Reading Wednesday
Feb. 11th, 2015 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Trade Me by Courtney Milan. A modern-day billionaire romance starring Tina Chen, a Chinese immigrant who's dealing with a dual major, holding a job, and a family that can barely remember/manage to pay the electricity bill, for which she feels responsible. She's classmates with Blake Reynolds, the only son of a self-made CEO of an Apple/Microsoft/Amazon type company, who is attending college against the wishes of his father (who feels it's a waste of time since, you know, he dropped out, so why doesn't everyone). Blake has his own, more subtle problems, which mostly circle around needing to spend some time away from his father's company. After Tina and Blake get into an argument in class about food stamps, they reach an agreement to trade lives for the rest of the semester – which includes Tina pretending to be Blake's girlfriend because let's embrace all the tropes, why not. Of course, knowledge is gained, minds are changed, and they fall in love.
I liked this much more than I ever expected to like a billionaire romance, but then, it's not really much of a billionaire romance. Blake's wealth is almost incidental to the plot, and there's no lavishly detailed opulence (even when you would expect it! For example, Tina moves into Blake's apartment, which I assume must be impressive, but there's no description of it at all). It also goes into several subjects I really did not expect (I never thought I'd see Falun Gong turn up in a romance novel!), and one of the secondary characters is a transwoman. So, all of that was cool. On the other hand, there was something about the writing style that didn't quite work for me. It was too casual, too simplistic; I think Milan was probably just trying to capture the voice of the two characters (the novel's in first person POV, switching between Tina and Blake), but I preferred the style in her historical novels.
Overall a good book, and even if I didn't like it quite as much as her Brother Sinister series, I'm still looking forward to the sequel.
Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca Herzig. Despite the general feel of the cover and summary, this isn't a pop science book, but an academic history of body hair with a fairly restricted focus: the US, from the late 1700s to now. All of which is fine, I just would have liked that to be clearer when I was deciding to read it. Nonetheless, it's a pretty fascinating topic. Herzig describes not just the history of how to get rid of unwanted hair – the invention of safety razors! the bizarre fad in the 1910s and 20s for using x-rays to make hair fall out! (Surprise, that did not go well for the patients.) Snake oil depilatories! Modern day lasers and waxes! The unexpected role of industrial meat butchering! – but also why some hair is declared unwanted in the first place, a topic that ends up relating to ideas of the body influenced by race, gender (particularly femininity), sexuality, health, and class. There's a ton of neat little facts in here – for example, the main place women in the 1700s worried about being hairless was their foreheads – but Herzig also manages to relate body hair to big, important factors of life in the past and now. A really well-done book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. Someone recommended this to me as surprisingly fascinating, and I shortly thereafter stumbled across it in a used book store, so I'm finally getting around to actually reading it.
Trade Me by Courtney Milan. A modern-day billionaire romance starring Tina Chen, a Chinese immigrant who's dealing with a dual major, holding a job, and a family that can barely remember/manage to pay the electricity bill, for which she feels responsible. She's classmates with Blake Reynolds, the only son of a self-made CEO of an Apple/Microsoft/Amazon type company, who is attending college against the wishes of his father (who feels it's a waste of time since, you know, he dropped out, so why doesn't everyone). Blake has his own, more subtle problems, which mostly circle around needing to spend some time away from his father's company. After Tina and Blake get into an argument in class about food stamps, they reach an agreement to trade lives for the rest of the semester – which includes Tina pretending to be Blake's girlfriend because let's embrace all the tropes, why not. Of course, knowledge is gained, minds are changed, and they fall in love.
I liked this much more than I ever expected to like a billionaire romance, but then, it's not really much of a billionaire romance. Blake's wealth is almost incidental to the plot, and there's no lavishly detailed opulence (even when you would expect it! For example, Tina moves into Blake's apartment, which I assume must be impressive, but there's no description of it at all). It also goes into several subjects I really did not expect (I never thought I'd see Falun Gong turn up in a romance novel!), and one of the secondary characters is a transwoman. So, all of that was cool. On the other hand, there was something about the writing style that didn't quite work for me. It was too casual, too simplistic; I think Milan was probably just trying to capture the voice of the two characters (the novel's in first person POV, switching between Tina and Blake), but I preferred the style in her historical novels.
Overall a good book, and even if I didn't like it quite as much as her Brother Sinister series, I'm still looking forward to the sequel.
Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca Herzig. Despite the general feel of the cover and summary, this isn't a pop science book, but an academic history of body hair with a fairly restricted focus: the US, from the late 1700s to now. All of which is fine, I just would have liked that to be clearer when I was deciding to read it. Nonetheless, it's a pretty fascinating topic. Herzig describes not just the history of how to get rid of unwanted hair – the invention of safety razors! the bizarre fad in the 1910s and 20s for using x-rays to make hair fall out! (Surprise, that did not go well for the patients.) Snake oil depilatories! Modern day lasers and waxes! The unexpected role of industrial meat butchering! – but also why some hair is declared unwanted in the first place, a topic that ends up relating to ideas of the body influenced by race, gender (particularly femininity), sexuality, health, and class. There's a ton of neat little facts in here – for example, the main place women in the 1700s worried about being hairless was their foreheads – but Herzig also manages to relate body hair to big, important factors of life in the past and now. A really well-done book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. Someone recommended this to me as surprisingly fascinating, and I shortly thereafter stumbled across it in a used book store, so I'm finally getting around to actually reading it.
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Date: 2015-02-12 05:15 am (UTC)*boggles too*
I just cannot reconcile the associations I have with both of them.
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Date: 2015-02-12 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-13 07:48 pm (UTC)Those gigantic pale foreheads in paintings are deliberate!
Haha, weirdly, yes! To quote from the book:
Steeped in the same humoral theories of health that informed the work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and other prominent natural philosophers, ordinary colonial women viewed facial complexion as a reflection of underlying temperament and spirit. An “unblemished” face was a primary standard of physical beauty in the eighteenth century, an achievement distinguished, in part, by upper lips and temples free of visible fuzz. The woman afflicted by a troublingly “low forehead” might find an array of recipes for homemade pastes and powders to alleviate the problem.