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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 1st, 2019 11:01 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Kay Armatage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which has given me for an excellent idea for a novel about a young woman directing a movie near the end of the silent era (I’m thinking about 1924, which was the year Shipman’s productions closed down: the big studios really began to squeeze out independent productions at that point), involving either a car chase or a boat race, and she swoops down on her best friend/former lover all “You should star with me! Our characters are running away from bootleggers!”
I also watched one of Shipman’s short films on Youtube, so I should write a quick review of that.
Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, the first of a trilogy I probably won’t be continuing, because I found this book pretty meh. It’s a slavefic that’s not quite iddy enough to be proper slavefic but also not socially astute enough to be a serious book about slavery, and I found the main romance pretty mushy.
My biggest reaction to Penelope Farmer’s Emma in Winter was that I simply have to read Farmer’s earlier book, The Flying Summer, because Emma in Winter refers to it so heavily that it feels like a reflection of the earlier book rather than a book of its own.
Psychologically this makes total sense. If I learned how to magically fly one summer, I would probably spend the rest of my life pining for it. But from an entertainment standpoint, I wanted there to be a bit more to it than “Emma and a classmate share a dream of flying, which takes them back in time to watch the geological history of England I guess.”
What I’m Reading Now
“When [Freud] dismissed women’s yearning for equality as “penis envy,” was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be men’s equal, any more than she could wear his penis?”
Betty Friedan is socking it to Freud in The Feminine Mystique and I’m having a good time with it. It’s especially fun because she starts out by proclaiming her enormous respect for Freud and then goes on to demolish his failure to understand at least half of the human race.
I’ve also about a third of the way through Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, which is a weird book. In someone else’s hands I think this would become a satire - prophecies about the world’s imminent end are so easily satirized, after all - but here it’s gaining uncanny force from the characters’ belief in it, reluctant though that belief is in some cases.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field for my reading challenge “a book outside your genre comfort zone,” and I really ought to begin reading, but I have come to the glum conclusion that “outside my genre comfort zone” will almost inevitably mean “something I’m not that interested in reading.” Ugh. But the point of a challenge is to push oneself, right?
I finished Kay Armatage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which has given me for an excellent idea for a novel about a young woman directing a movie near the end of the silent era (I’m thinking about 1924, which was the year Shipman’s productions closed down: the big studios really began to squeeze out independent productions at that point), involving either a car chase or a boat race, and she swoops down on her best friend/former lover all “You should star with me! Our characters are running away from bootleggers!”
I also watched one of Shipman’s short films on Youtube, so I should write a quick review of that.
Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, the first of a trilogy I probably won’t be continuing, because I found this book pretty meh. It’s a slavefic that’s not quite iddy enough to be proper slavefic but also not socially astute enough to be a serious book about slavery, and I found the main romance pretty mushy.
My biggest reaction to Penelope Farmer’s Emma in Winter was that I simply have to read Farmer’s earlier book, The Flying Summer, because Emma in Winter refers to it so heavily that it feels like a reflection of the earlier book rather than a book of its own.
Psychologically this makes total sense. If I learned how to magically fly one summer, I would probably spend the rest of my life pining for it. But from an entertainment standpoint, I wanted there to be a bit more to it than “Emma and a classmate share a dream of flying, which takes them back in time to watch the geological history of England I guess.”
What I’m Reading Now
“When [Freud] dismissed women’s yearning for equality as “penis envy,” was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be men’s equal, any more than she could wear his penis?”
Betty Friedan is socking it to Freud in The Feminine Mystique and I’m having a good time with it. It’s especially fun because she starts out by proclaiming her enormous respect for Freud and then goes on to demolish his failure to understand at least half of the human race.
I’ve also about a third of the way through Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, which is a weird book. In someone else’s hands I think this would become a satire - prophecies about the world’s imminent end are so easily satirized, after all - but here it’s gaining uncanny force from the characters’ belief in it, reluctant though that belief is in some cases.
What I Plan to Read Next
I have Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field for my reading challenge “a book outside your genre comfort zone,” and I really ought to begin reading, but I have come to the glum conclusion that “outside my genre comfort zone” will almost inevitably mean “something I’m not that interested in reading.” Ugh. But the point of a challenge is to push oneself, right?
