What Am I Reading Wednesday - July 24

What I Just Finished Reading

Boys Will Be Boys – Clementine Ford
Ford's excoriation of how Western, English-speaking culture often encourages or looks the other way when men equate violence and aggression with "manhood" often veers into battle cry territory, but it’s well warranted (although I sometimes wanted Ford to make her point and let the matter sit without rephrasing it two or three more times). Much of the content is challenging because Ford does not flinch away from what it looks like when this trainwreck plays out, particularly from the consequences for women or men who don't ascribe to this narrow definition of masculinity. Her withering, spot-on humor helps make these passages bearable.

The entire volume is good, but the first two and final three chapters are the volume's crown jewels. Consider this passage, from a section on male comedians' insistence on the "humor" of rape jokes:

Rape is in the room.

It's there with the survivors, but it's also in the room with the people present who've perpetrated it. Because make no mistake, they're there too. They're watching and listening and slapping their knees in spontaneous hilarity, and they're observing all the people around them who are doing exactly the same thing. You think rapists don't go and see comedians? Of course they do. And every time a rapist listens to a roomful of people laugh about something they've done they receive the reassuring message that they're not really so bad. That other people think like them. That other people have done the things they've done. That this is what all men are really like and, besides, if it were that big a deal, why would everyone find it so funny.

I could go on about all the other passages, on other topics, where Ford's verbal blades are as pointed and lethal as this, but that would just belabor the point. This is a challenging and thought provoking book, and well worth a read.

Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann
This excellent book made my skin crawl—and I was already familiar with the United States’ reprehensible treatment of Native Americans through the mid-20th century. What Gann describes, however, in this retelling of white politicians and businessmen's treatment of the Osage nation once oil was discovered on tribal lands in the 1920s, goes far beyond anything I’d previously encountered. Grrann is an excellent writer; his prose is evocative and makes it easy to keep track of the many key players and their relationships to one another. But what he describes is so evil, and the miscarriages of justice so dire, that reading his account of it did a real number on my psyche. I read this book in under a day and spent the next four nights consumed with nightmares. This book is incredibly good and absolutely worth reading; I’m just not sure I have the stomach to do so a second time.

Under the Pendulum Sun – Jeannette Ng
This book devoured me, and I could not put it down. I was ambivalent during the first chapter, in which Ng tried for but did not quite hit an 18th century narrative tone. But once the protagonist journeyed to faeryland? Oh my.

To me, the Fae and their realm are about alienation, and finally getting what you want only to discover it’s meaningless to you. Everything in Faery—its intoxicating beauty, its intoxicating music and dancing, its intoxicating food and drink—seems like it should be the ideal human experience, but in reality? The beauty masks malice, and coldness, and the absence of empathy or compassion. The music and dancing are delightful, but they only end once everyone you know has been dead for a century. The food may be the most delicious you’ve ever tasted, but eat it and you can never leave. Even your own beloved child might be a soulless simulacrum.

Ng captures this contradiction perfectly. She is a master at evoking the sense of walls closing in, dread, suffocation. And she’s able to sustain this tension throughout the entirety of the book. Ng calls her Faery Arcadia, and it rivals anything by Mirrlees or Clarke. Under the Pendulum Sun opens with the protagonist, Kathy, preparing to travel there to find her missionary brother, Laon, who's gone incommunicado. I had two theories about the plot. ( Here Be Spoilers )

TL;DR: Perhaps the best piece of fiction I’ve read this year. So good. Read it.


What I Am Currently Reading

All The Birds in the Sky – Charlie Jane Anders
There is so much potential in this book, but in surrounding her complex tweenage protagonists with a cast of siblings, classmates, parents, and other authority figures so nasty and inept it's cartoonish, Anders largely wastes it. I suppose lot of people find these martyr/persecution complex storylines compelling; I don’t.

Intermediate Korean – Andrew Sangpil Byon
I’ve made it through chapter 13.

A Companion to Wolves – Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear
This rather weirdly reminds me of an HP fanfic I wrote I wrote in ‘02, but I’m enjoying it all the same.

Outrages – Naomi Wolf
So, yes. Wolf’s conclusions about the “birth” of homophobia in 1850s Britain are too pat by far, but she does do a good job of synthesizing historical events.

What I'm Reading Next
My two acquisitions this week were Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man and A Necessary Evil, which thankfully do not count against my TBR pile because I have already read them. I just, for reasons, want to read them again.

これで以上です。