catching up...
Jul. 25th, 2009 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionChorus of Mushrooms - Hiromi Goto. I adored this novel. Definitely one of my favorites of the year. The language is vivid &, as the blurb on the back says, "palpably audible." Very appropriate, given the subject matter: three generations of Japanese women in Canada. There is Naoe, an immigrant; her daughter Keiko, who is alienated from her mother & her Japanese background, & goes by "Kay," & Muriel, Keiko's daughter, called Murasaki by her beloved grandmother, & who is trying to navigate between her grandmother & her mother's polar opposite reactions to being of color in a white society. The question of language looms over the novel: What languages someone may choose to speak or avoid. How language ties to culture & family. How cross-cultural families can communicate even without much of a common language. How we can hear without really listening. Stories & food both figure prominently, as transmitters of culture, family, & affection, yay. I kept finding paragraphs I wanted to copy out & save because they were so beautiful. Also, we need more amazing & kickass older women protagonists like Naoe.
Song of the Exile - Kiana Davenport. A harrowing read, this follows the lives of Keo & Sunny, two young Hawaiians growing up in Hawaii in the years before World War II. Keo is a promising young jazz musician & Sunny is a university student trying to protect her mother from domestic violence (she also receives lots of references to her "mixed-blood confusion"--she's half-Korean, half-Hawaiian, which gets real old real quick). After lots of traveling, the two lose each other in the war, with Sunny ending up as a sex slave to Japanese soldiers--this isn't a spoiler; the first pages are Sunny's thoughts in the camp, reflecting on her time living in Paris with Keo.
I felt like Davenport's writing was weak in places, but she is very good at evoking wartime, particularly her descriptions of Paris & Shanghai as inhabitants in both places realize that war is closing in: the odd combinations of panic & partying, the desperation. Large chunks of the book are devoted to describing the experience of sex slaves & POWs--beware serious triggers. The blurb on the back of the book doesn't give enough of a hint of just how dark the book will be--I mean, anything about WWII is likely to be traumatic to some degree, but I had no idea, & I spent a few days kind of sunk in sympathetic misery reading this book. As far as writing, I felt like characters' voices often sounded fake--Sunny in particular felt really stilted to me. Also, most of the book focuses on Keo & Sunny, but then abruptly a large chunk gets devoted to Keo's sister Malia & his high school friend Krash, neither of whom featured all that much earlier.
Trumpet - Jackie Kay. Joss Moody was a famous jazz trumpet player. Upon his death, the world learns what his wife Millie knew for years: Joss lived as a man while having breasts & a vagina hidden under his clothes. The novel deals with the fallout from this: how their adopted son Colman feels betrayed & disgusted (he had no idea); how suddenly many of his friends & colleagues assert that they always knew something was astray; how gender nonconformity brings out the gossip hounds & the tabloid journalists; & how Millie has to deal with this very significant loss also cut away from the support of her friends & family, because of this revelation. I fully expected Sophie Stones, the odious journalist who wants to write a book on Joss' life, to be totally fucked up in how she referred to Joss (by Joss' birth name & as a female), & Colman as well, as he struggles to come to terms w/this. I was surprised that the cover copy referred to Joss as "pretending" to be a man & as having a son "who called her Dad," though. I realize that when Joss began doing this (in the book he dies in 1997, I think, around 70 years ago) the terms "trans" etc. weren't in common usage & how Joss viewed himself is open to a certain amount of speculation. It just... struck me as weird. Saying something like "living as a man" would've been more neutral. But anyway--enough speculation about cover copy. This got a lot of positive reviews on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc & I agree w/them--Kay's writing is lovely.
(that was also my 50th book for the50books_poc challenge, hooray!)
The Chalupa Rules: A Latino Guide to Gringolandia - Mario Bosquez. I chose to read this because I was interested in what the book might have to say about surviving in a racist society. There is a bit about that, but most of the book is fairly standard self-help stuff organized around proverbs in Spanish. I found myself mildly inspired in bits but it's still not quite what I was hoping the book would be.
Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand - Carrie Vaughn. I felt a bit like I was reading this just to see what happens next; the storyline features a city I hate (Vegas) & something that at best tends to bore me, at worst piss me off (a wedding). Plus, Vaughn even throws in a stupid PETA reference (because animal rights really means beagles will get to vote. Right. EYEROLL). Nevertheless, there were a few things I liked about this book: mysterious magician Odysseus Grant (is his magic for real?); a couple of the bounty hunters Ben knows from his pre-Kitty days, who end up having their ideas of what werewolves are like maybe stretched a teeny bit. Um, I think that might've been it. Oh, & that Kitty thinks at one point, "How many times does one guy [Ben] need to be saved???" I thought Vaughn was going to pull a Patricia Briggs & do some dodgy magic date-rape-drug thing, & she didn't, phew. I also thought she was going to do the "we need the female werewolf to breed!" thing & she didn't, phew.
Kitty Raises Hell - Carrie Vaughn. Much better than the previous one! The nasty Babylonian goddess cult Kitty pissed off in Vegas is now threatening her & her pack back in Denver. There's goofy TV hosts for a paranormal show (one of whom turns out to be more than meets the eye--& no, not a werewolf, that would be too obvious & Kitty would know in a second), a challenge to Kitty's leadership of her pack, creepy attempts to contact spirits/dead people, & more Odysseus Grant. Anything to do w/ghosts or spirits freaks me out, so the thrill factor was pretty easily gained here. I kind of rolled my eyes a little at the eventual source behind the threat to Kitty, but at least Vaughn works in a snotty comment about Republicans with it. Also, I want Cormac back! These little jail visit snippets are so not enough.
One Foot in the Grave - Jeaniene Frost. I don't know if I actually like half-vampire Cat Crawfield very much; I don't dislike her, but she doesn't seem to grab me. The ending of the previous book annoyed me b/c she got all Spiderman & ran away from her love interest to protect him (even though he was a badass vampire capable of protecting himself). At least this book remedied that situation (not a spoiler, it's mentioned on the back cover). The first book had some really good smutty scenes; this one was kind of lackluster on that count (I was especially counting on a fantastic makeup sex scene, but no, not really). The plot, which revolves around Cat's secret government agent colleagues, was kind of meh, though I liked seeing her vamp-hating coworkers have their biases challenged gradually.
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide - Andrea Smith. A painful but very necessary look at how the oppression of Native Americans is tied inextricably to sexual violence against women; she also talks about environmental racism and cultural appropriation as violence & critiques the current dominant model of anti-domestic violence organizing for its ties to state mechanisms of violence. Very highly recommended.
The Other Side of Paradise - Staceyann Chin. This is spoken word artist Chin's memoir of growing up poor, parentless, mixed-race & queer in Jamaica. One of the things that struck me most was how sexual violence was a near-constant threat for her during much of her life, & how those around her utterly failed to offer her any support or even recognize the danger. Heartbreaking. I churned through this in just a couple of hours, I think.
The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One - Margaret Lobenstine. Re-read. Still useful as a way to organize a zillion hobbies & interests, though the book didn't quite hit me as much as it did the first time I read it.
San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement - Estella Habal. This book tore me up. There were multiple times reading it on the bus or during lunch at work where I had to stop, because I was going to start bawling. Habal recollects the fight to save the International Hotel, where in the late '60s and '70s elderly Filipino men were living out their days after years of backbreaking work--generally as farm workers or cannery workers--facing violent & extreme racism. (There were other groups there--for example, elderly Chinese men, but it was mostly Filipino) Many of them had no families, because racist immigration laws prevented Filipinas coming along with them & being with white women meant to risk lynching (though obviously some Filipino men during this period had relationships with other women of color).
Unfortunately for them, the hotel, in Manilatown (on the cusp of Chinatown & often not even recognized as a separate thriving community), was on prime development ground. The owner of the building tried to evict the residents to demolish the hotel & build a more profitable parking lot. Astonishingly, the threat of eviction was fought off for nearly 10 years, thanks to widespread organizing that crossed age, culture, & racial boundaries. Thousands of people would come out to protest & physically block the building. It was seen, rightly, as an issue affecting not only Filipinos but any poor people in a rapidly gentrifying city.
Habal was one of the leaders of the anti-eviction movement, so her book is full of detail & the kind of candor one has in critiquing one's own political work decades later. Dogmatic rifts between various Asian leftist groups hampered action (& some even pulled the "homosexuality is a bourgeois corruption" thing when a gay organization became involved). There was dissent over whether the Filipino aspect of the issue should be emphasized over the class aspect (intersectionality fail!). And the elderly bachelors, who mostly had been starved of female attention during their lives (& who were presumably straight?), sometimes acted inappropriately to the young female organizers--& when the women tried to bring this up to other organizers, they got blown off.
I've seen The Fall of the I-Hotel & found the eviction coverage just devastating--the sheriff using a sledgehammer to break down doors & drag out terrified elderly poor men of color, what the fuck?? Reading about it was just as gutwrenching. There were moments where I wanted to cry w/amazement, as well--at the broad coalition of people who did come out to support the hotel, at how volunteer labor repaired the hotel after a suspicious fire killed three tenants & wreaked major damage, at how strong & determined the tenants were. And at how shitty organizational politics (including arguments over whether the coalition should negotiate with politicians & the mayor--ie. the people who had legal heft to block the eviction--or just lambaste them as tools of the capitalist system) may have ended up dooming the hotel. It also gave me that same feeling I had after I went out for those World Says No to War demonstrations--so many people!--& then Bush went to war anyway. So many people were trying to save this hotel & it didn't work. An important piece of history & also, if anyone needed a reminder, a sharp condemnation of gentrification & politics that put profits before people.
Song of the Exile - Kiana Davenport. A harrowing read, this follows the lives of Keo & Sunny, two young Hawaiians growing up in Hawaii in the years before World War II. Keo is a promising young jazz musician & Sunny is a university student trying to protect her mother from domestic violence (she also receives lots of references to her "mixed-blood confusion"--she's half-Korean, half-Hawaiian, which gets real old real quick). After lots of traveling, the two lose each other in the war, with Sunny ending up as a sex slave to Japanese soldiers--this isn't a spoiler; the first pages are Sunny's thoughts in the camp, reflecting on her time living in Paris with Keo.
I felt like Davenport's writing was weak in places, but she is very good at evoking wartime, particularly her descriptions of Paris & Shanghai as inhabitants in both places realize that war is closing in: the odd combinations of panic & partying, the desperation. Large chunks of the book are devoted to describing the experience of sex slaves & POWs--beware serious triggers. The blurb on the back of the book doesn't give enough of a hint of just how dark the book will be--I mean, anything about WWII is likely to be traumatic to some degree, but I had no idea, & I spent a few days kind of sunk in sympathetic misery reading this book. As far as writing, I felt like characters' voices often sounded fake--Sunny in particular felt really stilted to me. Also, most of the book focuses on Keo & Sunny, but then abruptly a large chunk gets devoted to Keo's sister Malia & his high school friend Krash, neither of whom featured all that much earlier.
Trumpet - Jackie Kay. Joss Moody was a famous jazz trumpet player. Upon his death, the world learns what his wife Millie knew for years: Joss lived as a man while having breasts & a vagina hidden under his clothes. The novel deals with the fallout from this: how their adopted son Colman feels betrayed & disgusted (he had no idea); how suddenly many of his friends & colleagues assert that they always knew something was astray; how gender nonconformity brings out the gossip hounds & the tabloid journalists; & how Millie has to deal with this very significant loss also cut away from the support of her friends & family, because of this revelation. I fully expected Sophie Stones, the odious journalist who wants to write a book on Joss' life, to be totally fucked up in how she referred to Joss (by Joss' birth name & as a female), & Colman as well, as he struggles to come to terms w/this. I was surprised that the cover copy referred to Joss as "pretending" to be a man & as having a son "who called her Dad," though. I realize that when Joss began doing this (in the book he dies in 1997, I think, around 70 years ago) the terms "trans" etc. weren't in common usage & how Joss viewed himself is open to a certain amount of speculation. It just... struck me as weird. Saying something like "living as a man" would've been more neutral. But anyway--enough speculation about cover copy. This got a lot of positive reviews on
50books_poc & I agree w/them--Kay's writing is lovely.(that was also my 50th book for the
50books_poc challenge, hooray!)The Chalupa Rules: A Latino Guide to Gringolandia - Mario Bosquez. I chose to read this because I was interested in what the book might have to say about surviving in a racist society. There is a bit about that, but most of the book is fairly standard self-help stuff organized around proverbs in Spanish. I found myself mildly inspired in bits but it's still not quite what I was hoping the book would be.
Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand - Carrie Vaughn. I felt a bit like I was reading this just to see what happens next; the storyline features a city I hate (Vegas) & something that at best tends to bore me, at worst piss me off (a wedding). Plus, Vaughn even throws in a stupid PETA reference (because animal rights really means beagles will get to vote. Right. EYEROLL). Nevertheless, there were a few things I liked about this book: mysterious magician Odysseus Grant (is his magic for real?); a couple of the bounty hunters Ben knows from his pre-Kitty days, who end up having their ideas of what werewolves are like maybe stretched a teeny bit. Um, I think that might've been it. Oh, & that Kitty thinks at one point, "How many times does one guy [Ben] need to be saved???" I thought Vaughn was going to pull a Patricia Briggs & do some dodgy magic date-rape-drug thing, & she didn't, phew. I also thought she was going to do the "we need the female werewolf to breed!" thing & she didn't, phew.
Kitty Raises Hell - Carrie Vaughn. Much better than the previous one! The nasty Babylonian goddess cult Kitty pissed off in Vegas is now threatening her & her pack back in Denver. There's goofy TV hosts for a paranormal show (one of whom turns out to be more than meets the eye--& no, not a werewolf, that would be too obvious & Kitty would know in a second), a challenge to Kitty's leadership of her pack, creepy attempts to contact spirits/dead people, & more Odysseus Grant. Anything to do w/ghosts or spirits freaks me out, so the thrill factor was pretty easily gained here. I kind of rolled my eyes a little at the eventual source behind the threat to Kitty, but at least Vaughn works in a snotty comment about Republicans with it. Also, I want Cormac back! These little jail visit snippets are so not enough.
One Foot in the Grave - Jeaniene Frost. I don't know if I actually like half-vampire Cat Crawfield very much; I don't dislike her, but she doesn't seem to grab me. The ending of the previous book annoyed me b/c she got all Spiderman & ran away from her love interest to protect him (even though he was a badass vampire capable of protecting himself). At least this book remedied that situation (not a spoiler, it's mentioned on the back cover). The first book had some really good smutty scenes; this one was kind of lackluster on that count (I was especially counting on a fantastic makeup sex scene, but no, not really). The plot, which revolves around Cat's secret government agent colleagues, was kind of meh, though I liked seeing her vamp-hating coworkers have their biases challenged gradually.
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide - Andrea Smith. A painful but very necessary look at how the oppression of Native Americans is tied inextricably to sexual violence against women; she also talks about environmental racism and cultural appropriation as violence & critiques the current dominant model of anti-domestic violence organizing for its ties to state mechanisms of violence. Very highly recommended.
The Other Side of Paradise - Staceyann Chin. This is spoken word artist Chin's memoir of growing up poor, parentless, mixed-race & queer in Jamaica. One of the things that struck me most was how sexual violence was a near-constant threat for her during much of her life, & how those around her utterly failed to offer her any support or even recognize the danger. Heartbreaking. I churned through this in just a couple of hours, I think.
The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One - Margaret Lobenstine. Re-read. Still useful as a way to organize a zillion hobbies & interests, though the book didn't quite hit me as much as it did the first time I read it.
San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement - Estella Habal. This book tore me up. There were multiple times reading it on the bus or during lunch at work where I had to stop, because I was going to start bawling. Habal recollects the fight to save the International Hotel, where in the late '60s and '70s elderly Filipino men were living out their days after years of backbreaking work--generally as farm workers or cannery workers--facing violent & extreme racism. (There were other groups there--for example, elderly Chinese men, but it was mostly Filipino) Many of them had no families, because racist immigration laws prevented Filipinas coming along with them & being with white women meant to risk lynching (though obviously some Filipino men during this period had relationships with other women of color).
Unfortunately for them, the hotel, in Manilatown (on the cusp of Chinatown & often not even recognized as a separate thriving community), was on prime development ground. The owner of the building tried to evict the residents to demolish the hotel & build a more profitable parking lot. Astonishingly, the threat of eviction was fought off for nearly 10 years, thanks to widespread organizing that crossed age, culture, & racial boundaries. Thousands of people would come out to protest & physically block the building. It was seen, rightly, as an issue affecting not only Filipinos but any poor people in a rapidly gentrifying city.
Habal was one of the leaders of the anti-eviction movement, so her book is full of detail & the kind of candor one has in critiquing one's own political work decades later. Dogmatic rifts between various Asian leftist groups hampered action (& some even pulled the "homosexuality is a bourgeois corruption" thing when a gay organization became involved). There was dissent over whether the Filipino aspect of the issue should be emphasized over the class aspect (intersectionality fail!). And the elderly bachelors, who mostly had been starved of female attention during their lives (& who were presumably straight?), sometimes acted inappropriately to the young female organizers--& when the women tried to bring this up to other organizers, they got blown off.
I've seen The Fall of the I-Hotel & found the eviction coverage just devastating--the sheriff using a sledgehammer to break down doors & drag out terrified elderly poor men of color, what the fuck?? Reading about it was just as gutwrenching. There were moments where I wanted to cry w/amazement, as well--at the broad coalition of people who did come out to support the hotel, at how volunteer labor repaired the hotel after a suspicious fire killed three tenants & wreaked major damage, at how strong & determined the tenants were. And at how shitty organizational politics (including arguments over whether the coalition should negotiate with politicians & the mayor--ie. the people who had legal heft to block the eviction--or just lambaste them as tools of the capitalist system) may have ended up dooming the hotel. It also gave me that same feeling I had after I went out for those World Says No to War demonstrations--so many people!--& then Bush went to war anyway. So many people were trying to save this hotel & it didn't work. An important piece of history & also, if anyone needed a reminder, a sharp condemnation of gentrification & politics that put profits before people.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 09:43 pm (UTC)Weirdly, Chorus of Mushrooms is n/a from NYPL or Columbia. v. sad!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-11 06:12 am (UTC)Yeah, I have been trying to read that book for years & have been stymied for that reason. I finally nabbed a copy through either Bookmooch (http://www.bookmooch.com) or Paperbackswap (http://www.paperbackswap.com), I can't remember which.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-14 06:56 pm (UTC)I <3 Hiromi Goto!