problematic Wednesday reading
Mar. 13th, 2013 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinian• What are you currently reading?
Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star, which seems to be modern-day YA about an American girl in boarding school in London, plus supernatural Jack the Ripper recurrence. Okay. So far, so good: cute adjustment to different culture, none of the gross thriller-mystery tricks of killer POV or "let's make you care about the victim for five pages."
• What did you recently finish reading?
Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child trilogy. It was done, so I wanted to see how it turned out. It is wall-to-wall magic-geeking and natural (magical) history of plants and animals (and even mentions magical fungi!), which means that in a world where its foundational premise didn't link directly to the actual genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of their names for much of the continent around me, I would have loved these books. There are other flaws, mostly the unreasonable-seeming alternate history, but I could have gotten past all that if I hadn't been wincing every single time she called the Mississippi the Mammoth River. The magic and naturalism are pretty great if you can bring yourself to read it, but those are my biggest narrative kinks (plus there were lesbians in the last book) and I still had a hard time.
Leia Weathington's The Legend of Bold Riley is pretty comics about a lesbian adventurer from a heavily Hinduism-inspired culture. The blue, goat-herding god has a different name, though, so clearly there was no need to worry about cultural appropriation. Coming so soon on the heels of Quvenzhané Wallis' name issues around the Oscars, the thoughtless and dubiously consensual (teacher-child power dynamic) nicknaming of Rilavashana to Riley was interesting. I liked her travels, in which she was sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, and the women that she met.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
Something I don't have any problems with? This seems unlikely. Scalzi's Redshirts?
Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star, which seems to be modern-day YA about an American girl in boarding school in London, plus supernatural Jack the Ripper recurrence. Okay. So far, so good: cute adjustment to different culture, none of the gross thriller-mystery tricks of killer POV or "let's make you care about the victim for five pages."
• What did you recently finish reading?
Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child trilogy. It was done, so I wanted to see how it turned out. It is wall-to-wall magic-geeking and natural (magical) history of plants and animals (and even mentions magical fungi!), which means that in a world where its foundational premise didn't link directly to the actual genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of their names for much of the continent around me, I would have loved these books. There are other flaws, mostly the unreasonable-seeming alternate history, but I could have gotten past all that if I hadn't been wincing every single time she called the Mississippi the Mammoth River. The magic and naturalism are pretty great if you can bring yourself to read it, but those are my biggest narrative kinks (plus there were lesbians in the last book) and I still had a hard time.
Leia Weathington's The Legend of Bold Riley is pretty comics about a lesbian adventurer from a heavily Hinduism-inspired culture. The blue, goat-herding god has a different name, though, so clearly there was no need to worry about cultural appropriation. Coming so soon on the heels of Quvenzhané Wallis' name issues around the Oscars, the thoughtless and dubiously consensual (teacher-child power dynamic) nicknaming of Rilavashana to Riley was interesting. I liked her travels, in which she was sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, and the women that she met.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
Something I don't have any problems with? This seems unlikely. Scalzi's Redshirts?
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Date: 2013-03-13 07:01 pm (UTC)