[reading wednesday]
Feb. 20th, 2019 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellitslantI have absolutely no intention of making these on a regular basis, mostly because it is slightly absurd to me how little reading I get done lately, but I have actually read a few things in the last couple weeks, so why not!
what I just finished:
I still haven't had a chance to see the film Colette, but I picked up Claudine at School to see what the actual Colette's writing was like and... did not finish. I just could not get invested in any of the characters. If I can find it, I might give it a whirl in French, just to see if I enjoy it any more in the original language - I found the translation quite stilted, and it's hard to tell if that is the translation or if it's just the style. Very low on my priority list, though.
I think courtesy acosmic_llin recommendation, I read and really enjoyed Outrun the Moon by Stacy Lee, which is about a Chinese girl in San Francisco at the turn of the century who bribes her way into a boarding school populated by wealthy white girls. It's blurbed as 'perfect for fans of Code Name Verity,' but I'm not sure I'd go that far. V good, though.
My aunt rec'd Educated, by Tara Westover, which is a memoir by a woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family, homeschooled in a lackadaisical fashion, and then gets herself through BYU and on to a DPhil at Cambridge. I don't usually read memoir, but I went to a talk at the London Review Bookshop a few weeks back by a memoirist who discussed the ways in which sexism affects reception of the genre, and that has been rattling around in my brain since. I found this fascinating and disturbing - serious tw for abuse - but it was a good book to read while thinking the above thoughts, because there is a lot of discussion in it about memory, diary, forgetting, concocting alternate narratives and how to prove 'truth' about our memories/pasts, things like that.
Storm Season by Pene Hanson is a very fic-ish 'caught in a rainstorm and sharing a bed' lesbian romance set in Australia against the backdrop of the music scene. The sharing-a-bed bit was fun, but I found the plot really hit its stride when it moved into more of the Sydney indie music scene setting. This was light and fluffy, porny and fun.
The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff must've been something I saw on a bookstore table or something. It's a narrative about female SOE agents in France during the Second World War, specifically one particular agent, the woman who ran the female agents, and a woman working in New York after the war. This was very good. There are a couple of mysteries intertwined with the spy narrative and several different time periods, and they're brought together in a relatively satisfying fashion. What I really enjoyed was the way each world was built out and fully populated with characters who gave a great feel to the time. There's a lot going on in the background that informs the women we're focussed on. Good spying, would spy again.
what I'm reading now:
Currently I am reading Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis, which I think was anothercosmic_llin rec. Fantasy romances set in alternate nineteenth-century Englands are honestly kind of a bulletproof thing for me? i can't help it. :P So this is nicely suited to my tastes! I started it this morning and if I stay awake long enough I will probably finish it tonight. It's the first of a series, which makes me happy. And there's nice subtle worldbuilding, there's elves, there are queer women, it's got neat systems of magic that I'm interested to learn more about, plus I like all the characters. It's maybe a little faster paced than the plot really deserves - it feels like there should be a lot more to go than there are pages left in the book - but we'll see how I feel once I'm done.
what I'm reading next:
After that... I have two books checked out, The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera (rec'd by my dear friend A) and Out of the Blue by Sophie Cameron (I don't know where from). Unless any more interesting holds come in, it will probably be one of those.
Discussion about any of these welcomed in the comments!
what I just finished:
I still haven't had a chance to see the film Colette, but I picked up Claudine at School to see what the actual Colette's writing was like and... did not finish. I just could not get invested in any of the characters. If I can find it, I might give it a whirl in French, just to see if I enjoy it any more in the original language - I found the translation quite stilted, and it's hard to tell if that is the translation or if it's just the style. Very low on my priority list, though.
I think courtesy a
cosmic_llin recommendation, I read and really enjoyed Outrun the Moon by Stacy Lee, which is about a Chinese girl in San Francisco at the turn of the century who bribes her way into a boarding school populated by wealthy white girls. It's blurbed as 'perfect for fans of Code Name Verity,' but I'm not sure I'd go that far. V good, though.My aunt rec'd Educated, by Tara Westover, which is a memoir by a woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family, homeschooled in a lackadaisical fashion, and then gets herself through BYU and on to a DPhil at Cambridge. I don't usually read memoir, but I went to a talk at the London Review Bookshop a few weeks back by a memoirist who discussed the ways in which sexism affects reception of the genre, and that has been rattling around in my brain since. I found this fascinating and disturbing - serious tw for abuse - but it was a good book to read while thinking the above thoughts, because there is a lot of discussion in it about memory, diary, forgetting, concocting alternate narratives and how to prove 'truth' about our memories/pasts, things like that.
Storm Season by Pene Hanson is a very fic-ish 'caught in a rainstorm and sharing a bed' lesbian romance set in Australia against the backdrop of the music scene. The sharing-a-bed bit was fun, but I found the plot really hit its stride when it moved into more of the Sydney indie music scene setting. This was light and fluffy, porny and fun.
The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff must've been something I saw on a bookstore table or something. It's a narrative about female SOE agents in France during the Second World War, specifically one particular agent, the woman who ran the female agents, and a woman working in New York after the war. This was very good. There are a couple of mysteries intertwined with the spy narrative and several different time periods, and they're brought together in a relatively satisfying fashion. What I really enjoyed was the way each world was built out and fully populated with characters who gave a great feel to the time. There's a lot going on in the background that informs the women we're focussed on. Good spying, would spy again.
what I'm reading now:
Currently I am reading Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis, which I think was another
cosmic_llin rec. Fantasy romances set in alternate nineteenth-century Englands are honestly kind of a bulletproof thing for me? i can't help it. :P So this is nicely suited to my tastes! I started it this morning and if I stay awake long enough I will probably finish it tonight. It's the first of a series, which makes me happy. And there's nice subtle worldbuilding, there's elves, there are queer women, it's got neat systems of magic that I'm interested to learn more about, plus I like all the characters. It's maybe a little faster paced than the plot really deserves - it feels like there should be a lot more to go than there are pages left in the book - but we'll see how I feel once I'm done.what I'm reading next:
After that... I have two books checked out, The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera (rec'd by my dear friend A) and Out of the Blue by Sophie Cameron (I don't know where from). Unless any more interesting holds come in, it will probably be one of those.
Discussion about any of these welcomed in the comments!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-21 12:55 am (UTC)You know who Pene Hanson is, right? :)
-J
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-21 01:11 am (UTC)And no... should I??
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-21 01:12 am (UTC)And I'm surprised you didn't guess! I will text you. :)
-J
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-21 01:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-21 02:28 am (UTC)