Reading Wednesday
Dec. 17th, 2014 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. Short stories set in Bombay and the nearby city of Pune, set mostly in some indeterminate period in the early 1900s (horse carriages are still a thing, but many of the characters work in the film industry). The characters are mostly gangsters and sex workers, poor factory workers and corrupt police, wannabe actors and struggling intellectuals, plus a heavy dose of stories narrated by Manto himself, which seem to be at least vaguely autobiographical. The stories were interesting, but I found many of them unfulfilling: too short and without anything meaningful to say about the characters or situation. Still, overall it's worth reading.
Touched with Fire Christopher Datta. THIS BOOK. It's hard to describe my reaction to this book, because it had parts that were AMAZING and parts that were extremely lackluster. Where to even begin? Okay. It describes itself as "inspired by the true story of Ellen Craft". In actual history, Ellen Craft was a light-skinned slave in 1840s Georgia, who disguised herself as a white man and, along with her darker husband William, escaped to the North. They then moved to England to avoid being recaptured and wrote a book about their lives. In Touched with Fire, Ellen and William begin their escape in the same way, but are separated just before crossing the Mason-Dixon line, with Ellen making it to freedom and William ending up back as a slave owned by Ellen's white half-sister. Ellen then keeps up her disguise as a white man, going by Eli (the author uses masculine pronouns for her whenever she's disguised, which is a pretty interesting choice. I would have liked the book to go even further into playing with gender, but I was surprised and pleased that it went there at all), moving to Ohio, and eventually joining the Union Army with the goal of finding and rescuing William. There were a lot of battle scenes and military history in this section (which I found pretty boring; there's nothing more mind-numbing to me than looking at arrangements of troops or discussing who has the high ground) but also Eli making friends with Ulysses S. Grant, falling in love with one of her fellow (white) soldiers, and an UNBELIEVABLY FANTASTIC scene where Eli reenacts Gone with the Wind with Scarlet O'Hara as the bad guy and Eli (remember, a black woman ex-slave dressed as a Union solider) getting all the good lines:
She turned on him, dark-haired, young and slim with evil green eyes. “You’ll pay for this, you Yankee shits. I swear, just you wait,” she spat at him, her eyes blazing with hatred. “When our boys get done with you, I’ll be wearing your liver for a hat.” [...] And despite everything, despite all the reasons he had for hating her, pity touched his heart. She would never understand the wrongs she had done, and all she would know was that her world was undone and gone forever, gone with the wind. [...] “I hope you die,” she said, low and bitter.
Eli stood smoothing the lapels of his coat. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you hope, Madam."
(This scene also includes the line, "I doan know nutt’n ’bout no guns.”) I WAS HOWLING WITH LAUGHTER ON THE SUBWAY OH MY GOD. And then the book kinda ends in a canon OT3! I was iffy about the drastic rewriting of history at first, but when it's in the cause of having your heroine be a badass soldier who excels at killing dudes, hates everybody, and gets a dramatic climax of rescuing her damsel of a husband, I am TOTALLY IN SUPPORT.
I don't mean to praise the book without reservations though, because the writing style could use improvement. It was simplistic, a bit like bad YA, where everything is stated very obviously and there's no subtlety or depth. But come on! I could not love the plot more.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke (who I literally just now realized, in googling to check the spelling of her name, is a co-producer on that new show Empire! Which is cool. Maybe I'll check it out). A murder mystery about Caren Gray, a black woman who manages Belle Vie, a historical plantation in Southern Louisiana. She does this not without reservations: Belle Vie in 2010 might mostly be a setting for weddings and school tours, but it is also the plantation on which Caren's own ancestors were slaves. When the body of a Mexican immigrant, a worker in the nearby sugarcane fields, is found on Belle Vie's grounds, the investigation ends up touching on the long-ago disappearance of Caren's great-great-grandfather in those same fields.
This was an interesting book. I really liked the premise, but Caren is an extremely emotionally distant narrator, which made it hard to feel anything for the characters or the situation. I also didn't like the eventual reveal of the murderer, whose motivation was basically "crazy people gonna be crazy". I did like the use of history and the creepy tension building throughout the book, and Caren had a very subtle, slow-burn romance which I adored.
What are you currently reading?
Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. Romance in 1700s Boston! I just started this today, so I haven't formed an opinion yet.
Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. Short stories set in Bombay and the nearby city of Pune, set mostly in some indeterminate period in the early 1900s (horse carriages are still a thing, but many of the characters work in the film industry). The characters are mostly gangsters and sex workers, poor factory workers and corrupt police, wannabe actors and struggling intellectuals, plus a heavy dose of stories narrated by Manto himself, which seem to be at least vaguely autobiographical. The stories were interesting, but I found many of them unfulfilling: too short and without anything meaningful to say about the characters or situation. Still, overall it's worth reading.
Touched with Fire Christopher Datta. THIS BOOK. It's hard to describe my reaction to this book, because it had parts that were AMAZING and parts that were extremely lackluster. Where to even begin? Okay. It describes itself as "inspired by the true story of Ellen Craft". In actual history, Ellen Craft was a light-skinned slave in 1840s Georgia, who disguised herself as a white man and, along with her darker husband William, escaped to the North. They then moved to England to avoid being recaptured and wrote a book about their lives. In Touched with Fire, Ellen and William begin their escape in the same way, but are separated just before crossing the Mason-Dixon line, with Ellen making it to freedom and William ending up back as a slave owned by Ellen's white half-sister. Ellen then keeps up her disguise as a white man, going by Eli (the author uses masculine pronouns for her whenever she's disguised, which is a pretty interesting choice. I would have liked the book to go even further into playing with gender, but I was surprised and pleased that it went there at all), moving to Ohio, and eventually joining the Union Army with the goal of finding and rescuing William. There were a lot of battle scenes and military history in this section (which I found pretty boring; there's nothing more mind-numbing to me than looking at arrangements of troops or discussing who has the high ground) but also Eli making friends with Ulysses S. Grant, falling in love with one of her fellow (white) soldiers, and an UNBELIEVABLY FANTASTIC scene where Eli reenacts Gone with the Wind with Scarlet O'Hara as the bad guy and Eli (remember, a black woman ex-slave dressed as a Union solider) getting all the good lines:
She turned on him, dark-haired, young and slim with evil green eyes. “You’ll pay for this, you Yankee shits. I swear, just you wait,” she spat at him, her eyes blazing with hatred. “When our boys get done with you, I’ll be wearing your liver for a hat.” [...] And despite everything, despite all the reasons he had for hating her, pity touched his heart. She would never understand the wrongs she had done, and all she would know was that her world was undone and gone forever, gone with the wind. [...] “I hope you die,” she said, low and bitter.
Eli stood smoothing the lapels of his coat. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you hope, Madam."
(This scene also includes the line, "I doan know nutt’n ’bout no guns.”) I WAS HOWLING WITH LAUGHTER ON THE SUBWAY OH MY GOD. And then the book kinda ends in a canon OT3! I was iffy about the drastic rewriting of history at first, but when it's in the cause of having your heroine be a badass soldier who excels at killing dudes, hates everybody, and gets a dramatic climax of rescuing her damsel of a husband, I am TOTALLY IN SUPPORT.
I don't mean to praise the book without reservations though, because the writing style could use improvement. It was simplistic, a bit like bad YA, where everything is stated very obviously and there's no subtlety or depth. But come on! I could not love the plot more.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke (who I literally just now realized, in googling to check the spelling of her name, is a co-producer on that new show Empire! Which is cool. Maybe I'll check it out). A murder mystery about Caren Gray, a black woman who manages Belle Vie, a historical plantation in Southern Louisiana. She does this not without reservations: Belle Vie in 2010 might mostly be a setting for weddings and school tours, but it is also the plantation on which Caren's own ancestors were slaves. When the body of a Mexican immigrant, a worker in the nearby sugarcane fields, is found on Belle Vie's grounds, the investigation ends up touching on the long-ago disappearance of Caren's great-great-grandfather in those same fields.
This was an interesting book. I really liked the premise, but Caren is an extremely emotionally distant narrator, which made it hard to feel anything for the characters or the situation. I also didn't like the eventual reveal of the murderer, whose motivation was basically "crazy people gonna be crazy". I did like the use of history and the creepy tension building throughout the book, and Caren had a very subtle, slow-burn romance which I adored.
What are you currently reading?
Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. Romance in 1700s Boston! I just started this today, so I haven't formed an opinion yet.
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Date: 2014-12-18 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-12-18 09:07 pm (UTC)