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Finished reading
A question of age : women, ageing[,] and the forever self by Jacinta Parson. Mum read this one as an audiobook as her before sleep read, and recced this to me, and I'm really interested to hear what she got out of it. Reading it as a print book was probably much less enjoyable.
As someone who just turned 40, I'm starting to get very interested in engaging with ageing and what it means in our culture, and figuring out what it means to me personally. I am extremely here for whatever the 'forever self' might be. I have no fucking idea what it is, actually, having now read this book.
I'm used to non-fiction books that are either collections of essays with discrete points, or books that are chapters building on previous arguments. This was a book that purported to be the latter, but read like the former, and I found it immensely frustrating as a result. It made some really good starting points in each chapter that then...went nowhere. Seriously, this table of contents (Amazon link to the sample) looks so structured and Going Somewhere and argh. Each handful of pages makes a really entrancing point, that goes fucking hard reset into the next point that will have nothing to do with the one that came before it, or the one that comes after it, and reaches zero conclusions. I expected each element to relate to a time of life, but each introduction resets to her childhood memory of that element and then bounces all over the place.
It feels like this is the first draft of something that needs to have its core points written on sticky notes and reordered into an actual whole, and god, I really really want to read that. I am so sad its not that, and I can't tell if it's my own expectations, or if I'm trying to impose a structure on something that doesn't need it, or what. Ugh.
A question of age : women, ageing[,] and the forever self by Jacinta Parson. Mum read this one as an audiobook as her before sleep read, and recced this to me, and I'm really interested to hear what she got out of it. Reading it as a print book was probably much less enjoyable.
As someone who just turned 40, I'm starting to get very interested in engaging with ageing and what it means in our culture, and figuring out what it means to me personally. I am extremely here for whatever the 'forever self' might be. I have no fucking idea what it is, actually, having now read this book.
I'm used to non-fiction books that are either collections of essays with discrete points, or books that are chapters building on previous arguments. This was a book that purported to be the latter, but read like the former, and I found it immensely frustrating as a result. It made some really good starting points in each chapter that then...went nowhere. Seriously, this table of contents (Amazon link to the sample) looks so structured and Going Somewhere and argh. Each handful of pages makes a really entrancing point, that goes fucking hard reset into the next point that will have nothing to do with the one that came before it, or the one that comes after it, and reaches zero conclusions. I expected each element to relate to a time of life, but each introduction resets to her childhood memory of that element and then bounces all over the place.
It feels like this is the first draft of something that needs to have its core points written on sticky notes and reordered into an actual whole, and god, I really really want to read that. I am so sad its not that, and I can't tell if it's my own expectations, or if I'm trying to impose a structure on something that doesn't need it, or what. Ugh.
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