Book Logging
Jul. 5th, 2016 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckA Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now - I’m a really poor audience for poetry in translation. Part of that is that I look at translated poems as cultural artifacts rather than as art. Part of that is that the sound of language is hugely important to me in poetry, and I am constantly aware that this is not what the poet actually made. I kind of want huge amounts of annotations on translated poetry that explain the translator’s word choices and the original format of the poem and all of that. Depending on the source language/culture, I may also want annotations to explain allusions. That said, this book is fascinating because it gives small tastes of many, many different poets who wrote in many different languages. For a lot of the ancient poets, what’s given is all we have. Each poem lists the translator(s) at the end, so it’s possible to find out more about them and their biases if one is dedicated enough to do the research. I’m not.
Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics - This is a collection of short comics from the 1930s and 1940s. For some of the characters, a single appearance is all they got; for others, these selections are a small portion of their adventures. There’s not a huge amount of character development for anyone, and the plots tend toward the straightforward without surprise twists. But there is no ‘punching people isn’t feminine!’ and the ladies are focused on their adventures rather than on romance/relationships. The whole thing is a very quick read, and I recommend it if you have any interest in comics.
Freisenbruch, Annelise. Caesars’ Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire - The author admitted frequently how very much we don’t know about these women and how much of what we do know is propaganda (going in both directions). The book starts with Livia and continues through the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Hatke, Ben. Nobody Likes a Goblin - I thought this picture book was very, very cute, but I think that small children aren’t going to understand the D&D in jokes (they may still enjoy the book. I don’t know. I didn’t have a small child handy for testing). For that matter, adults who haven’t done fantasy gaming won’t get the jokes either. But I laughed, and Scott laughed.
Hurley, Kameron. The Geek Feminist Revolution - I found this quite readable and engaging. I agree with a great deal of what Hurley says. The main problem I had was that the book made me feel terribly guilty that I don’t do more in terms of political activism. I’m not convinced that the author realizes that there are people who can’t do the things she does. I’m also not convinced that it’s realistic for her to think that anyone can (or should) simply shrug off online harassment and keep going.
The Nameless City - Both Amazon and GoodReads recommended this for me. I-- how to put it? I think I wanted to like this more than I did. I didn't dislike it, and I will certainly read the next in the series when it comes out. I’m not sure what genre label to on this graphic novel. There’s no magic, but it’s very definitely a secondary world. I think that all of the characters with speaking roles are characters of color. I kept half-expecting Benders to show up (which I take mainly as a sign that I’ve had very limited exposure to graphic novels that aren’t centered on white characters).
Natsume’s Book of Friends 2-3 - The local library only owns the first two volumes of this, so anything after volume 2 needs to be gotten through interlibrary loan. For some reason, it’s hard for me feel right getting manga that way. I’m not sure why. I feel most comfortable asking for obscure non-fiction titles through interlibrary loan. At any rate, I’m still having fun. Natsume is likeable and pleasant to spend time with. I worry that the series will become stale, but it’s very promising at this point.
Paper Girls 1 - I was dubious about this because I have really loathed some other things that Brian K. Vaughan has done, but I actually really like this. The main characters are girls about my daughter’s age which often puts me off because I keep thinking as a parent, but pretty much everyone else has vanished, so it bothered me less. There are monsters and time travel and lots of things going on that haven’t been explained yet. I definitely want to read volume 2.
Red’s Planet: Book 1: A World Away from Home - This is a graphic novel aimed at kids. The main character is a little girl who accidentally gets kidnapped by aliens. Then the ship she’s on crashlands on another planet. There’s a largish cast of characters, all different types of aliens with very different (but very familiar) personalities. The girl is hugely excited by the presence of aliens and by being on a new planet, but nobody else shares her excitement. I laughed more than once.
Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Romeo and Juliet - This was funny and kind of sweet. It’s a graphic novel with zoo animals performing a version of Romeo and Juliet for an audience of other zoo animals. The Romeo and Juliet story is altered rather more than the previous adaptation of Macbeth. Juliet is a bear who lives wild. Romeo is a rooster who lives in a petting zoo. They meet and become best friends, and things go on from there. I’m not sure that the story has quite the same impact in this version. I don’t think it’s meant to. Still fun.
Sutherland, John. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? - I think I read this too soon after Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet so that I ended up not enjoying it quite as much. It’s in the same vein, essays addressing contradictions and puzzles in well known works of English literature.
What Did You Eat Yesterday? 2 - I still can’t manage to read the sections on cooking. My eyes glaze over. I stumbled heavily over the medical stuff about the main character’s father. I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have known that his father had a previous major surgery that requires at least a week in the hospital and months of recovery. (The surgery in question isn’t generally done, in the US at least, for what the mother said it had been done for. I have no idea if the practice is different in Japan.) I also couldn’t see a neurology team 'finishing off' a surgery involving the esophagus. I also wasn’t sure— Is necrosis fast enough a process to occur repeatedly during a ten hour surgery?
Started but not finished:
A.L.I.E.E.E.N. - I only got about six pages into this graphic novel. Very early on, I hit eyes getting poked out. I went a little farther, but I really just couldn’t.
Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures - I didn’t get very far in this graphic novel because I very much wanted to smack the main character for being selfish. She wasn’t unbelievable for a twelve year old, and I rather expect that readers younger than I am would enjoy her adventures. The book starts off with her ‘borrowing’ a magical lamp, summoning a genie, and making some wishes without thinking them through.
Battling Boy - I read between ⅕ and ¼ of this graphic novel and hated every panel. Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t getting anything out of reading the book and put it in the bag to go back to the library. The art felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t connect to any of the characters or feel that I had found a story that I wanted to stick with.
Boyce, Frank Cottrell. Cosmic - The library only has this on CD, so that’s the way I tried it out. Possibly, I’d have gotten farther with a paper book what with having the option to skip around and see if it worked better for me later on. It’s a six CD set, and I only got about halfway through the first one before I got frustrated and gave up. The blurb promised kids stranded in space. The first CD is all set up to establish the first person narrator’s personality and way of interacting with the world. He’s a twelve year old who looks like he’s at least thirty, and any time people assume he’s an adult, he just kind of accepts that and plays along without exactly making any decisions about what he’s doing. I wanted either to smack him or to dump him into the promised stranded in space situation so that he would have to do something-- anything-- instead of wander along as if nothing much mattered. The audiobook narrator seemed to match the book well, so there was that. (I’m kind of amused by the fact that my complaint about the main character in this one is the opposite of my complaint about the main character in the Alison Dare book. What am I looking for?)
Brown, Peter. The Wild Robot - Somehow, this just didn’t catch me. I listened to the book on CD, and I rather think I got farther that way than I would have with a paper book. I was actually kind of bored, but I listened to the entire first CD (out of four) in the hope that something would make me want to keep going. I think Amazon recommended this one to me. It’s a children’s book about a robot that is stranded on an island and how she learns to manage.
Fraser, Antonia. The Warrior Queens - I read the first chapter and really didn’t like the prose style. It irritated me. I got frustrated because I was actually very interested in the topic and was hoping that the book would give me information about women I’d never heard of or had only heard of vaguely. I paged through some later chapters and pulled out a few names, but I couldn’t deal with reading the whole thing.
Superior - At this point, I strongly suspect that it’s simply that I don’t really enjoy superhero comics no matter what the themes are or the twists or the unexpected characters or the amount of (or lack of) violence. I opened this one at various different points, trying to find something that would hook me, but that didn’t work.
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - I just didn’t feel comfortable with the prose style here. I can’t put my finger on it, but it didn’t work for me.
Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics - This is a collection of short comics from the 1930s and 1940s. For some of the characters, a single appearance is all they got; for others, these selections are a small portion of their adventures. There’s not a huge amount of character development for anyone, and the plots tend toward the straightforward without surprise twists. But there is no ‘punching people isn’t feminine!’ and the ladies are focused on their adventures rather than on romance/relationships. The whole thing is a very quick read, and I recommend it if you have any interest in comics.
Freisenbruch, Annelise. Caesars’ Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire - The author admitted frequently how very much we don’t know about these women and how much of what we do know is propaganda (going in both directions). The book starts with Livia and continues through the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Hatke, Ben. Nobody Likes a Goblin - I thought this picture book was very, very cute, but I think that small children aren’t going to understand the D&D in jokes (they may still enjoy the book. I don’t know. I didn’t have a small child handy for testing). For that matter, adults who haven’t done fantasy gaming won’t get the jokes either. But I laughed, and Scott laughed.
Hurley, Kameron. The Geek Feminist Revolution - I found this quite readable and engaging. I agree with a great deal of what Hurley says. The main problem I had was that the book made me feel terribly guilty that I don’t do more in terms of political activism. I’m not convinced that the author realizes that there are people who can’t do the things she does. I’m also not convinced that it’s realistic for her to think that anyone can (or should) simply shrug off online harassment and keep going.
The Nameless City - Both Amazon and GoodReads recommended this for me. I-- how to put it? I think I wanted to like this more than I did. I didn't dislike it, and I will certainly read the next in the series when it comes out. I’m not sure what genre label to on this graphic novel. There’s no magic, but it’s very definitely a secondary world. I think that all of the characters with speaking roles are characters of color. I kept half-expecting Benders to show up (which I take mainly as a sign that I’ve had very limited exposure to graphic novels that aren’t centered on white characters).
Natsume’s Book of Friends 2-3 - The local library only owns the first two volumes of this, so anything after volume 2 needs to be gotten through interlibrary loan. For some reason, it’s hard for me feel right getting manga that way. I’m not sure why. I feel most comfortable asking for obscure non-fiction titles through interlibrary loan. At any rate, I’m still having fun. Natsume is likeable and pleasant to spend time with. I worry that the series will become stale, but it’s very promising at this point.
Paper Girls 1 - I was dubious about this because I have really loathed some other things that Brian K. Vaughan has done, but I actually really like this. The main characters are girls about my daughter’s age which often puts me off because I keep thinking as a parent, but pretty much everyone else has vanished, so it bothered me less. There are monsters and time travel and lots of things going on that haven’t been explained yet. I definitely want to read volume 2.
Red’s Planet: Book 1: A World Away from Home - This is a graphic novel aimed at kids. The main character is a little girl who accidentally gets kidnapped by aliens. Then the ship she’s on crashlands on another planet. There’s a largish cast of characters, all different types of aliens with very different (but very familiar) personalities. The girl is hugely excited by the presence of aliens and by being on a new planet, but nobody else shares her excitement. I laughed more than once.
Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Romeo and Juliet - This was funny and kind of sweet. It’s a graphic novel with zoo animals performing a version of Romeo and Juliet for an audience of other zoo animals. The Romeo and Juliet story is altered rather more than the previous adaptation of Macbeth. Juliet is a bear who lives wild. Romeo is a rooster who lives in a petting zoo. They meet and become best friends, and things go on from there. I’m not sure that the story has quite the same impact in this version. I don’t think it’s meant to. Still fun.
Sutherland, John. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? - I think I read this too soon after Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet so that I ended up not enjoying it quite as much. It’s in the same vein, essays addressing contradictions and puzzles in well known works of English literature.
What Did You Eat Yesterday? 2 - I still can’t manage to read the sections on cooking. My eyes glaze over. I stumbled heavily over the medical stuff about the main character’s father. I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have known that his father had a previous major surgery that requires at least a week in the hospital and months of recovery. (The surgery in question isn’t generally done, in the US at least, for what the mother said it had been done for. I have no idea if the practice is different in Japan.) I also couldn’t see a neurology team 'finishing off' a surgery involving the esophagus. I also wasn’t sure— Is necrosis fast enough a process to occur repeatedly during a ten hour surgery?
Started but not finished:
A.L.I.E.E.E.N. - I only got about six pages into this graphic novel. Very early on, I hit eyes getting poked out. I went a little farther, but I really just couldn’t.
Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures - I didn’t get very far in this graphic novel because I very much wanted to smack the main character for being selfish. She wasn’t unbelievable for a twelve year old, and I rather expect that readers younger than I am would enjoy her adventures. The book starts off with her ‘borrowing’ a magical lamp, summoning a genie, and making some wishes without thinking them through.
Battling Boy - I read between ⅕ and ¼ of this graphic novel and hated every panel. Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t getting anything out of reading the book and put it in the bag to go back to the library. The art felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t connect to any of the characters or feel that I had found a story that I wanted to stick with.
Boyce, Frank Cottrell. Cosmic - The library only has this on CD, so that’s the way I tried it out. Possibly, I’d have gotten farther with a paper book what with having the option to skip around and see if it worked better for me later on. It’s a six CD set, and I only got about halfway through the first one before I got frustrated and gave up. The blurb promised kids stranded in space. The first CD is all set up to establish the first person narrator’s personality and way of interacting with the world. He’s a twelve year old who looks like he’s at least thirty, and any time people assume he’s an adult, he just kind of accepts that and plays along without exactly making any decisions about what he’s doing. I wanted either to smack him or to dump him into the promised stranded in space situation so that he would have to do something-- anything-- instead of wander along as if nothing much mattered. The audiobook narrator seemed to match the book well, so there was that. (I’m kind of amused by the fact that my complaint about the main character in this one is the opposite of my complaint about the main character in the Alison Dare book. What am I looking for?)
Brown, Peter. The Wild Robot - Somehow, this just didn’t catch me. I listened to the book on CD, and I rather think I got farther that way than I would have with a paper book. I was actually kind of bored, but I listened to the entire first CD (out of four) in the hope that something would make me want to keep going. I think Amazon recommended this one to me. It’s a children’s book about a robot that is stranded on an island and how she learns to manage.
Fraser, Antonia. The Warrior Queens - I read the first chapter and really didn’t like the prose style. It irritated me. I got frustrated because I was actually very interested in the topic and was hoping that the book would give me information about women I’d never heard of or had only heard of vaguely. I paged through some later chapters and pulled out a few names, but I couldn’t deal with reading the whole thing.
Superior - At this point, I strongly suspect that it’s simply that I don’t really enjoy superhero comics no matter what the themes are or the twists or the unexpected characters or the amount of (or lack of) violence. I opened this one at various different points, trying to find something that would hook me, but that didn’t work.
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - I just didn’t feel comfortable with the prose style here. I can’t put my finger on it, but it didn’t work for me.
