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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 9th, 2015 04:32 pmWhat did you just finish?
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise by Oscar Hijuelos. A novel about the friendship between Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley (he of the famous – or infamous – line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"). There's not much of a plot; this is rather a meandering collection of moments across the two men's lives, with a much greater focus on Stanley than Twain. Stanley's wife, Dorothy Tennant, a wealthy painter, is also a prominent character – probably moreso than Twain, which is unfortunate because of all the historical and fictional figures in this book, he was the only one I liked and enjoyed spending time with.
The book switches between epistolary style (diaries, letters, and segments of autobiographies), and more straight-forward third person limited POVs. The only real structure the book has is that it's bookended by twin retellings of the same moment in Stanley's life: when, at about age 20, he went searching for his adopted father who had disappeared in Cuba. The tellings (one by Stanley and one by Twain) differ significantly. Rather than plot, there's a strong thematic thread holding the book together; characters are constantly ruminating on death, the afterlife, fame, their legacies, and especially the inevitability of the passing of time. I don't like to read too much autobiography into novels, but it's extremely hard to avoid the reflection that this is a book written at the end of Hijuelos's life, and in fact only edited and published after his death.
I didn't like this book. The lack of any sort of plot made it feel as though it was dragging on forever, and the constant references to an Ozymandius-like passing of all grandeur just made me think of better things I could be doing with my time than reading this book. In addition, I found it incredibly hard to have any sympathy or patience with Stanley. He's a man who both served in the Confederate Army in the US Civil War and worked for King Leopold. Stanley is, in fact, responsible to some degree in the founding of the Congo Free State (trigger warning on that link for pretty much every terrible thing you can imagine; literally the URL is "Humanitarian Disaster"). And I'm not saying that Hijuelos should have changed these things! They're a matter of historical record, and if you're going to write about real people, these are the sorts of issues you must confront. But Hijuelos chooses to deal with it by... ignoring it, mostly, or including as few references as physically possible, which often involves skipping over entire years or decades of Stanley's life. If I had not already known about the problems of the Congo Free State, I could easily have finished this book without even being aware they existed. The writing itself was great, but it's hard for me to care about Stanley dating some lady when part of my mind is screaming, "ARE WE JUST NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOU WORK FOR A LITERAL GENOCIDAL MONSTER?"
And no, we never do talk about it. At least not in this book.
On the other hand, hey, it turns out Mark Twain is cooler than I'd realized! Did you know he was an active campaigner for women's suffrage, spoke out against missionaries, campaigned heavily against imperialism, particularly in the context of the Spanish-American war and the US expansion into the Phillipines, and supported unions and the labor movement? I wish he had been the focus of this book instead of Stanley.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Gemstone by Anastasia Vitsky. A f/f romance novel about Gemma, a good church lady who has a secret online life as a Mistress Lorelei, handing out strict spankings and figgings. Celine, Gemma's neighbor, has been nursing a crush on her for months. When she accidentally finds out about Mistress Lorelei, she decides to investigate the kink-scene, going so far as to contact Lorelei under a secret screenname of her own.
To complicate matters further, Gemma's best friend has set her up with confident, successful Stella, who seems like the perfect woman, except that a) she's not religious, and b) she's not into kink. Who will Gemma choose?
This is a fairly slight romance, with no particularly deep insights into characters or situations, but as long as you go into it with that understanding, it's a lot of fun. Plus, I've never seen lesbians + kinky + religious combined before, and it's worth reading just for that intersection alone. Actually, I wish there'd been more about Gemma's faith. She believes in no sex until marriage, which I found a little confusing when she was willing to act out BDSM scenes with her girlfriends (I know that's a line that professional dominatrixes often draw, but it makes more sense to me as a business transaction than a matter of faith. Clearly Gemma's activities are leading to orgasms for at least some of the participants, some of the time, so why does she – or God! – not consider that to be sex?). I also would have liked to see a bit more build-up to the happy ending. But I'm probably asking for more from this book than it really was trying to be. I wanted something light and enjoyable after the endless Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, and this was the perfect book for that.
Pimp My Rice by Nisha Katona. A cookbook focusing on rice dishes, from rice breakfasts to rice salads to rice bowls to rice smoothies to rice desserts. Usually it's actually rice which is the primary ingredient, but sometimes it's rice byproducts like rice milk or rice flour. There's a nice diversity of rice included; most of the recipes use the old standard of long-grain white rice, but there's also glutinous sticky rice, brown rice, wild rice, black rice, and red rice, as well as instructions on how to cook all of them. I didn't get quite as many useful recipes out of the book as I'd hoped (one of the banes of my existence in trying to find good cookbooks is that I'm constantly getting 200-page books that only have three recipes I actually want to make), but I have already tried out "Tea-steeped chickpea pot" (which is really just Chole Bhature with the rice mixed in) and quite enjoyed it.
Which brings me to the one thing I disliked about this book: Katona has to give weird names to each of her recipes. Instead of avgolemeno, it's "Lemony egg soup". Instead of poha, it's "Peanut & potato flattened rice". And then there's "Calcutta comforter", which I'm fairly sure is just a regular cauliflower curry, but the description makes it hard to tell. It would make it a lot easier to use the Table of Contents if she would just call things by their actual names.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Into the Beautiful North bu Luis Alberto Urrea. A sort-of retelling of The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai), except this time it's three teenage girls and one gay man from small-town Mexico, who have to cross the US border to find seven warriors to bring back to their village. Come on, isn't that the most amazing premise you've ever heard?
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise by Oscar Hijuelos. A novel about the friendship between Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley (he of the famous – or infamous – line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"). There's not much of a plot; this is rather a meandering collection of moments across the two men's lives, with a much greater focus on Stanley than Twain. Stanley's wife, Dorothy Tennant, a wealthy painter, is also a prominent character – probably moreso than Twain, which is unfortunate because of all the historical and fictional figures in this book, he was the only one I liked and enjoyed spending time with.
The book switches between epistolary style (diaries, letters, and segments of autobiographies), and more straight-forward third person limited POVs. The only real structure the book has is that it's bookended by twin retellings of the same moment in Stanley's life: when, at about age 20, he went searching for his adopted father who had disappeared in Cuba. The tellings (one by Stanley and one by Twain) differ significantly. Rather than plot, there's a strong thematic thread holding the book together; characters are constantly ruminating on death, the afterlife, fame, their legacies, and especially the inevitability of the passing of time. I don't like to read too much autobiography into novels, but it's extremely hard to avoid the reflection that this is a book written at the end of Hijuelos's life, and in fact only edited and published after his death.
I didn't like this book. The lack of any sort of plot made it feel as though it was dragging on forever, and the constant references to an Ozymandius-like passing of all grandeur just made me think of better things I could be doing with my time than reading this book. In addition, I found it incredibly hard to have any sympathy or patience with Stanley. He's a man who both served in the Confederate Army in the US Civil War and worked for King Leopold. Stanley is, in fact, responsible to some degree in the founding of the Congo Free State (trigger warning on that link for pretty much every terrible thing you can imagine; literally the URL is "Humanitarian Disaster"). And I'm not saying that Hijuelos should have changed these things! They're a matter of historical record, and if you're going to write about real people, these are the sorts of issues you must confront. But Hijuelos chooses to deal with it by... ignoring it, mostly, or including as few references as physically possible, which often involves skipping over entire years or decades of Stanley's life. If I had not already known about the problems of the Congo Free State, I could easily have finished this book without even being aware they existed. The writing itself was great, but it's hard for me to care about Stanley dating some lady when part of my mind is screaming, "ARE WE JUST NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOU WORK FOR A LITERAL GENOCIDAL MONSTER?"
And no, we never do talk about it. At least not in this book.
On the other hand, hey, it turns out Mark Twain is cooler than I'd realized! Did you know he was an active campaigner for women's suffrage, spoke out against missionaries, campaigned heavily against imperialism, particularly in the context of the Spanish-American war and the US expansion into the Phillipines, and supported unions and the labor movement? I wish he had been the focus of this book instead of Stanley.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Gemstone by Anastasia Vitsky. A f/f romance novel about Gemma, a good church lady who has a secret online life as a Mistress Lorelei, handing out strict spankings and figgings. Celine, Gemma's neighbor, has been nursing a crush on her for months. When she accidentally finds out about Mistress Lorelei, she decides to investigate the kink-scene, going so far as to contact Lorelei under a secret screenname of her own.
To complicate matters further, Gemma's best friend has set her up with confident, successful Stella, who seems like the perfect woman, except that a) she's not religious, and b) she's not into kink. Who will Gemma choose?
This is a fairly slight romance, with no particularly deep insights into characters or situations, but as long as you go into it with that understanding, it's a lot of fun. Plus, I've never seen lesbians + kinky + religious combined before, and it's worth reading just for that intersection alone. Actually, I wish there'd been more about Gemma's faith. She believes in no sex until marriage, which I found a little confusing when she was willing to act out BDSM scenes with her girlfriends (I know that's a line that professional dominatrixes often draw, but it makes more sense to me as a business transaction than a matter of faith. Clearly Gemma's activities are leading to orgasms for at least some of the participants, some of the time, so why does she – or God! – not consider that to be sex?). I also would have liked to see a bit more build-up to the happy ending. But I'm probably asking for more from this book than it really was trying to be. I wanted something light and enjoyable after the endless Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, and this was the perfect book for that.
Pimp My Rice by Nisha Katona. A cookbook focusing on rice dishes, from rice breakfasts to rice salads to rice bowls to rice smoothies to rice desserts. Usually it's actually rice which is the primary ingredient, but sometimes it's rice byproducts like rice milk or rice flour. There's a nice diversity of rice included; most of the recipes use the old standard of long-grain white rice, but there's also glutinous sticky rice, brown rice, wild rice, black rice, and red rice, as well as instructions on how to cook all of them. I didn't get quite as many useful recipes out of the book as I'd hoped (one of the banes of my existence in trying to find good cookbooks is that I'm constantly getting 200-page books that only have three recipes I actually want to make), but I have already tried out "Tea-steeped chickpea pot" (which is really just Chole Bhature with the rice mixed in) and quite enjoyed it.
Which brings me to the one thing I disliked about this book: Katona has to give weird names to each of her recipes. Instead of avgolemeno, it's "Lemony egg soup". Instead of poha, it's "Peanut & potato flattened rice". And then there's "Calcutta comforter", which I'm fairly sure is just a regular cauliflower curry, but the description makes it hard to tell. It would make it a lot easier to use the Table of Contents if she would just call things by their actual names.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Into the Beautiful North bu Luis Alberto Urrea. A sort-of retelling of The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai), except this time it's three teenage girls and one gay man from small-town Mexico, who have to cross the US border to find seven warriors to bring back to their village. Come on, isn't that the most amazing premise you've ever heard?
