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Wednesday reading meme: actual 2019!
Have read:
Any ordinary day: what happens after the worst day of your life? by Leigh Sales. This was a requested Christmas present. I love Sales as an interviewer, and I’d been keenly looking forward to this. The first two thirds of this book I felt were sort of repetitive and lacked depth, maybe. Or at least, I was expecting more depth, although I don’t actually know *how* she could have achieved it. The last third of the book was much more interesting to me – exploring a little bit the people who don’t cope, and touching on why; also talking to those who work in tragedies and work with those who are grieving. It’s been about two months since I finished this, and I can’t say I came away with it with much deep resonating ideas, although I don’t regret reading it, which is also something.
Beauty: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinnley. I am so torn on this book. I want to give one part of it – the story of her family and the immensely comforting prose (minus a handful of sentences that an editor should have tweaked) five stars. The sequence where Beauty’s family falls on hard times and has to relocate to a small village in the forest, and the descriptions of them cleaning and tending to the house and making it a home, were exactly what I’d been hoping Mandy would be. The atmosphere of the village, and then of the castle, were fantastically top-notch. The actual Beast fairytale… given the previous riches, the beast himself and her “romance” with him were achingly disappointing. It turns out that this book was originally written decades before the Disney movie, so it’s unfair of me to ask a book to interrogate something that didn’t exist yet, but I still wanted a retelling to examine the power imbalance of prisoner/jailer. There was so much that could have been done there – the beast being just as imprisoned as Beauty, and how he felt about ‘having’ to imprison someone in turn as the price of his potential freedom; her developing attraction to him, and how she felt about it; her shift from seeing herself as ‘ugly’ to ‘beauty’; his story of being imprisoned for 200 years… I just… McKinnley/Beauty says she came to trust and love the beast, but I didn’t feel like we saw a damn bit of that developing. I feel like McKinnley didn’t actually want to write the “romance” of the original, so she dodged *everything* to do with that part of the fairy tale, and the story suffered for it so badly. I’m glad I read it for everything else, but she could have made all of it amazing, and I am sad.
Currently reading:
Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel. This has been in my physical to-read pile for literal years. It’s my first actual book of Bechdel’s, and I love the art style, but coming in ‘late’ – not having read Fun Home, for example, the first few chapters of her writing about her mother grated as navel-gazing in a way that it might not have if I’d come to this already in love with her work. But the navel gazing is growing on me, and gets interlaced (beautifully, in the art style) with some legit interesting psychoanalysis, and that addition plus the comic style makes it easy to inhale a chapter before bed, and I’m continuing accordingly.
Wonder woman by Leigh Bardugo. I rather liked the inventiveness and richness of Bardugo's original work Six of crows, so I was excited to see this Wonder Woman tie-in. I’m 30-ish pages in, and it’s slow going, but also slowly hooking me in. It has both the denseness of Six of crows with the slight distancing that often comes with writing characters that aren't your own etc. I’m persisting, moderately interestedly. Also, I had no idea that the Amazons had been mortal women from around the world who had cried out their Goddess’s name while dying in battle, and were therefore granted immortality. That’s the COOLEST CONCEPT, and the movie utterly failed to mention it and I feel robbed. I’m persisting with the book, at least for a while longer.
Up next:
That feels like a very ambitious concept right now...
Any ordinary day: what happens after the worst day of your life? by Leigh Sales. This was a requested Christmas present. I love Sales as an interviewer, and I’d been keenly looking forward to this. The first two thirds of this book I felt were sort of repetitive and lacked depth, maybe. Or at least, I was expecting more depth, although I don’t actually know *how* she could have achieved it. The last third of the book was much more interesting to me – exploring a little bit the people who don’t cope, and touching on why; also talking to those who work in tragedies and work with those who are grieving. It’s been about two months since I finished this, and I can’t say I came away with it with much deep resonating ideas, although I don’t regret reading it, which is also something.
Beauty: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinnley. I am so torn on this book. I want to give one part of it – the story of her family and the immensely comforting prose (minus a handful of sentences that an editor should have tweaked) five stars. The sequence where Beauty’s family falls on hard times and has to relocate to a small village in the forest, and the descriptions of them cleaning and tending to the house and making it a home, were exactly what I’d been hoping Mandy would be. The atmosphere of the village, and then of the castle, were fantastically top-notch. The actual Beast fairytale… given the previous riches, the beast himself and her “romance” with him were achingly disappointing. It turns out that this book was originally written decades before the Disney movie, so it’s unfair of me to ask a book to interrogate something that didn’t exist yet, but I still wanted a retelling to examine the power imbalance of prisoner/jailer. There was so much that could have been done there – the beast being just as imprisoned as Beauty, and how he felt about ‘having’ to imprison someone in turn as the price of his potential freedom; her developing attraction to him, and how she felt about it; her shift from seeing herself as ‘ugly’ to ‘beauty’; his story of being imprisoned for 200 years… I just… McKinnley/Beauty says she came to trust and love the beast, but I didn’t feel like we saw a damn bit of that developing. I feel like McKinnley didn’t actually want to write the “romance” of the original, so she dodged *everything* to do with that part of the fairy tale, and the story suffered for it so badly. I’m glad I read it for everything else, but she could have made all of it amazing, and I am sad.
Currently reading:
Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel. This has been in my physical to-read pile for literal years. It’s my first actual book of Bechdel’s, and I love the art style, but coming in ‘late’ – not having read Fun Home, for example, the first few chapters of her writing about her mother grated as navel-gazing in a way that it might not have if I’d come to this already in love with her work. But the navel gazing is growing on me, and gets interlaced (beautifully, in the art style) with some legit interesting psychoanalysis, and that addition plus the comic style makes it easy to inhale a chapter before bed, and I’m continuing accordingly.
Wonder woman by Leigh Bardugo. I rather liked the inventiveness and richness of Bardugo's original work Six of crows, so I was excited to see this Wonder Woman tie-in. I’m 30-ish pages in, and it’s slow going, but also slowly hooking me in. It has both the denseness of Six of crows with the slight distancing that often comes with writing characters that aren't your own etc. I’m persisting, moderately interestedly. Also, I had no idea that the Amazons had been mortal women from around the world who had cried out their Goddess’s name while dying in battle, and were therefore granted immortality. That’s the COOLEST CONCEPT, and the movie utterly failed to mention it and I feel robbed. I’m persisting with the book, at least for a while longer.
Up next:
That feels like a very ambitious concept right now...