Reading Wednesday
Apr. 6th, 2016 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn. I was so excited for this book, but alas, it did not live up to my expectations. Despite the cheery yellow cover and the seemingly-hopeful title, this is absolutely one of the darkest books I've read in quite some time.
The main character is Margot, a young Jamaican woman who works at a tourist resort. She is ferociously ambitious, and dreams of escaping from the shack where she lives with her family. Margot is a sex worker on the side, supplementing her income and trading sex for promotions and other social benefits. She's focused on her much younger sister, Thandi, who attends an expensive private school. All of the family expects Thandi to become a doctor or lawyer and rescue the rest of them. Thandi, however, is mostly concerned with a cute neighborhood boy, buying skin lightening creams, and becoming an artist. Their mother Delores violently resents her daughters for their beauty and intelligence, and has spent most of their lives driving them away and then blaming them for not loving her the way she wants them to. The final important character is Verdene, a slightly richer woman with whom Margot is in love (sort of, kind of; Margot can't quite bring herself to commit to a same-sex relationship) and who has been ostracized by the community for being a lesbian.
All of these characters are suffering from the trauma of poverty, globalism, racism, colorism, homophobia, sexism, and rape, and as a result are all deeply self-loathing. And not the kind of self-loathing that's fun to read about, where it's just some angst to be healed with a kiss before the end of the story, but the more realistic kind, where it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, making the person pull away from others, making them hard to spend time with and extremely hard to like. Margot in particular makes some absolutely terrible choices, and as much as I can see where she's coming from, I don't have any sympathy for the negative consequences that result.
The writing is lovely and the characters are complex and realistic, but it's simply not a book that I wanted to spend any time with. It lacks a single ray of hope, or spark of goodness, or anything at all other than pure undiluted bleakness. And I know that not every book has to be fun or even 'enjoyable', but by God, I would have liked anything to entice me to return to these pages and not simply flee in glad desperation that I had the option of escaping.
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. The 12th book in the Discworld series returns to the witches: Magrat Garlick, Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax, a.k.a. the maiden, the mother, and the... well, don't let Granny hear you say it.
Most of the witches' books are examinations of stories. Most of the Discworld in general is about stories, of course, but the witches tend to take it a bit further and be unusually meta in how they deal with the ideas they present. Wyrd Sister took on Shakespeare, Maskerade is opera, Carpe Jugulum is vampires, and Witches Abroad is fairy tales. Unfortunately fairy tales have become an exteremly common topic to satirize, which means this book suffers as a result. Much of it can't help but feel like a retread of popular ideas. Not that I blame Pratchett for this; back in 1990, when Witches Abroad was first published, the whole "but what if Cinderella DIDN'T WANT to marry the prince!?!? I'M SO CLEVER" genre hadn't quite taken off to the extent it has today.
But thankfully Pratchett is not content to just tell grimdark versions of Red Riding Hood or a Sleeping Beauty without True Love's Kiss. His setting of Genua is particularly great – it's basically New Orleans if it had been conquered by Disneyworld – unique and fascinating and a perfect match for the themes of the story. He also introduces here a concept that he'll use again through the Discworld series: that stories want to be told. Something like Cinderella, for instance, has existed so many times and been told in so many places that it's like a river carving its way through a mountain: eventually it becomes a canyon that's nearly impossibly to escape, and likewise the people in the current version of the story are unable to resist acting it out, unable to make choices other than the ones that have been made before. It's both a wonderful fantasy idea and a neat metaphor for real-world problems like socialization, when it can in fact be exteremly hard to act out against what you've been taught.
Ultimately, though, Witches Abroad isn't my favorite of the Discworld books. The entire travelogue section is a lot of one-liners strung together without much plot or thematic coherence, and even several of the best parts will show up again, and be used more effectively, in later books (Granny sticking her hand in the fire, human Greebo, Granny resenting being the "good" one). Though even in a lesser Discworld book, there's always at least one quote worth remembering:
"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage."
And okay, just one more:
They say that everyone has the attributes of some kind of animal. Magrat possibly had a direct mental link to some small furry creature. She felt the terror of all small rodents in the face of unblinking death. [...] And the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is that, just occasionally, one of them’s a mongoose.
What are you currently reading?
Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky. From the guy who brought you Salt and Cod comes Paper! The newest and most meta book in microhistory.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn. I was so excited for this book, but alas, it did not live up to my expectations. Despite the cheery yellow cover and the seemingly-hopeful title, this is absolutely one of the darkest books I've read in quite some time.
The main character is Margot, a young Jamaican woman who works at a tourist resort. She is ferociously ambitious, and dreams of escaping from the shack where she lives with her family. Margot is a sex worker on the side, supplementing her income and trading sex for promotions and other social benefits. She's focused on her much younger sister, Thandi, who attends an expensive private school. All of the family expects Thandi to become a doctor or lawyer and rescue the rest of them. Thandi, however, is mostly concerned with a cute neighborhood boy, buying skin lightening creams, and becoming an artist. Their mother Delores violently resents her daughters for their beauty and intelligence, and has spent most of their lives driving them away and then blaming them for not loving her the way she wants them to. The final important character is Verdene, a slightly richer woman with whom Margot is in love (sort of, kind of; Margot can't quite bring herself to commit to a same-sex relationship) and who has been ostracized by the community for being a lesbian.
All of these characters are suffering from the trauma of poverty, globalism, racism, colorism, homophobia, sexism, and rape, and as a result are all deeply self-loathing. And not the kind of self-loathing that's fun to read about, where it's just some angst to be healed with a kiss before the end of the story, but the more realistic kind, where it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, making the person pull away from others, making them hard to spend time with and extremely hard to like. Margot in particular makes some absolutely terrible choices, and as much as I can see where she's coming from, I don't have any sympathy for the negative consequences that result.
The writing is lovely and the characters are complex and realistic, but it's simply not a book that I wanted to spend any time with. It lacks a single ray of hope, or spark of goodness, or anything at all other than pure undiluted bleakness. And I know that not every book has to be fun or even 'enjoyable', but by God, I would have liked anything to entice me to return to these pages and not simply flee in glad desperation that I had the option of escaping.
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. The 12th book in the Discworld series returns to the witches: Magrat Garlick, Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax, a.k.a. the maiden, the mother, and the... well, don't let Granny hear you say it.
Most of the witches' books are examinations of stories. Most of the Discworld in general is about stories, of course, but the witches tend to take it a bit further and be unusually meta in how they deal with the ideas they present. Wyrd Sister took on Shakespeare, Maskerade is opera, Carpe Jugulum is vampires, and Witches Abroad is fairy tales. Unfortunately fairy tales have become an exteremly common topic to satirize, which means this book suffers as a result. Much of it can't help but feel like a retread of popular ideas. Not that I blame Pratchett for this; back in 1990, when Witches Abroad was first published, the whole "but what if Cinderella DIDN'T WANT to marry the prince!?!? I'M SO CLEVER" genre hadn't quite taken off to the extent it has today.
But thankfully Pratchett is not content to just tell grimdark versions of Red Riding Hood or a Sleeping Beauty without True Love's Kiss. His setting of Genua is particularly great – it's basically New Orleans if it had been conquered by Disneyworld – unique and fascinating and a perfect match for the themes of the story. He also introduces here a concept that he'll use again through the Discworld series: that stories want to be told. Something like Cinderella, for instance, has existed so many times and been told in so many places that it's like a river carving its way through a mountain: eventually it becomes a canyon that's nearly impossibly to escape, and likewise the people in the current version of the story are unable to resist acting it out, unable to make choices other than the ones that have been made before. It's both a wonderful fantasy idea and a neat metaphor for real-world problems like socialization, when it can in fact be exteremly hard to act out against what you've been taught.
Ultimately, though, Witches Abroad isn't my favorite of the Discworld books. The entire travelogue section is a lot of one-liners strung together without much plot or thematic coherence, and even several of the best parts will show up again, and be used more effectively, in later books (Granny sticking her hand in the fire, human Greebo, Granny resenting being the "good" one). Though even in a lesser Discworld book, there's always at least one quote worth remembering:
"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage."
And okay, just one more:
They say that everyone has the attributes of some kind of animal. Magrat possibly had a direct mental link to some small furry creature. She felt the terror of all small rodents in the face of unblinking death. [...] And the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is that, just occasionally, one of them’s a mongoose.
What are you currently reading?
Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky. From the guy who brought you Salt and Cod comes Paper! The newest and most meta book in microhistory.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 11:33 am (UTC)It's one I read and reread. Still, each to their own.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 09:30 pm (UTC)And hey, even an average Terry Pratchett book is way better than a good book by anyone else. :)
no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 02:00 am (UTC)