What Am I Reading...Thursday - 23 April

My energy is at its lowest point on Wednesdays with this schedule and so I post Wednesday's meme on Thursday.

What I Just Finished Reading

Kushiel’s Dart – Jacqueline Carey
It’s been awhile since I’ve had such a complicated reaction to a book. Had Kushiel’s Dart been about a femdom ferreting out her clients’ dark political schemes with her talents, I would have been 100 percent on board. But instead it’s about a woman joyfully submitting to sexual dominance to ferret out said secrets, and this, alas, is Not My Thing.

And without the narrative hitting the right kinks, it’s hard to overlook all the weaknesses in the novel’s worldbuilding.( Read more... )

A Liberated Mind – Steven Hayes
Hayes is the “originator” (his term) of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. ACT uses six pivots—defusion, perspective-taking, acceptance, presence (i.e., mindfulness), values, and action—to improve a person’s psychological flexibility in the face of adversity. Hayes is deeply enthusiastic about ACT—sometimes to a fault—but there’s a lot to be said for many elements of its approach. Of A Liberated Mind’s three sections, the first, which explains the mental roadblocks and misapprehensions that lead to rumination, self-condemnation, and similar mental ruts; and the second, which discusses the six pivots in detail, are the strongest. The third section is ostensibly about applying ACT to various facets of life (e.g. spirituality, work, addiction) but reads more like an extended infomercial for the approach.

ACT owes a lot to other methods for taming the mind, such as CBT, or Zen or metta meditation, and to be honest, the latter work far better for me because I find much of the ACT approach twee (e.g. imagine your difficult thoughts as leaves floating away on a stream, tell yourself “I’m incapable of walking around this room” while walking around the room, write your fears on notecards and carry them with you throughout the day). But my guess is those methods will probably work for people who find other methods too austere or abstract, and as the principles underpinning them all are the same, it can't hurt to have ACT in the arsenal alongside the other methodologies.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Goblin Emperor – Katherine Addison
For reasons.

The Magpie Lord – KJ Charles
Six chapters in, this is shaping up to be exactly the sort of Victorian potboiler pulp romance novel I need right now.

The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern
Last week I barely got through a chapter; this week I read a third of the book in a sitting. There are definitely days when I’m more in the mood for this novel than others.

おまけのこ – 畠中 恵 (Omake no Ko – Hatakenaka Megumi)
To recap: protagonist Ohina wears freakishly heavy makeup despite being mocked because she’s afraid to go out in public without it. Through a comic twist of events, she unwittingly compels a byobunozoki to talk her through the problem as an ad hoc therapist. His appeals to logic fall on deaf ears, but he’s able to convince Ohina to give up the makeup by showing her the thousands of empty cosmetic wrappers (the chapter’s eponymous tataugami) her grandparents have collected from her trash, dated, and saved every day, for years after she applies her makeup each morning. Oh, my grandparents love me and worry about my problem, a chastised Ohina thinks upon seeing the mountains of carefully hoarded wrappers. Maybe tomorrow I can go out without my makeup on.

But. The loving, worrying grandparents' reaction to their granddaughter’s problem was to carefully collect, date, and save her trash—for years—instead of, maybe, you know, talking to her. Because, of course, Japan.

We shall see what this week’s chapter brings.


What I'm Reading Next
I’ve acquired the first several novels of Terri Winding’s Borderlands series, as well as the last three Murderbot novellas courtesy of Tor.

これで以上です。