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what i'm reading wednesday 29/1/2025
I have read six books so far this year and all of them are bangers!!! What a great streak!
What I finished:
+ Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Yeah, this lived up to the hype. I've appreciated Klein's work in the past, and I'd been meaning to read it since it came out, but at first the line at the library was too long and then I kind of forgot about it until I recently listened to an (old) episode of the On the Nose podcast where she was talking about Israel. It spurred me to pick up the book immediately, and I'm glad I did.
What I really appreciate about this book, besides Klein's honesty about how her fixation on her doppelganger Naomi Wolf has affected her, is that Klein is willing to take her opponents' worldviews seriously. This is not something that the mainstream liberal media is good at doing--see the endless hand-wringing about why the white working class is "voting against its interests" like economic interests are the only things that influence people. Klein wants to grapple with why people believe what they do, how the mainstream discourse and (essentially) society has failed them, and how a better society might win them over.
In her serious approach to other perspectives, Klein reminds me of Talia Lavin. Like Lavin, Klein is an actual leftist, not a liberal, and maybe that has something to do with it; maybe there's something in the Jewish intellectual tradition in this country that makes Jewish leftists writers more willing than others to say, "No, actually, people really believe this stuff that seems ridiculous to us, so we have to take it seriously."
I think Klein is more compassionate to people who disagree with her than Lavin is--and for good reason, since Lavin spent the last several years diving deeply into all the specific ways in which women and children are hurt by evangelical theology, a topic I'm pretty sure Klein doesn't know much about (simply because it's not her area of focus).
It's kind of amazing the way she weaves all these strands together--her being consistently mistaken for Naomi Wolf, anti-vaxxers, social media disinformation, the state of Israel, etc.--looking at them through the prism of doppelgangers. I'm not sure a less thoughtful and talented writer could have pulled it off. But Klein does, and I'm glad to have read this book--it gave me lots to think about and much of what she said resonated with me. I appreciate her approach to the world and to politics and I need to read more of her books.
+ Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray. Another retelling, this time of Beauty and the Beast, but one that asks, "What if the dad in the story had acted like a good father and said, 'Hell no, I will not hand my daughter over to you; I'll stay here in her place if that's what it takes.'" And also, "What if it was set in the UK in the 1940s?" (Which seems to be a favorite era of Gray's.)
I didn't think this was quite as interesting a creation as A Garter as a Lesser Gift simply because there are three billion retellings of Beauty and the Beast and not very many of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. So it had less of the novelty of that one.
But it's an equally well-written book, the romance is a little more convincing to me (simply because our leads know each other longer), and the blending of magic with the mundanities of wartime Britain is great. Another hit from Gray!
Which leads me to...
What I'm reading now: Which is her The Sleeping Soldier, yet another retelling, this one of Sleeping Beauty, only queer and in a 60s Midwest college town.
I will probably read my way through Gray's entire oeuvre lbr.
What I finished:
+ Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Yeah, this lived up to the hype. I've appreciated Klein's work in the past, and I'd been meaning to read it since it came out, but at first the line at the library was too long and then I kind of forgot about it until I recently listened to an (old) episode of the On the Nose podcast where she was talking about Israel. It spurred me to pick up the book immediately, and I'm glad I did.
What I really appreciate about this book, besides Klein's honesty about how her fixation on her doppelganger Naomi Wolf has affected her, is that Klein is willing to take her opponents' worldviews seriously. This is not something that the mainstream liberal media is good at doing--see the endless hand-wringing about why the white working class is "voting against its interests" like economic interests are the only things that influence people. Klein wants to grapple with why people believe what they do, how the mainstream discourse and (essentially) society has failed them, and how a better society might win them over.
In her serious approach to other perspectives, Klein reminds me of Talia Lavin. Like Lavin, Klein is an actual leftist, not a liberal, and maybe that has something to do with it; maybe there's something in the Jewish intellectual tradition in this country that makes Jewish leftists writers more willing than others to say, "No, actually, people really believe this stuff that seems ridiculous to us, so we have to take it seriously."
I think Klein is more compassionate to people who disagree with her than Lavin is--and for good reason, since Lavin spent the last several years diving deeply into all the specific ways in which women and children are hurt by evangelical theology, a topic I'm pretty sure Klein doesn't know much about (simply because it's not her area of focus).
It's kind of amazing the way she weaves all these strands together--her being consistently mistaken for Naomi Wolf, anti-vaxxers, social media disinformation, the state of Israel, etc.--looking at them through the prism of doppelgangers. I'm not sure a less thoughtful and talented writer could have pulled it off. But Klein does, and I'm glad to have read this book--it gave me lots to think about and much of what she said resonated with me. I appreciate her approach to the world and to politics and I need to read more of her books.
+ Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray. Another retelling, this time of Beauty and the Beast, but one that asks, "What if the dad in the story had acted like a good father and said, 'Hell no, I will not hand my daughter over to you; I'll stay here in her place if that's what it takes.'" And also, "What if it was set in the UK in the 1940s?" (Which seems to be a favorite era of Gray's.)
I didn't think this was quite as interesting a creation as A Garter as a Lesser Gift simply because there are three billion retellings of Beauty and the Beast and not very many of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. So it had less of the novelty of that one.
But it's an equally well-written book, the romance is a little more convincing to me (simply because our leads know each other longer), and the blending of magic with the mundanities of wartime Britain is great. Another hit from Gray!
Which leads me to...
What I'm reading now: Which is her The Sleeping Soldier, yet another retelling, this one of Sleeping Beauty, only queer and in a 60s Midwest college town.
I will probably read my way through Gray's entire oeuvre lbr.
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I have to say that neither leftists nor liberals seem very good at me at taking others' viewpoints seriously -- perhaps a universal human foible.
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perhaps a universal human foible.
Probably! It does seem rare! I am still pretty new to reading true leftists, so I didn't know if it was more common in those circles than it is in mainstream liberal circles, but I will take your word for it that it isn't. At any rate, I value it when I find it.
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I'll definitely pick up the Naomi Klein book - it's been pinging on my radar for a while.
BTW, did you know that Aster Glenn Gray is here on dreamwidth? osprey-archer
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I knew she was a fandom person, but I wasn't aware of what her handle was here!
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I've read neither book, just your writeups, and I think there possibly is just a Jewish mindset to this, where you are always aware that you have a different perspective/culture from the dominant one and so you're already oriented to "no, yeah, those people believe those things", whereas I think people who start from being the dominant culture have a harder time. It's something I've run into in various places, including for instance in fannish discords where someone who was speculating about a fandom that takes place 700+ years into the future would naturally and of course have all the same cultural touchstones and importance and morality as that person's current life, and all I could think of was "you have never been any kind of minority, ever, if your life". It's something I encounter randomly all the time in fandom spaces, and in political spaces it's even more stark. For instance, in the West Wing, there was this constant problem where Sorkin would never take Republicans seriously for actually believing in what they say they believe, and I do think that is partly to blame for politicians who I might deragtorily describe as "having watched The West Wing too much"; as someone who has watched the West Wing too much, I feel qualified to make that judgement call ;)