Bookwormish, third quarter of 2015
Oct. 7th, 2015 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarBooks! Another quarter of the year past, another chance to do a round-up of what I've been reading! (It wasn't meant to become a set quarterly tradition, but I've been enjoying it...)
VERY TOP BOOK:
* Among Others by Jo Walton
This book. I really loved it. I love its unusual take on "how magic works." I love its protagonist, who is prickly and not always even necessarily likable, but always relatable and real. I love how it's not quite categorizable – it's a fantasy book about a character who loves sci fi, and my local library at least had it in the regular adult fiction section, rather than fantasy or YA or whatever else – I love a "genre" book with crossover power (because I kind of hate the whole genre thing anyway). This is also a fairly rare instance of a book I want to go track down and own, right away, even though I initially read it from the library and could theoretically take it out again any time I want.
OTHER TOP BOOKS:
* Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton – Really fun! Victorian romance, but where the characters are dragons. Hee.
* The Complete Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers – Yes, I read this 800-page brick, which compiles all of Sayers' short stories ever! It was fun as a way of kind of looking into her process – some felt like good stories that stood up on their own; some felt more like sketches for the basic plot/mystery of a larger story or novel, but where she didn't feel like bothering to add in all the character stuff around the skeleton of a plot.
* Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel (nonfiction) – Read this for my (wonderfully varied) book group; it's by relationship therapist Esther Perel, also known for her intriguing TED talk about infidelity. (This book is basically a study on how to keep a long-term relationship working, and my book group consists almost entirely of a group of colleagues and their respective long-term partners/spouses, so the ensuing book group discussion was really interesting!)
* Better Nate than Ever by Tim Federle – Dawww. What a sweet, charming, big-hearted book. It's middle-grade, meaning for the somewhat-younger-than-YA set, but maybe middle-grade is my new thing, because I loved it. It's about a probably-gay-but-not-sure-yet preteen boy who loves musicals and runs off from his small, conservative town to New York City for one magical day of auditioning on Broadway. And it is like the "It Gets Better" project in totally charming book form, and I want to put it right into the hands of every kid struggling to fit in in conservative small towns everywhere.
* The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie – I couldn't quite decide whether to include this on the list, because while I really admire Sherman Alexie, and I think he's a powerful writer and tells important stories...I'm also not sure I could say I enjoyed this book, because his characters' lives are so, so depressing. But again – important. But so depressing. Anyway, regardless of whether I enjoyed the process, it's one I'm glad I (re-)read, along with having read "Reservation Blues" last year, which I would say I enjoyed more.
OTHER THOUGHTS:
Margaret Atwood: An author I've been meaning to read approximately as long as I've been literate. My book group read "Oryx and Crake" recently and...I didn't love it. It was a fast read, but I wouldn't say it captivated me. My book group is now going to read "The Handmaid's Tale," which I think of as a classic, so I hope I'll get into that one more.
Jo Walton: I really enjoyed "Tooth and Claw," and I LOVED "Among Others," so I thought I would grab whatever else of hers I could from the library shelf, which turned out to be "My Real Children"...and I was utterly underwhelmed. Huh. It's a more recent book of hers, too, and yet it read as less deft. Now I'm a little baffled and not sure what of hers to read next – because I still love her, and still want to read more now that I've discovered her. If anyone has suggestions, I want them!
Linguistics nerd: Because I am a total dork about all things language-related, I occasionally read pop-science type historical linguistics books...and then talk about the history of language way too much in casual conversation with people who are not language nerds. Whoops. In this case, the book was "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, which I picked up at the last Friends of the Library booksale.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shimotsuki, as an actual linguist, I'm curious if you've read him and what you think? I found his theories about how complexity in languages emerges compelling and plausible, but then, I'm a lay person and I've been out of academia a long time!
VERY TOP BOOK:
* Among Others by Jo Walton
This book. I really loved it. I love its unusual take on "how magic works." I love its protagonist, who is prickly and not always even necessarily likable, but always relatable and real. I love how it's not quite categorizable – it's a fantasy book about a character who loves sci fi, and my local library at least had it in the regular adult fiction section, rather than fantasy or YA or whatever else – I love a "genre" book with crossover power (because I kind of hate the whole genre thing anyway). This is also a fairly rare instance of a book I want to go track down and own, right away, even though I initially read it from the library and could theoretically take it out again any time I want.
OTHER TOP BOOKS:
* Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton – Really fun! Victorian romance, but where the characters are dragons. Hee.
* The Complete Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers – Yes, I read this 800-page brick, which compiles all of Sayers' short stories ever! It was fun as a way of kind of looking into her process – some felt like good stories that stood up on their own; some felt more like sketches for the basic plot/mystery of a larger story or novel, but where she didn't feel like bothering to add in all the character stuff around the skeleton of a plot.
* Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel (nonfiction) – Read this for my (wonderfully varied) book group; it's by relationship therapist Esther Perel, also known for her intriguing TED talk about infidelity. (This book is basically a study on how to keep a long-term relationship working, and my book group consists almost entirely of a group of colleagues and their respective long-term partners/spouses, so the ensuing book group discussion was really interesting!)
* Better Nate than Ever by Tim Federle – Dawww. What a sweet, charming, big-hearted book. It's middle-grade, meaning for the somewhat-younger-than-YA set, but maybe middle-grade is my new thing, because I loved it. It's about a probably-gay-but-not-sure-yet preteen boy who loves musicals and runs off from his small, conservative town to New York City for one magical day of auditioning on Broadway. And it is like the "It Gets Better" project in totally charming book form, and I want to put it right into the hands of every kid struggling to fit in in conservative small towns everywhere.
* The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie – I couldn't quite decide whether to include this on the list, because while I really admire Sherman Alexie, and I think he's a powerful writer and tells important stories...I'm also not sure I could say I enjoyed this book, because his characters' lives are so, so depressing. But again – important. But so depressing. Anyway, regardless of whether I enjoyed the process, it's one I'm glad I (re-)read, along with having read "Reservation Blues" last year, which I would say I enjoyed more.
OTHER THOUGHTS:
Margaret Atwood: An author I've been meaning to read approximately as long as I've been literate. My book group read "Oryx and Crake" recently and...I didn't love it. It was a fast read, but I wouldn't say it captivated me. My book group is now going to read "The Handmaid's Tale," which I think of as a classic, so I hope I'll get into that one more.
Jo Walton: I really enjoyed "Tooth and Claw," and I LOVED "Among Others," so I thought I would grab whatever else of hers I could from the library shelf, which turned out to be "My Real Children"...and I was utterly underwhelmed. Huh. It's a more recent book of hers, too, and yet it read as less deft. Now I'm a little baffled and not sure what of hers to read next – because I still love her, and still want to read more now that I've discovered her. If anyone has suggestions, I want them!
Linguistics nerd: Because I am a total dork about all things language-related, I occasionally read pop-science type historical linguistics books...and then talk about the history of language way too much in casual conversation with people who are not language nerds. Whoops. In this case, the book was "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, which I picked up at the last Friends of the Library booksale.
shimotsuki, as an actual linguist, I'm curious if you've read him and what you think? I found his theories about how complexity in languages emerges compelling and plausible, but then, I'm a lay person and I've been out of academia a long time!
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Date: 2015-10-10 12:32 am (UTC)I haven't tried any Jo Walton. My guy has, with mixed results. He did like the series of books named after coins, but he really didn't like Among Others, which he read because a few of his friends had really strongly recommended it. If I'm remembering right, his main complaint was that the characters in the story keep naming books or characters that they like, but those likes/dislikes don't follow from anything internal to the story. He said it felt like a bunch of books were being name-dropped but nothing interesting was being said about them. To be fair, my guy doesn't like very much fiction (Tolkien and Pratchett and a few others excepted), so he may be easily put off.
I don't actually know much at all about Guy Deutscher, I'm afraid -- I mostly stick to phonetics and phonology. But I've just gone and poked around a couple of his online articles and interviews, and it looks to me like he's tackling potentially loaded topics (linguistic relativity, evolution of language) in what appears to be a nuanced and reasonable way. I can't tell from the things I've found online what his view of the grammatical system is -- whether he's some flavor of a generativist, or more along the lines of a functionalist. I sort of suspect the latter, in which case there would likely be some technical aspects of linguistic analysis (or philosophy) that I would disagree with him about. But what I read just now certainly wasn't raising any big red flags -- he looks interesting.
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Date: 2015-10-10 01:19 am (UTC)Oh, ooh, I'm glad to hear it! I've actually been vaguely worrying that I'm getting too one-track, reading so much YA lately and barely any proper "grown-up" books. Going to try to make a point of mixing it up a bit more.
Among Others – your guy's absolutely right, the book is one part narrative, one part the author straight-up name-checking a running list of all the sci-fi classics she herself clearly loved when she was the same age as the protagonist. I was never much of a sci-fi person, despite my early history as a wee nerdling, so it mostly went over my head, but I didn't mind – it seemed right and real for a character who's book obsessed to talk about books all the time, even if the specific books themselves didn't have a "narrative" function. In fact, for me it was a stellar example of writing a character who really *is* the way you, as the author, are telling the reader they're supposed to believe she is, if that makes sense. In any case, even if you're not interested in Among Others, I bet you'd enjoy Tooth and Claw! A really fun send-up/delving-into of Victorian novel tropes.
About Guy Deutscher, neat, I would say that confirms my impression (tackles quite loaded, large-scale questions of linguistics, and certainly has his own opinion, but is pretty inclusive in his discussion of the different trains of thought). So thank you for taking the time to give me your thoughts!
Oh, and I was at the library today and requested "Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart" from another library in the region, at your recommendation. :-)