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What I Just Finished Reading
Rat Queens vol. 2 – Ed Brisson, Roc Upchurch, and Kurtis Wiebe
This volume contains plenty of snarkiness and mayhem, but also a healthy dose of worldbuilding, good use of secondary characters, and in particular, meaty expansions of three of the protagonists’ backstories. (And oh my, I loved the scenes with Violet and Hannah and their respective mothers.) A few scene transitions felt a little abrupt, but overall, this volume continued to build on the strengths of the first.
The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
I knew going in that many people have strong, polarized reactions to this book. A quarter of those boil down to “How dare a woman engage in self-promotion!” and can be immediately dismissed. Ditto for objections to Kondo on religious grounds. Many more people seem to dislike to Kondo’s prescriptive tone, but this didn’t bother me: it’s how Japanese self-help texts sound, whether they’re explaining how to shape your eyebrows or play a better round of golf. Maybe because I knew how all this would read in the original Japanese, it struck me as peppy and optimistic in a way it didn’t for some other readers. At any rate, I didn’t feel either castigated or bound by Kondo’s directives regarding her method.
I think most people are aware of said method, even if (like me, until last week) they’ve never read the book and largely absorbed it through osmosis: take all your possessions in a given category (clothing, books, documents, miscellany), pile them up in one place, and then choose to keep the ones you enjoy owning and discard the ones you feel obligated to own. That’s it, really.
Kondo engages in a fair amount of anthropomorphizing here, but this didn’t grate on me the way it has some, perhaps because I can see how imagining that obligated-to-keep possessions are sad that you only own them because you feel obligated could be a useful tool to help people—especially hoarders, who often conflate items and emotions—give them up. And if you don’t care to anthropomorphize, it’s easy enough to replace Kondo’s “spark joy” and “sad it’s not fulfilling its purpose “ with “I like this thing a lot” and “I feel like I should keep this but don’t like it” to achieve the same end state.
The book could have done with some localization: Japanese closets are different than those in the West; kitchens are laid out differently; standard book sizes are different, even trash bags are different. But at the end of the day, much of what Kondo recommends is fairly similar—if a bit more extreme—to things I already do that keep my space neat, so I guess that puts me more in the pro-KonMari camp than not.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Midnight Queen – Sylvia Izzo Hunter
I’ve finished the prologue and so far things are promising.
Tales from Earthsea – Ursala K. LeGuin
I’m on track to have this one wrapped up by next week.
Beauty – Robin McKinley
This is, hands down, one of my favorite books.
The Mountains Sing – Nguyen Phan Que Mai
I’m enjoying, although not enthralled by, this one.
What I'm Reading Next
This week an auto tune-up entailed an out-of-state trip to a neighborhood with a Book Barn in the vicinity. There, I picked up Laura Eve’s The Graces, Sylvia Izzo Hunter’s The Midnight Queen, and C.M. Waggoner’s Unnatural Magic. I also received an ARC of Valerie Miner's Bread and Salt.
これで以上です。
Rat Queens vol. 2 – Ed Brisson, Roc Upchurch, and Kurtis Wiebe
This volume contains plenty of snarkiness and mayhem, but also a healthy dose of worldbuilding, good use of secondary characters, and in particular, meaty expansions of three of the protagonists’ backstories. (And oh my, I loved the scenes with Violet and Hannah and their respective mothers.) A few scene transitions felt a little abrupt, but overall, this volume continued to build on the strengths of the first.
The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
I knew going in that many people have strong, polarized reactions to this book. A quarter of those boil down to “How dare a woman engage in self-promotion!” and can be immediately dismissed. Ditto for objections to Kondo on religious grounds. Many more people seem to dislike to Kondo’s prescriptive tone, but this didn’t bother me: it’s how Japanese self-help texts sound, whether they’re explaining how to shape your eyebrows or play a better round of golf. Maybe because I knew how all this would read in the original Japanese, it struck me as peppy and optimistic in a way it didn’t for some other readers. At any rate, I didn’t feel either castigated or bound by Kondo’s directives regarding her method.
I think most people are aware of said method, even if (like me, until last week) they’ve never read the book and largely absorbed it through osmosis: take all your possessions in a given category (clothing, books, documents, miscellany), pile them up in one place, and then choose to keep the ones you enjoy owning and discard the ones you feel obligated to own. That’s it, really.
Kondo engages in a fair amount of anthropomorphizing here, but this didn’t grate on me the way it has some, perhaps because I can see how imagining that obligated-to-keep possessions are sad that you only own them because you feel obligated could be a useful tool to help people—especially hoarders, who often conflate items and emotions—give them up. And if you don’t care to anthropomorphize, it’s easy enough to replace Kondo’s “spark joy” and “sad it’s not fulfilling its purpose “ with “I like this thing a lot” and “I feel like I should keep this but don’t like it” to achieve the same end state.
The book could have done with some localization: Japanese closets are different than those in the West; kitchens are laid out differently; standard book sizes are different, even trash bags are different. But at the end of the day, much of what Kondo recommends is fairly similar—if a bit more extreme—to things I already do that keep my space neat, so I guess that puts me more in the pro-KonMari camp than not.
What I Am Currently Reading
The Midnight Queen – Sylvia Izzo Hunter
I’ve finished the prologue and so far things are promising.
Tales from Earthsea – Ursala K. LeGuin
I’m on track to have this one wrapped up by next week.
Beauty – Robin McKinley
This is, hands down, one of my favorite books.
The Mountains Sing – Nguyen Phan Que Mai
I’m enjoying, although not enthralled by, this one.
What I'm Reading Next
This week an auto tune-up entailed an out-of-state trip to a neighborhood with a Book Barn in the vicinity. There, I picked up Laura Eve’s The Graces, Sylvia Izzo Hunter’s The Midnight Queen, and C.M. Waggoner’s Unnatural Magic. I also received an ARC of Valerie Miner's Bread and Salt.
これで以上です。
From:
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Tales from Earthsea – Ursala K. LeGuin
I've been meaning to revisit these!
Beauty – Robin McKinley
This is, hands down, one of my favorite books.
Me too! How many times have you read it? I haven't read it in a few years, but I am such a McKinley fan.
From:
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Yes. It's alarmingly vitriolic and can now say having read the book that I don't see how on earth it's warranted. I wonder, though, if it has something to do with betrayed expectations. So much American entertainment is predicated on sparking audience outrage, and I wonder if some of her readers feel let down or unfulfilled because she genuinely wants to help people, without mocking them for their failings first.
I have a complicated relationship with Earthsea, but I finished this book this morning and found it the best of all of them.
And Beauty!! I've read it too many times to count. Everything about it is just so good--the prose, the character growth and plot development...I just love it to pieces. And I have to consciously let time elapse between each reading, so that some of it can be new to me again when I next pick it up. :D
From:
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This is an absolutely fascinating take. I hadn't considered that before, but I think you may be on to something.