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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 10th, 2019 08:53 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Garden, which unfortunately I think was a little weaker than the other books in the Anna Wang series - although it looks like Andrea Cheng died before this book was published, so quite possibly she didn’t have the chance to finish it as she would have liked. I still recommend the first four books in the series, though; as this one is a prequel, it doesn’t matter so much whether you read it or not.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, which is gorgeous, a prose-poem of a book. But so sad. There’s a sense of omnipresent sexual menace about the 1970s Brooklyn setting - the heroine and her three friends Gigi and Angela and Sylvia always aware that they’re being stared at and judged in public, watched, perhaps touched, which never rises to an actual assault but also never goes away.
And I gave up on Annie Barrows’ Nothing because I was a third of the way into the book and couldn’t tell the two leads apart, let alone any of the supporting characters, and life is just too short. Question for keepers of reading logs: do you add a book you abandoned to your log?
What I’m Reading Now
Guess who finally got Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women? Me! I’ve only been waiting for this book for, oh, six months or so. It’s a collection of movie reviews, many written by different people, so I expect it will be uneven as anthologies often are, but I’m hoping to come out of it with recommendations for new movies to watch.
I’m also still working on Kay Armitage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which I’m really enjoying. I particularly like the way that Armitage situates Nell Shipman as one of many women directors in the silent era, because it’s accurate, it highlights a piece of film history that is largely forgotten (even the introduction to The Female Gaze blithely asserts that there were few women directors till the 1970s), and Armitage uses it to explicitly challenge the way that historical women who achieved anything are often portrayed as Lone Geniuses.
As Armitage points out, the Lone Genius construction is pretty limiting. It often requires ignoring the other women who were present, either by not mentioning them or by dismissing them as non-geniuses. It means that anyone who wants to dismiss a woman creator from attention can do so by arguing that she, too, is a non-genius. It drags people into circular arguments about the genius or lack thereof of particular creators (how do you prove that someone is a genius, after all?) rather than letting them say, “Nell Shipman was an interesting person who made interesting movies and her work is worth discussing whether or not she was an innovative genius.”
I was also VERY interested to discover that female-driven car chase movies were a big thing in the 1910s & 20s. (Shipman’s Something New is an extant example.) Audiences loved them and there were dozens going around.
I’ve also started Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdattar, but I think I’ll do a separate post for it every week, lest it take over the Wednesday Reading Meme for months on end.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m contemplating what to read for the reading challenge “a book you chose for the cover.” Top contenders right now: Katrina Leno’s Summer of Salt or Amor Towles Rules of Civility.
Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Garden, which unfortunately I think was a little weaker than the other books in the Anna Wang series - although it looks like Andrea Cheng died before this book was published, so quite possibly she didn’t have the chance to finish it as she would have liked. I still recommend the first four books in the series, though; as this one is a prequel, it doesn’t matter so much whether you read it or not.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, which is gorgeous, a prose-poem of a book. But so sad. There’s a sense of omnipresent sexual menace about the 1970s Brooklyn setting - the heroine and her three friends Gigi and Angela and Sylvia always aware that they’re being stared at and judged in public, watched, perhaps touched, which never rises to an actual assault but also never goes away.
And I gave up on Annie Barrows’ Nothing because I was a third of the way into the book and couldn’t tell the two leads apart, let alone any of the supporting characters, and life is just too short. Question for keepers of reading logs: do you add a book you abandoned to your log?
What I’m Reading Now
Guess who finally got Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women? Me! I’ve only been waiting for this book for, oh, six months or so. It’s a collection of movie reviews, many written by different people, so I expect it will be uneven as anthologies often are, but I’m hoping to come out of it with recommendations for new movies to watch.
I’m also still working on Kay Armitage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which I’m really enjoying. I particularly like the way that Armitage situates Nell Shipman as one of many women directors in the silent era, because it’s accurate, it highlights a piece of film history that is largely forgotten (even the introduction to The Female Gaze blithely asserts that there were few women directors till the 1970s), and Armitage uses it to explicitly challenge the way that historical women who achieved anything are often portrayed as Lone Geniuses.
As Armitage points out, the Lone Genius construction is pretty limiting. It often requires ignoring the other women who were present, either by not mentioning them or by dismissing them as non-geniuses. It means that anyone who wants to dismiss a woman creator from attention can do so by arguing that she, too, is a non-genius. It drags people into circular arguments about the genius or lack thereof of particular creators (how do you prove that someone is a genius, after all?) rather than letting them say, “Nell Shipman was an interesting person who made interesting movies and her work is worth discussing whether or not she was an innovative genius.”
I was also VERY interested to discover that female-driven car chase movies were a big thing in the 1910s & 20s. (Shipman’s Something New is an extant example.) Audiences loved them and there were dozens going around.
I’ve also started Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdattar, but I think I’ll do a separate post for it every week, lest it take over the Wednesday Reading Meme for months on end.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m contemplating what to read for the reading challenge “a book you chose for the cover.” Top contenders right now: Katrina Leno’s Summer of Salt or Amor Towles Rules of Civility.
