Book Reviews
May. 6th, 2009 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI decided to participate in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc this year, which, if you haven't heard of it, is pretty simple: try to read fifty books written by authors of color over the course of a year. Considering that I read over a hundred books last year, I figured it would be very sad if I couldn't manage to read at least half that written by people of color (although, looking back over what I did read last year, a distressingly large majority of the books did have white authors; I was nowhere near fifty books by authors of color). There are many reasons to participate in the Fifty Books challenge, from using what books you buy to protest a heavily white-dominated publishing industry, to being interested in hearing about other cultures from that culture's point of view, to simply thinking it sounds like fun. There are several excellent posts about the topic linked to here.
The second part of the challenge is writing reviews of the books you read, so that other people can hear about the awesome. And so, the books by authors of color that I've read so far this year:
1. Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
This novel is about four women who went to high school together; twenty years later, one of them is murdered and the others discover she's been working as a prostitute. There are multiple narrators, including diaries and letters, and none of them is particularly trustworthy, so there's always a question of who's telling the truth in regard to their feelings and motivations. Really interesting look at gender, beauty, and competition, but I couldn't quite get into the book. I never felt much connection or understanding for any of the characters, which is the same problem I had with Kirino's previous book, Out. I think her writing may be a bit too chilly for me.
2. Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After
Things I have learned this year: Alexandre Dumas was biracial! I didn't realize this fact until I saw him on someone else's 50 POC book list. His grandmother was a slave in Haiti. Anyway, this book is the sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I absolutely adored when I read it a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, this sequel did not quite live up to the original. Too many needlessly complicated early 1600s politics with a cast of hundreds, too little funny swashbuckling for my tastes. Also, my goodness, but Mr. Dumas hated Oliver Cromwell with the fiery heat of a dying sun, didn't he? Not that I'm a fan of him, necessarily- I am pretty unemotional about the entire issue of Oliver Cromwell, in fact- but it's still pretty strange to see him written as Satan Incarnate. On the other hand, this book does feature a crazy, evil, villain with a secret identity who disguises himself as a monk to kill people, so it does have a few points in the "trashy fun" category.
3. Shereen Ratnagar, Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age
There's really no reason why anyone not studying the third millennium bce would read this book, as it consists almost entirely of charts and long lists of economic items and translations of cuneiform taxation tablets. Um, if anyone who does study the third millennium bce happens to be reading this review, it's an excellent resource! A fantastic gathering of information from a huge range of sources, and it's totally going on my bibliographies for comparative exams! But this book is really intended for an academic audience, and I have to admit would be pretty boring to others.
4. Dalai Lama, How to Practice
I'm very interested in Buddhism, and have read several books on issues of Buddhist theology or philosophy. This book, which is the first I've read by the Dalai Lama, focuses instead on Buddhist rituals and practices, particularly meditation. The author goes to great extents to make the tips he gives applicable to people from any religion; for instance, he mentions that when mediating, instead of focusing on a mantra, a Christian could choose to focus on an image of Jesus. I particularly liked the chapter of the book when he went into detail about the famous "form is emptiness, emptiness form" sutra, explaining the context and theological meanings of the saying.
5. Lalita Tademy, Cane River
The back cover described this as "a female version of Roots", and that's pretty good, I suppose. The narrative follows multiple generations of a family, focusing on the women, who live in rural Louisiana at first as slaves and later as free, and covers most of the 1800s and early 1900s. Although this is a novel, it's heavily based on the author's own family history, and makes use of real historical records. I really enjoyed reading this book. Although the writing, on a sentence-to-sentence level, was perhaps not the greatest, the characters were very well-drawn, and the plot was very suspenseful, if sometimes a bit melodramatic. A very good book.
6. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
This is a novel-ized retelling of the Mahabharata, focusing on the character of Panchaali. I read this off of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija's suggestion. This was my first real introduction to the Mahabharata; although I knew a bit of the basics, I'd never actually read any version of it before this. I really enjoyed this book; there were several funny bits, particularly at the beginning, but also really lovely descriptions, and some great emotional moments. Panchaali makes an excellent narrator; she's very cynical, which heads a bit more into bitter as she grows older, but still allows for some moving insights. A few parts of this book felt a bit rushed, but I suppose that's too be expected when you're trying to condense the entire Mahabharata into a normal-sized novel. Overall, I very much recommend it.
7. Wendy Lee, Happy Family
I was so excited for this book! It has such an intriguing premise: white, upper class New York City family adopts Chinese baby, hires recent Chinese immigrant to be the baby's nanny. All sorts of questions of family and identity to be explored. Sadly, I felt the book never lived up to its premise; although people sometimes mention the obvious race issues, they usually don't do much more than mention the fact that, hey, they exist. I would have liked more exploration. However, it's not a bad book, and the awkward relationships between the characters are written well, and I thought the descriptions of New York landscape were very pretty.
8. Randa Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big In This?
My favorite book of the year so far! I adored this one. A YA novel about an Australian Muslim teenage girl who attends a very WASP-y (or the Australian equivalent) prep school who decides to wear the hijab full-time. Although the book has a bit of a problem with info-dumping facts about Islam into its narrative (the intended audience is clearly someone who does not know what the word hijab means, for instance, much less other details about Islam), the main character, Amal, is funny and smart and sassy and is basically my favorite narrator ever, and I would read her discussing anything. I particularly love her lists of cons and pros to make difficult decisions. A fantastic book.
50books_poc this year, which, if you haven't heard of it, is pretty simple: try to read fifty books written by authors of color over the course of a year. Considering that I read over a hundred books last year, I figured it would be very sad if I couldn't manage to read at least half that written by people of color (although, looking back over what I did read last year, a distressingly large majority of the books did have white authors; I was nowhere near fifty books by authors of color). There are many reasons to participate in the Fifty Books challenge, from using what books you buy to protest a heavily white-dominated publishing industry, to being interested in hearing about other cultures from that culture's point of view, to simply thinking it sounds like fun. There are several excellent posts about the topic linked to here.The second part of the challenge is writing reviews of the books you read, so that other people can hear about the awesome. And so, the books by authors of color that I've read so far this year:
1. Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
This novel is about four women who went to high school together; twenty years later, one of them is murdered and the others discover she's been working as a prostitute. There are multiple narrators, including diaries and letters, and none of them is particularly trustworthy, so there's always a question of who's telling the truth in regard to their feelings and motivations. Really interesting look at gender, beauty, and competition, but I couldn't quite get into the book. I never felt much connection or understanding for any of the characters, which is the same problem I had with Kirino's previous book, Out. I think her writing may be a bit too chilly for me.
2. Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After
Things I have learned this year: Alexandre Dumas was biracial! I didn't realize this fact until I saw him on someone else's 50 POC book list. His grandmother was a slave in Haiti. Anyway, this book is the sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I absolutely adored when I read it a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, this sequel did not quite live up to the original. Too many needlessly complicated early 1600s politics with a cast of hundreds, too little funny swashbuckling for my tastes. Also, my goodness, but Mr. Dumas hated Oliver Cromwell with the fiery heat of a dying sun, didn't he? Not that I'm a fan of him, necessarily- I am pretty unemotional about the entire issue of Oliver Cromwell, in fact- but it's still pretty strange to see him written as Satan Incarnate. On the other hand, this book does feature a crazy, evil, villain with a secret identity who disguises himself as a monk to kill people, so it does have a few points in the "trashy fun" category.
3. Shereen Ratnagar, Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age
There's really no reason why anyone not studying the third millennium bce would read this book, as it consists almost entirely of charts and long lists of economic items and translations of cuneiform taxation tablets. Um, if anyone who does study the third millennium bce happens to be reading this review, it's an excellent resource! A fantastic gathering of information from a huge range of sources, and it's totally going on my bibliographies for comparative exams! But this book is really intended for an academic audience, and I have to admit would be pretty boring to others.
4. Dalai Lama, How to Practice
I'm very interested in Buddhism, and have read several books on issues of Buddhist theology or philosophy. This book, which is the first I've read by the Dalai Lama, focuses instead on Buddhist rituals and practices, particularly meditation. The author goes to great extents to make the tips he gives applicable to people from any religion; for instance, he mentions that when mediating, instead of focusing on a mantra, a Christian could choose to focus on an image of Jesus. I particularly liked the chapter of the book when he went into detail about the famous "form is emptiness, emptiness form" sutra, explaining the context and theological meanings of the saying.
5. Lalita Tademy, Cane River
The back cover described this as "a female version of Roots", and that's pretty good, I suppose. The narrative follows multiple generations of a family, focusing on the women, who live in rural Louisiana at first as slaves and later as free, and covers most of the 1800s and early 1900s. Although this is a novel, it's heavily based on the author's own family history, and makes use of real historical records. I really enjoyed reading this book. Although the writing, on a sentence-to-sentence level, was perhaps not the greatest, the characters were very well-drawn, and the plot was very suspenseful, if sometimes a bit melodramatic. A very good book.
6. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
This is a novel-ized retelling of the Mahabharata, focusing on the character of Panchaali. I read this off of
rachelmanija's suggestion. This was my first real introduction to the Mahabharata; although I knew a bit of the basics, I'd never actually read any version of it before this. I really enjoyed this book; there were several funny bits, particularly at the beginning, but also really lovely descriptions, and some great emotional moments. Panchaali makes an excellent narrator; she's very cynical, which heads a bit more into bitter as she grows older, but still allows for some moving insights. A few parts of this book felt a bit rushed, but I suppose that's too be expected when you're trying to condense the entire Mahabharata into a normal-sized novel. Overall, I very much recommend it.7. Wendy Lee, Happy Family
I was so excited for this book! It has such an intriguing premise: white, upper class New York City family adopts Chinese baby, hires recent Chinese immigrant to be the baby's nanny. All sorts of questions of family and identity to be explored. Sadly, I felt the book never lived up to its premise; although people sometimes mention the obvious race issues, they usually don't do much more than mention the fact that, hey, they exist. I would have liked more exploration. However, it's not a bad book, and the awkward relationships between the characters are written well, and I thought the descriptions of New York landscape were very pretty.
8. Randa Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big In This?
My favorite book of the year so far! I adored this one. A YA novel about an Australian Muslim teenage girl who attends a very WASP-y (or the Australian equivalent) prep school who decides to wear the hijab full-time. Although the book has a bit of a problem with info-dumping facts about Islam into its narrative (the intended audience is clearly someone who does not know what the word hijab means, for instance, much less other details about Islam), the main character, Amal, is funny and smart and sassy and is basically my favorite narrator ever, and I would read her discussing anything. I particularly love her lists of cons and pros to make difficult decisions. A fantastic book.
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Historical note.
Date: 2009-05-06 10:08 pm (UTC)Re: Historical note.
Date: 2009-05-08 09:03 pm (UTC)It just strikes me much like Hugo's hero-worship of Napoleon or Tolstoy's conviction that the same guy was the anti-Christ (and a sloppy, fat one at that). It's hard for me to feel much deep passion about such historical figures one way or the other, particularly since I'm used to hearing about them in a just-the-facts way from history textbooks.
Re: Historical note.
Date: 2009-05-08 09:11 pm (UTC)Apparently, the story goes that when our old taoiseach/prime minister went to congratulate Tony Blair on becoming prime minister, he walked out when he saw the portrait of Cromwell above Blair's desk and refused to go back in until it was taken down. Like all good stories, it's been embellished (the taoiseach made his great displeasure known to Blair instead of walking out), but I find it amusing nonetheless.
Re: Historical note.
Date: 2009-05-08 10:10 pm (UTC)Re: Historical note.
Date: 2009-05-08 09:51 pm (UTC)I was simply pointing out that Dumas pere's blind hatred of Cromwell, like my own*, may have historical roots specific to him.
*Cromwell was howling bloody mad, you know. And don't even get me started on that little shit Andrew Johnson! ;)
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:08 pm (UTC)Randomly, we're in the middle of doing a translated works promotion at work, so it's three for two on authors translated into English, including Dumas and many others. It's been a pretty good incentive for stoking up and there are many authors of colour included. It was obviously not at all linked to RaceFail, but the timing was ironic.
Edit: Does My Head Look Big in This? is fabulous! I read it recently and adored it. I have to read her other book and she has a new one coming out fairly soon, too, I believe.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 08:59 pm (UTC)I've got Ten Things I Hate About Me on request at the library, but it just came out in the US this year, so I think it might be a while before her new one makes it over here, alas.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:48 pm (UTC)2. I can't remember if I read Twenty Years Later or not, when I was on a Musketeers kick. There's supposed to be 5 books in the Musketeer series, but they're not all published or available in English. Or something. It's been a while since I've read Dumas.
6. The protag in the Divakaruni sounds interesting. I plan on checking if my library has it.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 08:56 pm (UTC)2. Yeah, the Three Musketeers series is quite confusing. I very much would like to read The Man in the Iron Mask, because it seems awesome in a silly melodrama type of way, but there's another two books in the series between me and it, and I'm not sure I can deal with that many hundreds of pages for a payoff that may or may not be worth it.
6. I liked her quite a lot! I very much recommend it.