Oh, the pressure of a name
Dec. 18th, 2022 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12The snow and frost have stuck around since last week, but I don't think they'll linger much longer — it's been drizzling all weekend, and it's meant to be 13 degrees tomorrow. I'm not too disappointed — this has been the sort of winter I've wanted for years, but I don't think our skyrocketing energy costs can take much more of it.
In spite of growing up in a warm country where the sight of even a few flakes of snow is a cause for extensive photographic documentation, I'm very good at cold weather: I made mulled wine, and Matthias and I are snuggled up in the living room, drinking the wine and eating panettone. Everything is slow and warm and relaxing. I have ventured out to go swimming this morning (and on Thursday and Friday), but beyond that, neither of us have left the house.
I've spent the past three days doing all the kinds of things I enjoy: a mixture of reading (of which more below), writing (Yuletide fic finished and posted, two more treats posted, and a third treat about halfway done, plus some stuff for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees), yoga and cooking. I'd really like to get at least one more Yuletide treat done in the next couple of days — the prompts this year are fantastic, and I'm absolutely buzzing with ideas. But we'll see — it depends on available time.
The two books I've read this weekend couldn't be more different. The first, Our Violent Ends (Chloe Gong) is the sequel in a YA fantasy duology retelling Romeo and Juliet in a 1920s Shanghai in which the star-crossed lovers are heirs of rival criminal gangs. It's competently done, with a great sense of place and a fun array of secondary characters.
The second book, Either/Or (Elif Batuman) is something I have to read in small doses — not because it's bad, but because it's so close to the bone that it quickly becomes too much to bear. It's a follow up to her previous novel, The Idiot, and the pair of books are semi-autobiographical novels about a Turkish-American undergraduate student at Harvard in the 1990s, who falls in love with Russian literature and navigates various romantic trials and tribulations with a mixture of both wry Gen-X humour and painful overidentification with every work of literature the narrator encounters. I'm a cusp millennial, not a Gen-Xer, I was an undergraduate in Australia in the early 2000s, not at Harvard in the mid-90s, and I studied medieval Irish literature, not 19th-century Russian novels, but nevertheless reading Either/Or was very much the agonising pain of being known, and not much liking it. It brought those terrible years of undergraduate studies crashing back: the self-absorption, the obsessive and unavoidable tendency to engage with every work of literature as if it were giving voice to my experiences, the way I related to men (and the terrible anguish it caused me), the utter inability to navigate any social situation without an agonised sense that every other person present was composing a mental list of my inadquacies that would float like a miasma above my head every time they saw me, the sense that everyone else had managed to crack some hidden code of adulthood that allowed them to sail onwards, leaving me floundering and drowning in an ocean for which I had no map to navigate — all of it, in all its horror. It's somewhat amusing that one of my sisters (the oldest of my younger sisters, the one who is also in her thirties, as opposed to our three other sisters who are, respectively, in their twenties, teens, and preteen years) and I were chatting last week about how awful it is to be in your early twenties, and the sense of sheer relief we felt when we turned thirty, and how glad we were never to be that young, and that painfully aware of the weight of our own sense of inadequacy and our imagined sense of others' disdain ever again. The problem, of course — as we both concluded — is that the only way to escape those awful, awful years is to endure them, and learn, painfully, that the way we perceived ourselves and others' perceptions of us was ridiculous, and exhausting, and counterproductive. As with many terrible things, the only way out of one's early twenties is through.
In other words, an exquisite book, but one that succeeded not only in reminding me how I felt as an undergraduate, but also in causing me to relate to it in the way I related to every book I read as an undergrad: making it all about me.
If you've made it through that wall of text and emotions, congratulations!
In spite of growing up in a warm country where the sight of even a few flakes of snow is a cause for extensive photographic documentation, I'm very good at cold weather: I made mulled wine, and Matthias and I are snuggled up in the living room, drinking the wine and eating panettone. Everything is slow and warm and relaxing. I have ventured out to go swimming this morning (and on Thursday and Friday), but beyond that, neither of us have left the house.
I've spent the past three days doing all the kinds of things I enjoy: a mixture of reading (of which more below), writing (Yuletide fic finished and posted, two more treats posted, and a third treat about halfway done, plus some stuff for
fandomtrees), yoga and cooking. I'd really like to get at least one more Yuletide treat done in the next couple of days — the prompts this year are fantastic, and I'm absolutely buzzing with ideas. But we'll see — it depends on available time. The two books I've read this weekend couldn't be more different. The first, Our Violent Ends (Chloe Gong) is the sequel in a YA fantasy duology retelling Romeo and Juliet in a 1920s Shanghai in which the star-crossed lovers are heirs of rival criminal gangs. It's competently done, with a great sense of place and a fun array of secondary characters.
The second book, Either/Or (Elif Batuman) is something I have to read in small doses — not because it's bad, but because it's so close to the bone that it quickly becomes too much to bear. It's a follow up to her previous novel, The Idiot, and the pair of books are semi-autobiographical novels about a Turkish-American undergraduate student at Harvard in the 1990s, who falls in love with Russian literature and navigates various romantic trials and tribulations with a mixture of both wry Gen-X humour and painful overidentification with every work of literature the narrator encounters. I'm a cusp millennial, not a Gen-Xer, I was an undergraduate in Australia in the early 2000s, not at Harvard in the mid-90s, and I studied medieval Irish literature, not 19th-century Russian novels, but nevertheless reading Either/Or was very much the agonising pain of being known, and not much liking it. It brought those terrible years of undergraduate studies crashing back: the self-absorption, the obsessive and unavoidable tendency to engage with every work of literature as if it were giving voice to my experiences, the way I related to men (and the terrible anguish it caused me), the utter inability to navigate any social situation without an agonised sense that every other person present was composing a mental list of my inadquacies that would float like a miasma above my head every time they saw me, the sense that everyone else had managed to crack some hidden code of adulthood that allowed them to sail onwards, leaving me floundering and drowning in an ocean for which I had no map to navigate — all of it, in all its horror. It's somewhat amusing that one of my sisters (the oldest of my younger sisters, the one who is also in her thirties, as opposed to our three other sisters who are, respectively, in their twenties, teens, and preteen years) and I were chatting last week about how awful it is to be in your early twenties, and the sense of sheer relief we felt when we turned thirty, and how glad we were never to be that young, and that painfully aware of the weight of our own sense of inadequacy and our imagined sense of others' disdain ever again. The problem, of course — as we both concluded — is that the only way to escape those awful, awful years is to endure them, and learn, painfully, that the way we perceived ourselves and others' perceptions of us was ridiculous, and exhausting, and counterproductive. As with many terrible things, the only way out of one's early twenties is through.
In other words, an exquisite book, but one that succeeded not only in reminding me how I felt as an undergraduate, but also in causing me to relate to it in the way I related to every book I read as an undergrad: making it all about me.
If you've made it through that wall of text and emotions, congratulations!
no subject
Date: 2022-12-18 07:06 pm (UTC)=^..^=~
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Date: 2022-12-19 02:41 pm (UTC)I am very, very glad not to be in my early twenties any more!
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Date: 2022-12-21 03:53 am (UTC)I say this pretty philosophically. I don't remember my early twenties. I don't remember last week, though, either.
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Date: 2022-12-18 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 02:42 pm (UTC)Thankfully it's now 13 degrees here and everything is a lot warmer.
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Date: 2022-12-19 09:00 pm (UTC)It hit 14 degrees here and all the ice melted, for which I'm grateful.
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Date: 2022-12-19 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 06:00 pm (UTC)I am glad to hear that things get better after the twenties…
no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 06:18 pm (UTC)Things definitely improve a lot once you get out of your twenties!