Stuff I read and mostly disliked. But the next few things I’m reading = all female authors. Ey!

Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson

Praying Craig Thompson doesn’t read this - I feel like he has an hourly Google alert on his name despite his own better judgment - but I want this guy to shut up so much. I realise self-centeredness is the nature of his disease but Craig Thompson’s publishers let him get way too caught up in being Craig Thompson. Beautiful drawings but his constant nimrod editorialising about the “culture” around him was just so fucked. He seems to have this approach to non-American-Midwest places that recalls the guy at the party who laughs WAY too hard when Sikhs make jokes about tans. Dude also is a secret (not-so-secret?) misogynist, of the “why won’t those bitches sleep with me I’m such a nice guy” school. Sorry, I know this was rude. Whatever, I spent like an hour of my life on this guy’s terrible diary!

A Sickness In the Family by One Of Those Vertigo Mystery Artists

Yawn. Mostly predictable mystery tale. I think there might’ve been one or two interesting things in it somewhere but no so interesting that I haven’t already forgotten what they were.

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura

I did love this. It was just so adorable. I wish it’d been written/drawn by girlz but whateer.

Snaked by Clifford Meth and Rufus Dayglo

Rufus Dayglo! Haha, awesome. Book was a snooze though. I am unmoved by pseudo-political stuff that feigns nobility in being something that can be “read both ways” (i.e. as anti-conservative, or as anti-liberal, kind of thing). And anything that’s like “CONSPIRACY: that is all.” …you’re not trying, and you’ve got your head up your ass, and get bent.

Big Questions by Anders Nilsen

Good. Overhyped. Wouldn’t read it again.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

I liked a book! Cue ticker tape parade. Spoilers but: my exploded head is still being scraped off walls for the way this guy managed to pull off such an impacting examination of race, class and faith in a story where a man in an anachronistic suit gets pregnant by a swamp thing and figures he’d better shoot up some heroin to nip swampbaby in the bud. Jesus.

Sidenote, the problem is, I wonder what your average American Book Award Brought Me Here reader would’ve been thinking as they set the book down. I wonder if there’re people reading it as a narrative outlining why people need to work harder to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and that’s worrying.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

First Eugenides book! Fun and trashy and fun but so awful too. First off, weird to read after Big Machine (Why is everyone white? EVEN IN INDIA?), second, weird to read as a female grad school applicant. Madeleine was just so gutwrenchingly “smart for a girl”, you know? Disheartening, Eugenides. I get that she doesn’t have to stand in for all girls here, and “it’s the 80s”, and she was “human”, which I believed, for a while. But she wasn’t balanced out by a single other female character that could hold their own, intellectually, across from a Leonard or Mitchell or Thurston. That Madeleine just haaad to be extraordinarily beautiful, and patient and motherly while also prone to (you’re-sexy-when-you’re-mad!) feminine irrationalities, I could forgive…for a little while. It’s just that I can’t help but be uncomfortable when both other (male) protagonists are given so much depth and respect from their author, because you get tricked into thinking Eugenides respects Madeleine as a person, too. Then you realise, nah, he seems to just want to fuck her. And the lit theory and parodied academia of the book’s first third was the strongest part of it all, but petered out so very quickly. I don’t think I’ll read any more of this guy.

That movie Life in a Day got Jeff and I wondering who was doing the filming in all the “look we’re so poor but also we have a RED ONE” scenes. Because I’d perform misery, too, if it meant I might get some free money out of a douche with a fancy flipcam. That, and all of the people whose greatest fears were historical insignificance (you know what you’re probably MORE afraid of? Guns. Maybe.) made the movie more accurately Life in a Day According to Rich People.

Which got us thinking about how there should be a highscool World Issues textbook called The Global South According to the Facebook Pages of American Kids. “Africa may be billed as a continent by most maps but in actuality it is a single country. It has several villages in it including Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda. In Africa, everyone is a very young child, except for the adults, who are similar to wildlife in that they are only photographed from afar, for their colourful plumage. Nobody is fat, everybody’s head is shaved, and white teenagers are worshipped like Gods. Professional careers such as teacher, doctor and wildlife researcher require no formal training whatsoever. You just have to be non-African and able to afford a plane ticket. School days consist exclusively of holding hands, smiling and posing for photographs. There are no bathrooms, there are only holes being dug endlessly for toilets that will never be completed lest there be no more reason left to go to Africa.” etc.

This morning I did a Statistical Analysis Of My Bookshelf, in that I looked at my bookshelf and counted stuff. I own 11 fiction books written by women (discounting children’s lit here). Eleven. Of those, I’ve read seven. Six were hype-books, one was for a class in high school. Most of these books, I didn’t really like.

So, feeling like a douche, I turned to boyfriend’s-ex-girlfriend (strike one!) who is a PhD student (strike two!) in Can Lit (strike three!). Well no, no strikes… from what I know of her, she’s awesome. And I admitted I wasn’t putting my money where my mouth was, book purchasing-wise, and asked for recommendations. And she gave me some names of women, each name followed by a string of “post”-something-“ist”s to describe what I’d be reading. Most recommendations were poetry, other stuff looked overly academic, others seemed to be part of the “raped on the prairies” CanLit canon. Then there was Alice Munro, who bugs me, Flannery O’Connor, who’s fine, and the book Gate to Women’s Country which would be part of my Bookshelf Statistical Analysis as 12th Book Written By A Woman if I hadn’t gotten rid of it because goddamn it Sheri Tepper doors OPEN they don’t YAWN SEDUCTIVELY and people WALK they don’t SLINK NERVOUSLY and you don’t need 20+ pages just to tell me that it’s friggin’ RAINING.

And then I was like, man, I’m not the easiest person to recommend things to, am I.

So I thought about the women authors I do like: Zadie Smith. Jennifer Egan. Jeannette Turner Hospital, anomalously, because my reasons for liking Smith and Egan? “They don’t write like girls.” I am the worst.

Maybe this is just a taste thing. I like boymannish manboy showoff authors, DFW, Pynchon, that sort of thing. And women don’t write those kinds of books for a lot of reasons -

Bracket! Small sampling of these reasons, off the top of my head:

a) lack of encouragement to be a jack-of-all-trades-including-advanced-physics-even-though-you-are-a-fiction-author lest you become “intimidating”

b) the “women should be seen and not heard” thing. When foregoing brevity for the sake of nuance, Sady Doyle writes 1500 words and she’s “ranting”, whereas someone with a penis does the same kind of thing and it’s “long-form”. Even just look what I said about Sheri Tepper. Sorry, Tepper. Still hate your book though.

c) the “women WILL be seen AND heard” thing w/r/t blatant displays of emotion. Men learn how to let emotions simmer and be subtle ‘cause “dark” and “brooding”s “hot” but “wimp” isn’t. Women are taught to EXPECT themselves to let their emotions control them and be totally not-subtle because, periods! So even if being hysterical is bad, it’s not like women have other societally defined options for having feelings. What is a stony-faced, restrained-when-in-pain female like in common media narratives? Oh, that’s right: they’re the one who has that furious breakdown later because they really, really want a baby. Just think female authors in movies vs. male ones. Which one cries more?  

c) ii. This is, notably, separate from women being perceived as “too emotional” when they’re really not, which is obviously a (possibly greater) problem.

d) Do mainstream female authors take fewer risks? There is the possibility that woman authors feel they should write like other women, or write “for” women, because that is in many ways the Easy Way Out. Don’t stick your neck out. There are more ways to get trashed for what you do in your career, if you’re a female, than there are if you’re male. Do mainstream publishers even accept risky stuff written by women who haven’t already established some popularity?

There are so many more reasons I want to cry…close bracket.

But then, as much as I legitimately enjoy reading the menboyz, there’s obviously other factors at play. For example, socially, I can talk to lots of people about DFW or Pynchon, because we accept they’re Important. I can usually only talk to women or niche-ish people about Janette Turner Hospital, and not only are reading women harder to find where I am, talking to women also provides me with less social capital, where I am. For real. That is the fucking WORST. How does anyone in this world believe sexism no longer exists.

Here’s where things get the most sad, for me. Every single one of the above things I’ve written about What The Deal Is With Female Authors and What They Write and How People Feel About Them and How They Feel About Themselves might be true. It might be not. In fact, it PROBABLY isn’t. Like I said, I don’t reaaaally read women, and, as a woman, I don’t write fiction. But. These things feel true. They’re true for me. 

When I was a kid, I wanted to write for a living. 

I don’t anymore.

Part of that is realising I’m not a great writer, and that’s fine. But is another part of this me not bothering to develop the ability to write well, because of the absolute terror I am stricken with when thinking about the idea of Being A Female Author? Because girls like me would grow up not to bother reading anything I’ve written, for all kinds of reasons? This is similar to the way I stopped taking math and science in grade eleven because I wanted to “be better at being a girl”. This is literally in an old diary of mine.

In practice, I have a very nice life and I’ve been able to do all the things I’ve seriously wanted to do and being a girl hasn’t been a problem at all. I like being a girl, it rules. I’m going to take control of the whole reading-other-women thing, because I’m missing out on great books because of my own dummyness.

BUT other-me, in other-universe-where-sexism-never-was, has no problem whatsoever reading books by people of whatever gender and does not write blog posts about this because it’s a normal thing for everyone everywhere in other-universe. Other-me might know a lot about math and science, and spend time writing fiction and showing it to people, because none of that stuff seemed nearly as scary in other-universe-where-sexism-never-was. And from the perspective of other-me in other-universe-where-sexism-never-was, my life was effectively ruined, in some of the most major ways that a life can be “ruined”, because I felt uncomfortable about the way I was born.

Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

I love her, this was so cute… that’s about it.

Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

Calculated, emotionless looking art and whiny whiners whining. If you are going to make me read about an asshole, you need to have a very good reason. “I briefly inserted a couple questions about race” is just not a good enough one in this case. Oh and the title was ironic because I got this megahyped Book Of The Year for fifty cents in the rejects-of-the-rejects bin at Chapters. It read like one of those newspaper cartoons that doesn’t even merit a Sunday Colour Comics spot and is only enjoyable for the unintentional humour that comes from skimming three-out-of-context panels one day by accident. Actually I did like Alice’s girlfriend at the end, she was kind of cool.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

I found this…frustrating. I’m still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. There are times where I’d put this book down for a bit and didn’t know what to because everything I’d usually do seemed so evil and shallow and, eh, “Media”. No wait yeah it was probably a good thing. Reading this during the London riots was pretty messed up though. I think this fell into the collapsed-accordion trap of a lot of sci-fi, where things were simplified to prove “points” but as a reader you still find yourself thinking “I don’t think THAT will ever actually happen…”.

The problem is that didn’t just apply to the futuretech stuff, it also applied to the stuff about immigrant parents, which seemed, to me, simplified to try and make some expansive statement about the immigrant experience…but it’s like…that’s not MY experience, as am immigrant daughter? And I can only imagine how uncomfortable it’d feel to be Korean and to be that much more irked by Shteyngart trying to write my life. I mean, I thought he did a good job, but we’re not Asian, so it’s probably a bad thing that I believed he did a good job? Ehhh I’m perplexed.

And the non-lead characters were too simplistically “bad” a lot of the time.

Nah whatever this book was great at least because it’s stressed me out more than anything I’ve read this year.

The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heiti

Cutesy, twee, enjoyable enough. Full of really good communication excercises to borrow for work. A bit awful at times, though (for instance, “a kind of racism that was invisible to all of us”?!?). I wouldn’t recommend it to average adults because it has the Miranda July curse of feeling like a young-white-rich-kids-only club where for reasons you just can’t put your finger on you feel like you don’t belong, while reading it. But I think it’d be a great graduation gift for a high schooler, and I’d recommend it to highschool teachers, too. With the reminder to be really critical and take nothing seriously.

Spoilers below, pretty sure.

Adverbs by Daniel Handler

Did not finish, duh. Might, later, if I have a lot of time to kill.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

This was awesome, but I think I’d need a second reading, preferably not while carsick, to understand the weird Weather-Undergroundish stuff. It was sweet to read about her lit-road trips while tripping US roads. Some reviewer said she had a “tin ear” for prose; that’s balls, the way it was written was just perfect. Weird, dreamy, appropriately teenager-ish/proffessor’s-kid turns of phrase that I still think about all the time, even if the plot didn’t really get to me. Anxiously await her next book.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Read this when I was about thirteen and didn’t remember or, probably, understand it. This time ‘round I just felt the prose wasn’t as fun as his other stuff, it was just sort of flatly functional. Stephen Dedalus is a total pissant. But it was pretty good, got to flag a lot of pages for thinking about nationalism/separatism/myth stuff.

Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre

Vernon God Little’s a solid favourite but this one wasn’t as good. I think of it kind of as a way better kind of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. Everywhere Little Bee did the Brit-meets-global-South thing wrong (overplayed third-world naivety & ignorance, “struggling” non-white characters with “pasts” portrayed as morally flawless, Product (RED) style WASPishness, etc.: the usual stuff really) Ludmila’s Broken English didn’t entirely fuck up. Though it came close, at times. Ludmila’s beautiful-ness was awkwardly overemphasized, and the treatment of disability w/r/t the twins was a little messed up at times… but overall not too horrible. I liked it, I couldn’t not like it, even when certain pages contained upwards of six bad figures of speech for “so-and-so looked at so-and-so” (lots of eyes being “hung on” or “thrown at” people).

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Dunno what to say other than really, really good. Should be required youth reading. I wonder, though, about all the almost forcedly high brow intertextuality in all “serious” graphic novels. I mean, it’s well-placed and works most everywhere you see it, but it almost seems like there’s still this horror that words & pictures can’t be sophisticated & literary yet without a couple nods at the High School English canon for good measure.

The Unwritten (first 3 trades) by Mike Carey & Peter Gross

I just love this. Engrossing, painfully clever stuff that gets the Internet and fandom parody stuff dead on. It’s just a really, really tight series, and smartly but not obnoxiously topical. Way too excited for the next trade.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Nother re-read. It’s just too good. Found newly & unexpectedly heartbreaking moments the second time round even when the moments that killed me the first read still felt freshly moving. Somehow this book’s tied up pretty tightly with Oscar Wao in my head in that it’s earnestly moving in the same non-manipulative ways, plus deals with globalisation, technology, and Science Fiction as Science Fact in the same smart background-is-foreground ways. Oh, also, it’s weird to witness 9/11 becoming American culture’s new nuclear bomb in that it’s lingering in every hyped American book released so far this millenium, in stage whispers or loud silences. And thinking bout how if I believe the Atomic Age gave us the Culture of Containment and all its etc., then I probably do in some way believe in the post-9/11, post-Facebook, nothing-is-contained age being the “Culture of…”, you know, whatever the trend pieces make up. And finally, I am weirded out by how jam-packed this book was with suicide. Egan is near fifty, right? That seems old for someone who’s written a book that seemed, to me, to deal with suicide in that youngish, “well don’t people just have to get tired of how overstimulating life can be?” kind of way. I think I’m a little tired of suicide stuff. Sure, people offing themselves can work as a strong metaphor or jump off point for whatever a book’s helping you think or feel. But too often suicide’s just a heartlessly employed literary crutch because it’s so extreme and so scary and it gets you and you can’t NOT contemplate it and everything that comes with it. It’s like forcing your reader to stand on the edge of a cliff and think about how small they are and how easily they can end themselves and how little they matter yet how powerful they really are. The suicide-sublime. But it bothers me, because self-murder’s not a literary device; it’s a thing, people do it, it’s horrible for everyone. It’s obviously not as bad as using rape as a writing tool, though, which I’m sure is being done as well, so. Anyway.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Maybe I didn’t get it, but I just…didn’t…like? It was pulpy. I’m not sure what people get out of this book that they couldn’t get from a Jaycee Dugard/Elizabeth Smart book/memoir or a psychology book on feral children/childhood development in isolation. At least then the voyeurism comes with a little more honesty on the part of the reader (though possibly less honesty on the writer’s part…dunno). I came close to liking the book during the moments that were based on the idea that, to Jack, the world is the prison, and the bits that ambivalently questioned what “normal” is and why were interesting when they came up briefly, but I found all that stuff to be few & far between. I suppose people would’ve been really offended and confused if the book had framed the escape as (for Jack) 100% horrible and sad rather than also beautiful and redemptive (and sappy! Oh God, the sap). That’s fair (maybe only when Room-situations don’t actually HAPPEN in the world should they be used as fiction?) but even if I don’t seriously begrudge the book for being the way that it was, I still wasn’t a big fan of it.

Now midway through Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Into the sci fi that’s not marketed as such lately, I guess, but are there any recent books that aren’t in some way sci-fi?

catladysoul:

“It’s funny because the way that kind of stuff is talked about on blogs is so black-and-white. It’s all cut-and-dry identity politics. ‘Is he straight or is he gay?’ Or, ‘This is your third gay movie - come out already!’ And all based on, gay or straight, based on the idea that your object of affection decides your sexuality. There are lots of other reasons to be interested in gay characters than wanting myself to go out and have sex with guys. And there are also lots of other aspects about these characters that I’m interested in, in addition to their sexuality. So, in some ways it’s coincidental, in other ways it’s not. I mean, I’ve played a gay man who’s living in the ’60s and ’70s, a gay man who we depicted in the ’50s, and one being in the ’20s. And those were all periods when to be gay, at least being gay in public, was much more difficult. Part of what I’m interested in is how these people who were living anti-normative lifestyles contended with opposition. Or, you know what, maybe I’m just gay.”

—

James Franco (via gizelle-f)

Or maybe he ought to cut it out with the oppression-tourism and let gay actors play gay characters.

- grooving along to voldemorts triumphant shimmy-thrust after he thinks he’s killed Harry

- many shoutings of “pedophile!” (e. g. when Dumblybore is all “you’re a beautiful boy Harry” in the glowy 9 3/4, when voldy and Harry clutch each other & make out in the sky, when slughorn is talking to dean at the end and is all like “such a big man!!!”, etc)

- lots of “look out behind you”s

- “YOUR BABY HAS FINGERNAILS” when we see the bloody voldemort fetus

- everyone yelling “not my daughter you bitch”, at least along with mrs weasley, but probably throughout

- some kind of comment on how fat they make old-Ron in the epilogue (or something about how old-Ron IS Steve buscemi)

Richard Yates by Tao Lin

Why did I even read this? Don’t I pride myself on having better judgment than that? Isn’t this book just an overlong tract explaining why, exactly, Tao Lin would be the worst to date?

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (HATE to ttyppe that nnamme.)

Beautiful amazing beautiful favourite. Every single top ten list of 2009 couldn’t possibly be wrong, I guess. I was concerned, at the beginning, about the way the book was going to treat its female characters but that was rectified pretty quickly. This book is just the bestest. I may have cried a little bit at the end but shut up whatever no I didn’t even come close to crying there were just onions around or something.

Adverbs by Daniel Handler

It’s a nice enough book that I’m not cancelling my plans to get a VFD eye tattooed on my ankle, but I’m not terribly desperate to finish Adverbs, either, so I probably never will. I feel mildly guilty about that. Wait, no, I don’t.

I don’t know what I’m going to read next. Probably Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I’m still deciding.