Last reading roundup for September
Sep. 28th, 2020 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This is just a brief post to log the final handful of books I've read in September, but not written about elsewhere. One is a reread, one is a long-awaited follow-up to one of my favourite books of 2019, and the third is a nonfiction book which I suspect will make me grumpy.
The reread is Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones's beloved retelling of the Tam Lin (and to a certain extent, Thomas the Rhymer) folk tales. I adore book the original tales, I adore most Diana Wynne Jones books I've read, but this one didn't work for me the first time I tried it. I was irritated with myself for not enjoying it, I know a lot of my friends absolutely adore this book, and so I reread it mainly to check that I hadn't missed anything, and that my original impression was correct. I'm sad to say that it still mostly didn't work. I loved the setting of twentieth-century suburban England, I thought the portrait of a family trying to work through an acrimonious divorce was brilliantly done, and I adored the grandmother character ... and yet the final reveal at the end still remains such a huge squick for me that it taints everything that comes before it. (Those who've read this book will know what I mean; those who haven't feel free to ask me about it in the comments.)
The follow-up is Roshani Chokshi's The Silvered Serpents, which continues the adventures of her pack of damaged, dangerous, magical teenage treasure hunters in Belle Époque Paris. Like The Gilded Wolves before it, the book is both a fabulously twisty heist novel, and a deftly written condemnation of the iniquities of empire — the damage colonisation does to both the colonisers and colonised. The book never lets readers forget that the glittering beauty of this opulent period of European history is built on exploitation and bones. The quintet of characters at the heart of this series each represent (in terms of both their identities and experiences) the interplay of privileged colonising empires, and the peoples such empires exploited and harmed. None of this is heavy handed — but it's impossible to miss. Like all the best middle novels in trilogies, The Silvered Serpents ends on a cliffhanger, with multiple questions unanswered (and asking new questions of its own). I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the concluding novel.
The nonfiction work is something I've just picked up, Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women, which looks at the ways women (or rather all those assigned female at birth) have been systematically excluded from providing data that underpins medical research, and justifies everything from the design of safety features in cars to the temperature settings in offices. I was aware of a lot of this beforehand (I knew that a lot of clinical trials, for example, will automatically exclude anyone who has the potential to become pregnant; there are similar problems in medicine with racial biases — most dermatalogical textbooks give examples of what a skin condition would look like on white skin, meaning most healthcare professionals aren't trained to detect such conditions on darker skin), but I think there is value in bringing all this evidence together, to demonstrate the patterns it forms, and the damage that has been done in consequence.
Have any of you read interesting books in September?
The reread is Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones's beloved retelling of the Tam Lin (and to a certain extent, Thomas the Rhymer) folk tales. I adore book the original tales, I adore most Diana Wynne Jones books I've read, but this one didn't work for me the first time I tried it. I was irritated with myself for not enjoying it, I know a lot of my friends absolutely adore this book, and so I reread it mainly to check that I hadn't missed anything, and that my original impression was correct. I'm sad to say that it still mostly didn't work. I loved the setting of twentieth-century suburban England, I thought the portrait of a family trying to work through an acrimonious divorce was brilliantly done, and I adored the grandmother character ... and yet the final reveal at the end still remains such a huge squick for me that it taints everything that comes before it. (Those who've read this book will know what I mean; those who haven't feel free to ask me about it in the comments.)
The follow-up is Roshani Chokshi's The Silvered Serpents, which continues the adventures of her pack of damaged, dangerous, magical teenage treasure hunters in Belle Époque Paris. Like The Gilded Wolves before it, the book is both a fabulously twisty heist novel, and a deftly written condemnation of the iniquities of empire — the damage colonisation does to both the colonisers and colonised. The book never lets readers forget that the glittering beauty of this opulent period of European history is built on exploitation and bones. The quintet of characters at the heart of this series each represent (in terms of both their identities and experiences) the interplay of privileged colonising empires, and the peoples such empires exploited and harmed. None of this is heavy handed — but it's impossible to miss. Like all the best middle novels in trilogies, The Silvered Serpents ends on a cliffhanger, with multiple questions unanswered (and asking new questions of its own). I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the concluding novel.
The nonfiction work is something I've just picked up, Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women, which looks at the ways women (or rather all those assigned female at birth) have been systematically excluded from providing data that underpins medical research, and justifies everything from the design of safety features in cars to the temperature settings in offices. I was aware of a lot of this beforehand (I knew that a lot of clinical trials, for example, will automatically exclude anyone who has the potential to become pregnant; there are similar problems in medicine with racial biases — most dermatalogical textbooks give examples of what a skin condition would look like on white skin, meaning most healthcare professionals aren't trained to detect such conditions on darker skin), but I think there is value in bringing all this evidence together, to demonstrate the patterns it forms, and the damage that has been done in consequence.
Have any of you read interesting books in September?
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Date: 2020-09-28 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 06:22 pm (UTC)Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer — the folk tales — are pretty messed up, dark and creepy, so the book certainly is no darker than its source material. I don't mind dark children's fiction (and I don't think it's something that children need to be protected from; I think they need interested and engaged parents/caregivers who give them a sense of safety so that the children feel comfortable discussing things that unnerved them in fiction with their parents, should they require it), and my issues with the book don't really lie in its darkness. It's just never going to work for me, and I'm glad to have confirmed that on the reread.