2019-10-03

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2019-10-03 09:47 am

reading wednesday on thursday

 I mean it's thursday in Loughborough, where I still am till tomorrow. I had planned to visit people this trip--Loughborough is as close to Manchester as Santa Cruz is to an Francisco, closer to Leicester than Santa Cruz is to San Jose, after all--but though I kind of knew these distances mean different things in the UK from what they do in the US, a five hour bus trip from Manchester to Leicester with a mandatory hour-long layover in Birmingham taught me the reality of it. Seriously, that was the fastest I could get to Loughborough--the direct bus is six hours.

So anyway, the real point of this post is: three years after chemotherapy, I am finally a real book reader again. It's really nice to plow through book after book, not having to discard them all after a few pages of inability to get stuck in properly.  Some of this is time, but some is changing the format. I don't believe there is any magic to ebooks and audiobooks on the phone--I'm now reading paper books with as much enjoyment and efficacy as ever--I think it's the change itself that's doing it for me. Well, there is one thing. Listening to audiobooks can be done while I'm doing handwork or housework, so that breaks through the physical restlessness that I sometimes get. 

Another advantage to electronics is the library app. The online selection of the northern California library system is not great in the sff adult line, and skews heavily to old pewpew space opera and YA series, but I've found plenty to read and especially, plenty to put holds on. The problem with holds is that they tend to all come in at once so I have to return some unread and join the sometimes excruciatingly long queue again. So I'm learning not to fall for the temptation of putting everything on a hold that is attractive with a long waiting list. I'm mostly limiting my browsing to available-now books.

Which all means I'm largely reading out of genre, which is not a problem in itself, but I do notice very different story telling expectations for these books. All that stuff about how plots have to have a certain rhythm, how they have to hit beats in the right way, have certain climaxes, certain kinds of resolutions? Those are not universal rules. (I know, we all knew this. But there are different kinds of knowing: see above about distances in the US and the UK). Of course, if you read older sff books--even 15, 20 years older--you will see those rules less rigidly adhered to anyway.

Just food for thought. I'm doing some different things to try to reclaim my writing monster too, we'll see what happens there. Anyway, what I read and listened to in September:

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev, a rich people romance. Okayish.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See, which has a lot of interesting stuff in it...but glorifies getting rich in modern China.



Swing Time by Zadie Smith: a really fine book, but one that left me screaming to know what happened next.

The Sonnet Lover, a mysteryish thing by Carol Goodman, which I finished out of pique--I hated everyone and everything in it.

The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland, which has its twee and sentimental aspects, but which I liked a lot despite massive reservations because I trusted its local-ethnography aspects.

And genre: the entire Machineries of Empire trilogy by Yoon Ha Lee.

That's... like 2 books a week, and I remember substantial parts of all of them and have opinions. This is a definite improvement. 5 by women, half by POC, and two that explore class in an interesting way (Swing Time and Lost for Words). Tea Girl has stuff about class, but it's "rich people are good, and poor people who are good get rich eventually."