booklog 2: the word limitations are rather shorter than I hoped

[rushthatspeaks]

Books

June
56. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Taylor Branch. This is the first book of Branch's trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, the kind of books about which people always use the word 'monumental' because there is nothing else that can adequately express the sheer length and weight of it all. It is clearly popular history; it is clearly popular history written by a white man and with a white audience in mind. I would have liked more footnotes, but the endnotes are there. He did the research, and the facts seem solid. For fact, anecdote, tracking of general trends, and simple reminder of how different things were; for identification of factions, descriptions of people who may have been overlooked in other sources, and decided attempts not to canonize or demonize those history has passed verdicts on; in short, for historiography, this is a very fine book. If you are looking for biographies, for primary sources, for people involved in their own words, or for a writer who is not profoundly in love with Kennedy (though to be fair he knows and is trying to work against it), this is not your book. I will probably read the other two, as I have a far less clear grip on the sequence of events in those years than I would like.
57. The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978. I think Sylvia Townsend Warner may write the most truly enjoyable letters I have ever met. It is the sort of thing where you want to quote a bit, to prove the point, or read a bit aloud to someone in the room, and you have to stop because you would read the whole book. She writes the only volumes of letters I would consider reading aloud for pleasure. Of course she claims she is not a patch on Mme. de Sevigny, and has told me strictly that after I am fifty I may read the journals of Goncourt. And William Maxwell is a fine conversational companion. It is a pleasure to read writers working together, the dip and swerve of things left unsaid, the undercurrent of desperate joy.
58. Ten Things I Hate About Me, Randa Abdel-Fatteh. 50books_poc #15. This is not a good book. It is very telling not showing, and the prose is just wince-worthy, and and and. But it is rather compulsively readable, because I can't think of the last time I read a book about a Lebanese-Muslim Australian schoolgirl who is passing for Caucasian but wants to learn to publicly love and value her own culture and beliefs. I enjoyed it.
59. Delicious, Sherry Thomas. 50books_poc #16. Better than average romance I suspect I was in the wrong mood for. Good food porn. Believably not-twenty couple. Just didn't quite click with me for some reason.
60. Graceling, Kristin Cashore. Surprisingly good compulsively more-ish first novel that reminds me of Tamora Pierce. Everything about this, from plot to prose, is just that little bit better than one expects. Does not shake my belief that Flora's Dare won the Norton because sometimes the universe is just, but in a year without the Wilce I would cheerfully heap this with awards; it's a kind of thing I've seen before, but a good job of it. There had better be a sequel as the first third of the book beautifully sets up some political things that haven't been exploited yet.
61. Father's Arcane Daughter, E.L. Konigsburg. Minor Konigsburg I turn out not to have been sorry to have missed when I was younger. I mean it's fine, it's Konigsburg, there's just less there than usual.
62. The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books, Eleanor Cameron. There is, it turns out, a reason I had not read this in my devouring of whatever criticism I could find on childrens' books and fairy tales when I was oh fifteen or so. This would be because the gist of the book is 'what Tolkien SAID', with a reverential bow and gesture; also mentioning how very much she agrees with several other noted critics. As a book, this is mostly an excuse to talk about how much she likes various authors whom one ought to read. Well, probably one ought to read them, but. Oh, I don't know, it feels as though it isn't fair to be rough on a novelist whose heart is clearly in the right place just because her nonfiction is not struck with the divine fire. It's that she's talking about said divine fire, though, and the only way she can get at it is by quoting everyone else on the planet, it won't come through in her own words. I do blame her for that. Ah well, she quoted Isak Dinesen which reminds me to go back to reading Isak Dinesen.
63. Niccolo Rising, Dorothy Dunnett. Everyone says the Niccolo books are even more abstruse, confusing, complex, and hard to get into than the Lymond books. I am confused by this as I found this a much easier read than any of the Lymond books. As is usual for Dunnett, this is about the interplay of class, intelligence, power, and money, and the protagonist is the smartest person in Europe; but the emotions are a lot clearer, I don't want to throw things at her sex scenes quite so much, and her bubbling humor expresses itself in a five-hundred-page running gag about an ostrich that is really magnificent. If they can make one anime about Renaissance currency speculation (Spice and Wolf), can they not make me an anime of this?

August

64. The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan
65. The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson
66. The True Meaning of Smekday, Adam Rex

Graphic Works

June
63-65. Fullmetal Alchemist v.16-18, Hiromu Arakawa. Oh hai worldbuilding I like you! Also wow, do the women of this series kick ass and take names. I am delighted. Except panda girl can still go away for all of me.
66. Pluto v.3, Naoki Urasawa. There are points in this volume where I sat there flipping the page two or three times in a row just marveling at the sheer excellence of the worldbuilding reveal. This is the best graphic sf going. Except maybe the rest of Urasawa. He is a worthy heir to Tezuka.
67. The Eternal Smile, Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. 50books_poc #17. I really disliked this. It was boring, all three stories were predictable, the moral messages were in my opinion questionable, and I literally cannot remember the third story because it was just that forgettable. I am sad, I wanted this to be good.
68. Nightschool v.1, Svetlana Chmakova. Followup to Dramacon is more ambitious, has better art, more interesting paneling, clearly an attempt at a longer sustained storyline; this however does not help with the fact that in the absence of otaku injokes it becomes obvious that there is no characterization there. I may keep reading this to see if it improves as clearly she is trying to.
69. Petshop of Horrors: Tokyo v.4, Matsuri Akino. Not the best volume of Petshop, and not helped by apparently not being proofread. Leon > the new guy and that is all there is to it. Sigh.
70. Mushishi v.7, Yuki Urushibara. Oh, this is lovely. Especially 'The Ragged Road'. Tanyuu! Eeee! I am so happy to have more Tanyuu! I am trying to resist the urge to write fic. It is a difficult thing to resist.
71. Silver Diamond v.4, Shiho Sugiura. Not as flagrantly original as the last three volumes, but I like these people and it is nice to see the plot maybe starting to get somewhere.

July-ish

72. Skim, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. 50books_poc #18.

Films

June

Up, Boston Common, with Ruth. I cannot think of another film I have cried so much during. I mean that. I burst into tears about five minutes from the start and just kept going, to the point where sometimes it was difficult to see the rest of the movie through smeary glasses. It is a good thing that by coincidence Ruth was the person I saw it with, as otherwise it would have been absolutely intolerable and I might have had to leave. In other news, this is a visually amazing, occasionally funny, utterly lunatic triumph of a film from Pixar which absolutely merits the comparisons I have seen in reviews to Miyazaki. It has taken the unusual path of deciding to earn its uplifting and gorgeous images by grounding them securely in unbearable pain. It works. If I have any caveat about the film, I might have liked more women.

Azur & Azmar, the Brattle, with Ruth and Thrud. First half of a double feature. I had been wanting to see this for literally two years now and had given up all hope of it coming theatrically somewhere I could see it. Yay Brattle. The latest from the Moroccan animator Michel Ocelot is, as I had expected, a visually gorgeous fantasy devoted to showing things people don't put in animated movies, with strong and interesting women and a cast who are mostly from Africa. This one does interesting things with the fact that one of the major characters doesn't speak Arabic very well; the movie is meant to be in French and Arabic, so you understand whichever you understand. I am not sure I am happy with the English having been dubbed in place the French instead of the Arabic as I think it may unbalance the viewpoint character emphasis. It was correct to leave one of them undubbed and in fact Ocelot had to sue to make them do it. There is also a scarlet lion with blue claws, and a very wise and wonderful princess, and the Queen of the Djinn, and people who climb trees because the trees are there to be climbed, and a black cat, and bravery beyond the lot of mere mortals, and a really amazing medieval French hat. And so on.

Sita Sings the Blues, the Brattle, with Ruth. Second half of a double feature. There has been controversy of several different sorts around this movie, so I was glad of the double feature, as it means that in some senses I was not actually paying for the ticket. Or am I glad of it? For I am very firmly on Nina Paley's side in the copyright disputes. Short version: this is an animated film about parts of the Ramayana, in which Sita sings various jazz recordings by a twenties singer called Annette Hanshaw. Nina Paley, the director and animator, checked to make sure that the Hanshaw was out of copyright before making the movie. After she had made the movie, a loophole popped up to say that either the songs were out of copyright but these particular recordings weren't, or vice versa, I can't remember which, and Hanshaw's heirs asked for half a million dollars which is ludicrous, and the whole thing went to court, where it lurks. Paley has gotten round this by putting the film under Creative Commons and distributing it free, but honestly. Also, in a completely different direction, about half the people from India I know who have seen the film loved it, and the other half say that it is offensive and appropriative because Sita is too much of a doormat and Rama walks all over her and how dare a white filmmaker come through and have Sita be like this and draw explicit personal analogies to her own relationship problems. Upon seeing the film, I concluded that I do not have enough information. There is no way for me to tell whether this is offensive. I don't have the cultural context of what people think about the Ramayana and how it might or might not be offensive for it to be interpreted. This film is visually wildly inventive, spectacularly pyrotechnically inventive, and the fact that it is possible for one person to animate it by herself, as Paley in fact did, is amazing and says wonderful things about the upcoming era of cinema. The cartoons are occasionally cute and funny. I turn out not to like Annette Hanshaw. Both Sita and Nina, the animated version of the animator, are in fact doormats. The film did not cohere for me into a coherent artistic whole. I really liked the bits in which some people tried to sit around and retell the Ramayana from memory. And that is about all I can say.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I believe Kristin Cashore would qualify as a POC?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Oh, really? She doesn't seem to say anything about it on her blog.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Further Googling sayeth not.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Or at any rate it is not mentioned on the internet.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

What I was basing this on was someone else's review of Graceling that listed it under 50BooksPOC, but I can't remember whose it was and so can't check, so they were probably wrong and I am probably wrong. Sorry.

[ionescribens.livejournal.com]

Nope. Met her at Sirens, middle class white person (of great grace and charm).

[larryhammer]

Chashore's next book, not a direct sequel but set in the same world, is coming out later this year. It is the book I am most anticipating aside from the sequel to The Hunger Games.

(Panda-girl's moment of plot necessity and of awesomeness are in still later chapters, just recently serialized. Now that I think about it, in that moment of awesome, the panda is almost completely absent.)

---L.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I really need to read The Hunger Games.

Thank you for the news on the Cashore! It makes me happy.

I am trying to decide whether to read FMA in scanlation or sit about waiting.

[larryhammer]

Starting around when we leave the mountain fortress and start heading all downhill from here towards the Big Final Confrontation Of DOOM (so far extending several volumes with More To Come, as there's a lot of threads to wrap up) I was unable to hold back on reading the current scans. I manage save them up a volume's-worth at a time -- and just read the latest lump this weekend.

The Hunger Games is even better than I expected, given the praise it's gotten. And fewer craft bobbles than Graceling, which really is a first novel.

---L.

[oyceter]

Oh! I do not know how I managed to miss your write up of Azur & Azmar! I actually bought the DVD in Taiwan with Chinese subs b/c I was so annoyed at not being able to find it here. And of course they release it soon after that...

I love the animation, even the computer graphic-ness of some of it, but was bugged by some of the racial undertones. And I adore the princess.