, when I think she was in her 30s. So she doesn't really have trouble making Daisy sound American, but there's one bit I noticed, where Daisy says that people at home in the US, on hearing that her mother is dead, say Oh I AM sorry. Well, that's British intonation; Americans would say I'm SORRY to HEAR that! Or: Oh, I'm SORRY. Anyway—just one bit that threw me out of the story a little this time. Obviously not enough to remove the book from my favorites list!
Blowout - Susan Vaught. Nabbed this at the library because I loved Stormwitch. In this book, published as Trigger in the US, we meet Jersey Hatch, a teenager leaving a brain-injury center after a year of rehab following him taking a bullet to the head. It becomes obvious to the reader fairly quickly that Jersey attempted suicide, even if he doesn't remember it & won't let himself believe it for a while. Jersey, a former star athlete, now has physical difficulties & his brain doesn't work like it should. Moreover, he wants to learn why he shot himself & why his best friend hates him. It's a moving & chilling story—one of the cover blurb mentioned it being “darkly funny” or something like that, but nothing Jersey went through struck me as funny. One thing that really bugged me was the presence of a stereotypical helpful-yet-prickly black grandmother—the grandmother of Jersey's former best friend—who is the main person helping Jersey figure out what happened to him & what to do now. Kind of ironic coming from an author that won a Carl Brandon Award.
Grave Sight - Charlaine Harris. Reread. The Harper Connolly books are super-creepy! They're much darker than the Sookie Stackhouse books, & without the moments of actual laugh-out-loud humor. I still enjoy them, but this reread made me feel a little freaked out about being home alone at night.
From Outside In: Refugees and British Society - Edited by Nushin Arbabzadah. This anthology offers fiction & nonfiction pieces from a wide variety of refugees in the UK: Chilean, Hungarian, Somali, Sierra Leonean, Ugandan Asian, and Vietnamese, to name a few. I liked that a point was made to include the voices of children as well. Unfortunately I felt that breadth was offered up as a replacement for depth; all the pieces are quite brief & I definitely wanted them to be longer. However, they were all worth reading in one way or another; I feel like a lot of the anthologies I've read recently were disappointing, but this one was overall well written.
Highlights included "Pakoras on the Picket Line," Shereen Pandit's account of protesting apartheid in the face of public indifference and menace in the form of South African government agents; "Acclimatisation," a poem by George Szirtes on being a child refugee from Hungary; and Darija Stojnic's "Baked Beans," in which a Bosnian family receives a box of food from the council & is disgusted by baked beans.
The introduction to the collection talks about how refugees are seen as "other," very un-British, despite the fact that refugees have been coming to the UK for hundreds of years & that some very famous people in the UK are refugees or descendents of them. I appreciate the desire to broaden the image of refugees & provide a more informed picture, but the brief introduction to each section includes a list of accomplished refugees from the countries discussed within, and it just makes me feel like a game of "good immigrant" is being played.
Dark Moon - Lori Handeland. I don't tend to like vampire or werewolf stories where being supernatural means automatic evil. My annoyance was greater w/this novel, where being a werewolf means automatic evil, unless you're one of two werewolves without the “demon”--you turn into a wolf but you don't hunger to eat people. Yawn. One of them, named Damien, had been “like all the rest, until he'd run afoul of an Ozark Mountain magic woman. He'd been blessed to lose the demon and cursed to remember all that he'd done while having it.” I think I've seen this story on TV somewhere, only it was about vampires... Also Elise, the protagonist, is the other such werewolf & is described as “'the perfect werewolf... Power without pain, strength without evil.'” Yawn again. The plot revolves around Ojibwe & gypsy magics, & there are definitely annoying comments connected to both.
Kobal: The Mysteries of the Septagram - Paul Bryers. The only reason I took this book out from the library was because it mentions reindeer herders of Lapland on the back cover. Basically Jade is a normal girl living a boring life in London & she starts having weird headaches & telepathic powers & then someone tries to kill her & she learns her parents aren't who she thought they were, yadda yadda. I suppose it's all the sorts of things I would have loved as a child & the intended audience of the book—but it doesn't translate all that well to adult reading, I think.
Also, at one point a Swedish priest living in Lapland says something about how this far north there's “'little difference between us, Finn, Swede or Norwegian, we are all the same. Norseman, all.'” I could understand, say, the Sami feeling a stronger identity as a Sami than as whatever nationality they technically are—but I do not think a Finn is likely to identify as a Norseman!! Also, secret religious orders whose members are apparently immortal, & who seem to have been forced underground for being too violent for the modern day? Just reminds me of the one episode of Bonekickers we watched—not a compliment, believe me!
The Self Sufficient-ish Bible: An Eco-Living Guide for the 21st Century - Andy & Dave Hamilton. This is almost a coffee-table book about green living for urban folks who want to live more sustainably but don't want to move out to the country & live off the grid. There are gorgeous full-page photos & the layout is quite attractive. This probably accounts for the shocking cover price (30 pounds!!). That said, there's lots of useful information in here on growing food, making your home more energy-efficient (though as usual a lot of the tips are useless for those of us who rent), how to travel more greenly, etc. I did think that the environmental impact of meat, period (whether factory farmed or not), was conveniently glossed over—they mention how the craze for soy products contributes to deforestation but say nothing at all about how much soy goes to feed animals raised for slaughter. Their section on traveling sustainably falls prey to the whole “oooh, exotic” thing. But overall, a very pretty & inspiring book—I wouldn't buy it, though, not for the price, given that the information is generally available elsewhere (if it were cheaper I might buy it just to have all the reference info together, but not for 30 pounds!).
no subject
no subject