Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 9th, 2021 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A bonanza of Newbery books this week! Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (fun, but not as good as A Girl Named Disaster, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver (a white boy is left alone to hold the claim while his father fetches the rest of the family; befriended by local Indian boy. It was written in the 1980s and is very eighties), Paul Fleischman’s Graven Images (a collection of three short stories, each one prominently featuring a statue. I have just now realized that Sid and Paul Fleischman are different people; Sid was Paul’s father), AND FINALLY Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (a ghost story, although the ghost is almost beside the point; very sad).
I also finished Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I wish I had read back when I was writing Captain America fanfic, as it could have added interesting new depth to the minor plotline of Bucky vs. The SHIELD Therapists… although really I suspect the SHIELD vision of “therapy” is to apply a twisted version of CBT to browbeat agents into submission. These are the people who recruited Skye by kidnapping her, after all.
What I’m Reading Now
Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m going to read all of Mary Renault’s books. (Well, maybe not all. I understand there are some early works about heterosexuals, which I probably won’t bother with.)
Speaking of heterosexuals, I’ve also begun Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality, by which he means not male-female bonking in general but the specific cultural construction where it is VERY IMPORTANT that men and women direct every single iota of their erotic energy entirely at opposite-sexed people at all times.
I haven’t gotten very far in this yet, but it has a delightfully acid forward by Gore Vidal, who gets distracted from actually discussing the book in question to pursue a decades-old feud with his frenemy James Baldwin. Apparently Baldwin said some mean things about Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, and now Vidal is returning the favor by calling Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room “a perfect panic of a book that ends with the beloved one’s head chopped off in Paris.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I was going to say “I think I should take a break from the Newbery Honor books for a while,” but actually I’m on a roll right now, so why cut myself short?
A bonanza of Newbery books this week! Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (fun, but not as good as A Girl Named Disaster, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver (a white boy is left alone to hold the claim while his father fetches the rest of the family; befriended by local Indian boy. It was written in the 1980s and is very eighties), Paul Fleischman’s Graven Images (a collection of three short stories, each one prominently featuring a statue. I have just now realized that Sid and Paul Fleischman are different people; Sid was Paul’s father), AND FINALLY Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (a ghost story, although the ghost is almost beside the point; very sad).
I also finished Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I wish I had read back when I was writing Captain America fanfic, as it could have added interesting new depth to the minor plotline of Bucky vs. The SHIELD Therapists… although really I suspect the SHIELD vision of “therapy” is to apply a twisted version of CBT to browbeat agents into submission. These are the people who recruited Skye by kidnapping her, after all.
What I’m Reading Now
Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m going to read all of Mary Renault’s books. (Well, maybe not all. I understand there are some early works about heterosexuals, which I probably won’t bother with.)
Speaking of heterosexuals, I’ve also begun Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality, by which he means not male-female bonking in general but the specific cultural construction where it is VERY IMPORTANT that men and women direct every single iota of their erotic energy entirely at opposite-sexed people at all times.
I haven’t gotten very far in this yet, but it has a delightfully acid forward by Gore Vidal, who gets distracted from actually discussing the book in question to pursue a decades-old feud with his frenemy James Baldwin. Apparently Baldwin said some mean things about Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, and now Vidal is returning the favor by calling Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room “a perfect panic of a book that ends with the beloved one’s head chopped off in Paris.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I was going to say “I think I should take a break from the Newbery Honor books for a while,” but actually I’m on a roll right now, so why cut myself short?
