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what i'm reading wednesday
Oct. 23rd, 2024 10:32 amWhat I finished:
+ Grandma Ursula's Five Ways to Forgiveness. These are five novellas within the Hainish cycle; they're connected by setting and theme. Set on two linked worlds, one the colony of the other, they're about slavery and freedom and gender. The enslavement system is very clearly modeled on US chattel slavery, sometimes a bit too much so? But on the whole this is solid Le Guin. There's both the insider and outsider perspectives and the way they clash, interesting societal arrangements, the way power both harms the oppressed and morally degrades the oppressor, people encountering new cultures, the collective nature of change, the way that progress in one area does not necessarily bring around progress in the other, the way progress can be rolled back, etc. etc.
These stories do well grouped together; I think I'd read them each on their own, I would not have appreciated them as much as I did as a whole.
An aside: the stories acknowledge a range of sexual orientations and behaviors but also they somehow manage to be very heterosexual? I don't know how to explain how, really, but she's just got a very straight view of the world. Sometimes I'm reading a writer and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. There are some people who are just so straight. So straight." And Le Guin is one of them. It's not enough to ruin anything for me, but I do find it one of the most annoying of her quirks.
+ Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson about the 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane that killed at least 6,000 people. This is typical Larson, which you will recognize if you've read Devil in the White City--he's as interested in evoking an era and a particular way of life as he is of telling the straightforward story. I like this about him, but I imagine some people might find the extra details extraneous. Here he's talking about the event, but he's also talking about the mood in Galveston prior, the way extreme storms form, the history of weather prediction, the bureaucratic shenanigans of the early weather service, the life of a single person, and perspectives on the storm from a group of survivors. He's a good enough writer that he can keep you engaged throughout and move back and forth between these things and to and fro in time and not be confusing.
The storm itself was horrifically awful. We get a balance of intimate, individual experiences and the overall destruction. Larson does a magnificent job of making you feel the sheer unrelenting power of the storm and the horrors the people endured. Honestly I kept thinking, "I have got to move far away from the coast! Get me out of here!"
There was no way, of course, to avoid thinking about the recent hurricanes that killed so many here in my country and future storms that climate change will hurl at us. I won't write about that too much because I'm sure you can all imagine what I'm thinking/feeling on that topic. But it hangs heavy over the book to me. It was published in 1999, I believe, before the fullness of climate change was understood by laypeople in the way that it is now. He hints at the future in the last chapter, but I kept reflecting how different it is to read this book 25 years after it was published, having seen what climate change is doing to humanity.
All in all, an engage and interesting and richly-researched read. No one can say Larson doesn't do his research!
Of course, because I am me, I also found a half dozen things I wanted to learn more about that are only glanced at: the invention of hurricane prediction by Cuban priests(!!!!!), the cleanup efforts (these are briefly explored, but not to the depth I'd want), and the experience of Black Galvestonians (if you look up pictures online, most of the people doing the cleanup were Black).
What I gave up on:
I was reading B.D. McClay riff on how classic female scifi writers would feel about Taylor Swift (lol) and I got so tickled by her Joanna Russ assessment.
And then I was like, "You know what? I've never actually read any Joanna Russ except for How to Suppress Women's Writing" (which is awesome). So I downloaded a couple from the library and...y'all, I cannot get into And Chaos Died. I really, really wanted to like it! But I did not and gave up after only about thirty pages. I will still try The Female Man, and I am going to be very sad if I can't get into that one either! Joanna! I want to love you!
What I'm reading now:
Erik Larson's Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania. I am in a Larson mood, what can I say?
+ Grandma Ursula's Five Ways to Forgiveness. These are five novellas within the Hainish cycle; they're connected by setting and theme. Set on two linked worlds, one the colony of the other, they're about slavery and freedom and gender. The enslavement system is very clearly modeled on US chattel slavery, sometimes a bit too much so? But on the whole this is solid Le Guin. There's both the insider and outsider perspectives and the way they clash, interesting societal arrangements, the way power both harms the oppressed and morally degrades the oppressor, people encountering new cultures, the collective nature of change, the way that progress in one area does not necessarily bring around progress in the other, the way progress can be rolled back, etc. etc.
These stories do well grouped together; I think I'd read them each on their own, I would not have appreciated them as much as I did as a whole.
An aside: the stories acknowledge a range of sexual orientations and behaviors but also they somehow manage to be very heterosexual? I don't know how to explain how, really, but she's just got a very straight view of the world. Sometimes I'm reading a writer and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. There are some people who are just so straight. So straight." And Le Guin is one of them. It's not enough to ruin anything for me, but I do find it one of the most annoying of her quirks.
+ Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson about the 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane that killed at least 6,000 people. This is typical Larson, which you will recognize if you've read Devil in the White City--he's as interested in evoking an era and a particular way of life as he is of telling the straightforward story. I like this about him, but I imagine some people might find the extra details extraneous. Here he's talking about the event, but he's also talking about the mood in Galveston prior, the way extreme storms form, the history of weather prediction, the bureaucratic shenanigans of the early weather service, the life of a single person, and perspectives on the storm from a group of survivors. He's a good enough writer that he can keep you engaged throughout and move back and forth between these things and to and fro in time and not be confusing.
The storm itself was horrifically awful. We get a balance of intimate, individual experiences and the overall destruction. Larson does a magnificent job of making you feel the sheer unrelenting power of the storm and the horrors the people endured. Honestly I kept thinking, "I have got to move far away from the coast! Get me out of here!"
There was no way, of course, to avoid thinking about the recent hurricanes that killed so many here in my country and future storms that climate change will hurl at us. I won't write about that too much because I'm sure you can all imagine what I'm thinking/feeling on that topic. But it hangs heavy over the book to me. It was published in 1999, I believe, before the fullness of climate change was understood by laypeople in the way that it is now. He hints at the future in the last chapter, but I kept reflecting how different it is to read this book 25 years after it was published, having seen what climate change is doing to humanity.
All in all, an engage and interesting and richly-researched read. No one can say Larson doesn't do his research!
Of course, because I am me, I also found a half dozen things I wanted to learn more about that are only glanced at: the invention of hurricane prediction by Cuban priests(!!!!!), the cleanup efforts (these are briefly explored, but not to the depth I'd want), and the experience of Black Galvestonians (if you look up pictures online, most of the people doing the cleanup were Black).
What I gave up on:
I was reading B.D. McClay riff on how classic female scifi writers would feel about Taylor Swift (lol) and I got so tickled by her Joanna Russ assessment.
And then I was like, "You know what? I've never actually read any Joanna Russ except for How to Suppress Women's Writing" (which is awesome). So I downloaded a couple from the library and...y'all, I cannot get into And Chaos Died. I really, really wanted to like it! But I did not and gave up after only about thirty pages. I will still try The Female Man, and I am going to be very sad if I can't get into that one either! Joanna! I want to love you!
What I'm reading now:
Erik Larson's Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania. I am in a Larson mood, what can I say?
