Book List

[lettered]

I want to keep a list of all the books I have read this year, in case I ever get time to review them (unlikely).

Finished
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
The Leisure Seeker - Michael Zadoorian
Man In The High Castle - Philip K. Dick
Love In Infant Monkeys - Lydia Millet
Demon's Covenant - Sarah Rees Brennan
Leviathan - Scott Westerfield
Reading Lolita In Tehran - Azar Nafisi

In progress
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
Locksley - Nicholas Chase
At The Water's Edge - Carl Zimmer

Next Up
Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier
Harold and the Pursuit of Happiness -
The Girl Who Played Go

On Hiatus
Cosmos - Carl Sagan

I don't know how it can possibly be that I've only finished five books so far this year. Possibly all the fanfic . . . But Daniel Deronda should count as six!

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

I found Reading Lolita in Tehran fascinating and confusing. Western culture has colonized almost every corner of the world, and in so many places that's a bad thing, a damaging thing. And here are these women desiring it and fighting for it, as a path to empowerment. For them, the colonizers are the extremist men of their own country, and the disputed territory their own female bodies and minds. A very twisty problem. Can't wait to hear your reaction.

It's also hooking up with thoughts I've been having about fandom as post-colonial space. I.e., how do you (we, women) write about ourselves and things we care about when all the words we have come preloaded with meanings/contexts/allusions/assumptions developed in and by the kyriarchy? How, for eg., can one write a story about robots without, also and perforce, writing about Issac bloody Asimov?

[lettered]

Oh, so I learned a new word reading your comment (kyriarchy). That's nice.

I hadn't thought about it quite in terms of colonization, but yeah, that problem is difficult and interests me. There are rights some people (myself included, most the time) see as universal and so we seek to give those rights on others, when really what we're doing is imposing our culture onto others, saying our culture is better and right. And yet there are those who would choose our culture and the rights that come with it over their own. And I think they have a right to choose. But is that right to choose also something I'm imposing?

fandom as post-colonial space

Isn't anyone who is writing or trying to express themselves using words that come preloaded? Unless it's someone at the top of the kyriarchy trying to express ideas that are perfectly in sync with the kyriarchy it's going to be a problem. Even in that case, I think the individual is oppressed by canon (by which I mean all literature. And art. And forms of expression, basically). We most of us do have singular individual things to say, and it is difficult to differentiate that singularity from the cacophony that has come before. I'm not sure my being a woman makes that particular difficulty . . . more difficult.