Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which is lots of fun if you love punctuation and anecdotes about the New Yorker editorial office. (It’s definitely stronger on the punctuation front than the anecdote front, somewhat to my surprise. I also enjoyed the chapter about profanity.) I read the chapter about dashes with particular attention, because I’ve been contemplating changing how I style my dashes. Currently I do them with spaces on either side, which can create weird formatting in print (basically, the dash will fall on a new line, sundered from word before it), which I thought using M-dashes without spaces might solve…

But evidently that’s just how computers format dashes. Maybe I should just use fewer dashes? That might be sensible, but my whole soul revolts against this solution.

At work we’ve been assigned to read Ibram X. Kendi & Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which is an abridged version of Kendi’s hefty tome Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I realize that the library probably had good reason not to assign us all a five-hundred-page-long book, but I would probably prefer the long version, because it might make me feel less talked down to. Stamped is an abridgement aimed at teenagers and boy could I feel it.

I spent a lot of time going, “Wait, but it’s more complicated than that. How can you lump Puritan New England and colonial Virginia together as if they’re culturally and economically indistinguishable? How can you skim over the Civil War so fast? (It occurs to me that it’s hard to explain the Civil War once you’ve rendered regional distinctions illegible. This may also explain why the book is vague about the Great Migration.) How can you just skip Reconstruction?”

Also at work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on door duty (ensuring that everyone who comes in is wearing a mask and that the building stays below capacity), so I’ve been looking for short books to read while on door. Thus, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.

Although I got them because they’re both short, they both turn out to have a number of other commonalities: they are both intensely evocative of place (a convenience store in modern Tokyo; a girls’ residential hotel in World War II London), neither cares particularly whether the characters are likable, and in both books I felt that the author was trying to make a point which I didn’t fully grasp, although I enjoyed the view into the complexities of their seemingly mundane worlds so much that it didn’t really matter.

And finally, I read E. F. Benson’s David Blaize and the Blue Door, which is an Alice in Wonderland-ish fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with the original David Blaize. Benson could just as well have named the hero Otis Crumpet. Possibly he connected the two as a fiendish marketing ploy to draw in unsuspecting readers who enjoyed the first book?

What I’m Reading Now

I was hoping that I had grown into William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, but alas, I’m still finding it a hard slog. Still, I have persevered, and it’s becoming slightly less hard as I get used to the fact that the characters sometimes speak in poems of ten stanzas.

However, I think perhaps I have grown into Willa Cather. I didn’t like Song of the Skylark when I read it in college, but last year I enjoyed My Antonia, and now I’m reading O Pioneers! (by way of research for a book I’m contemplating) and enjoying it too. I’ve always been a sucker for immigrant stories.

What I Plan to Read Next

E. Lockhart has a new book out (Again Again) and guess who is going to read it? ME, apparently. I saw it on the shelf and couldn’t resist it. E. Lockhart, why can’t I quit you?

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

in both books I felt that the author was trying to make a point which I didn’t fully grasp

I haven't read The Girls of Slender Means (although it's on my list!) but I remember being weirded out and frustrated by Convenience Store Girl, because I fully Didn't Get It.

[osprey_archer]

I kept having moments where I felt like I was approaching understanding or at least a sense of connection - obviously working at an American Starbucks is very different than working at a Japanese convenience store, but there's a similar scripted quality to interactions, and like the narrator I found it much easier to make small talk with people when I was doing it as store employee to customer rather than just human to human.

But then Shiraha would start spouting all of his "nothing has changed since the stone age" stuff and I was like... is this the point? Are we supposed to agree with him? But also he's such an obnoxious person, it's hard to imagine an author putting her point into his mouth.

[troisoiseaux]

But then Shiraha would start spouting all of his "nothing has changed since the stone age" stuff and I was like... is this the point?

I liked (?) it until Shiraha showed up, and then things just got... too weird for me, both because of the truly bizarre takes that came out of his mouth and because the whole "fake relationship" thing was uncomfortable/unpleasant/unsettling. (Words I never thought I'd say!)

Also, does she fantasize about murdering a baby at one point or am I making that up? It's been a few years since I read it.

(I just realized I'd originally mistyped the title. //facepalm// I guess my brain accidentally mashed the two books together?)

[osprey_archer]

I think my familiarity with the fake relationship trope in fic made the fake relationship in the novel seem even worse, because in fics the fake relationship partners are always pining and so I kept bracing for Keiko or Shiraha to start, well, pining. Which they never did, thank goodness.

And yes! Keiko's sister's baby won't stop crying, and Keiko thinks about hitting the baby with something, the way that long ago she hit a classmate with a spade to stop a fight. Like the fake relationship, it's clearly meant to be off-putting, I guess I just... don't usually like my novels to be quite that off-putting?

[evelyn_b]

I've been meaning to read Convenience Store Woman forever! Maybe I'll look for it if I manage to get to THE LIBRARY (now open!) this week.

I don't know Kendi's work, but it sounds like that abridgement has abridged itself right out of usefulness. A definitive history of racist ideas in America is a hard enough undertaking without skipping Reconstruction. What does it leave in?

[osprey_archer]

Convenience Store Woman is conveniently very short! So even if you decide you don't like it, it's not a big investment.

It seems like more of an intellectual history, focusing on people who contributed in some way (good or bad) to American ideas about racism: Cotton Mather, Phyllis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, etc. And it also points out that the basic underpinning of racism is not really intellectual at all, but economic gain - the ideas are a superstructure built up to rationalize why the extremely lucrative system of slavery is not merely expedient but morally okay. I thought the book maybe should have leaned on that harder.

[evelyn_b]

Oh, that sounds interesting! And the idea of racism as rationalization for slavery built up over time (rather than something that was just always there) is brand new and a big deal to lots of teenagers.

[kore]

Aww, I like Cather a lot. Many bookish people in my hometown read her because of Death Comes to the Archbishop.

[osprey_archer]

Possibly I should try rereading Song of the Lark now that I'm older and apparently better at appreciating Cather? Or maybe I should just delve deeper into her bibliography. One of Us probably counts as research for a book I'm working on...

[silverusagi]

I've seen Convenience Store Woman, but I haven't decided whether I should pick it up or not. It's short, but I've been lacking motivation to read things recently.

[osprey_archer]

I think that if you're feeling a lack of motivation, Convenience Store Woman is maybe not the book to overcome that? It's really a place/character study - there's not a lot of plot impetus to pull you along.

[lokifan]

<But evidently that’s just how computers format dashes. Maybe I should just use fewer dashes? That might be sensible, but my whole soul revolts against this solution.

LOLLLLLL

At work we’ve been assigned to read Ibram X. Kendi & Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Interesting they assigned it to you guys! I haven't really heard of that before. Seems like a good idea in a place where presumably everyone reads, though yeah - at the point you're skipping over Reconstruction there's a LOT missing.