#(play kate's speech as her hogging the stage/upstaging petruccio!)

[dillydedalus]

what i read in may

how is it may lmao... anyway i went thru a bit of reading slump this month and i’d like to pretend it’s bc i had a lot of uni stuff to do (i did) but tbh it’s bc game of thrones infected me with Vintage* ASOIAF Feels & i didn’t really care about reading anything else

celestial bodies, jokha alharthi (tr. from arabic) quiet and evocative novel about a network of families in a village in oman, told over three (?) generations, but centred on three sisters, mayya, asma and khawla (but not as focused on them as i would have liked). interesting to get some insight into omani society, class relations (& especially slavery and the now-free slaves), gender, tradition and westernisation, but it’s also really lovely and sad. ultimately a bit scattered and vague tho. 3/5

the taming of the shrew, billy shakes (uni) academia and assorted shakespeareans like bending over backwards to explain why this is not misogynist but actually subversive/farcical/ironic/meta or whatever and that’s a fine & worthy endeavour i’m sure but the only valid reading of the taming is that kate is actively plotting to murder petruccio in every single scene so... that’s that on that. misandry stars/5 

vinegar girl, anne tyler (uni) y’all i don’t have high expectations for hogarth shakespeare entries (tho shylock really won me over last month) but fuck this was bad. staggeringly BAD, both as a book and as an adaptation of shrew. it starts out with a completely declawed & detoothed kate, who on the scale of ‘timid wifey’ to ‘shrewish firebrand’ is uh ‘apathetic & slightly sour’.... which is a choice i guess. in the beginning i hoped we were seeing a kate who was repressing her rage (and there is one genuinely great line where the bianca annoys kate while she’s gardening and ‘kate stuffed a snarl of vine into the trash bag’ like okay anne that’s cool) and that the taming would be reverse, i.e. would free kate to feel & act on her rage. but instead... honestly i can’t even tell you what the arc was instead? there’s no real taming, kate (who is very stuck in her life and job) just chooses this green card marriage to become a little bit less stuck and i guess pyotr (petruccio) likes her the way she is, that is sour and Not Like Her Dumb Blonde Sister. and then in the end we get a speech about how men have it really hard bc they never learn how to deal with feelings (when kate throughout the book has herself struggled w/ social skills). can’t wait to rip this apart in class. 1/5 (ALSO how did hogarth have atwood on their roster and not give her the shrew wtf)

doctor wooreddy’s prescription for enduring the ending of the world, mudrooroo (uni) for my postcolonial australia course; it’s about the colonisation of australia and genocide against indigenous australians from the pov of tasmanians and an englishman who’s never seen a white man’s burden he didn’t immediately pick up (all based on real historical people). lots of interesting stuff in there (i’d love to read something about gender roles/gendered spaces in indigenous australian culture) but tbh it’s a bit of a slog (at 200 pages...) 2/5 embassytown, china miéville cool scifi novel about weird alien languages (the ariekei, who speak with two mouths at once and cannot lie - apparently their language doesn’t signify so...uh. linguistically not particularly sound at all but a) it’s a cool concept, b) they’re aliens so like whatever) and what happens when humans, not possessing two mouths and very much capable of lying, communicate with them. there is a lot of really original & fascinating concepts here but some problems w/ the execution (pacing/characters mainly) - not as much as with city&city tho. 3.5/5

the little prince, antoine de saint-exupéry (tr. from french) i wanted something short & bittersweet & this is it. anyway i have these vague & but very vivid memories of seeing like. a slide show of this w/ narration at the berlin planetarium when i was a kid & that is the best way to consume this story. 4/5

the year of the death of ricardo reis, josé saramago (tr. from portuguese) took me nearly 2 months to finish this & it’s under 500 pages which should already say a lot. i enjoyed this while reading mostly, and saramago’s style is beautiful, but it is a bit of a drag & reis honestly is not particularly sympathetic or interesting. the undercurrent of the rise of fascism is the best thing about the novel & makes the end really work but there’s too much tangential meandering about how old dude ricky reis is obsessed with a mucher younger girl and like... yawn. i will try again w/ saramago tho. 2/5

follow the rabbit-proof fence, nugi garimara (uni) story about three young girls with indigenous australian mothers and white fathers escaping from the residential school they were abducted to as part of the stolen generations, based on the author’s mother’s own life. it’s an impressive story of resilience and survival, but perfunctorily written. we’re also going to watch the film & that should be interesting. 2/5

everything under, daisy johnson i find it quite hard to talk about this bc there’s something quite vague and uncertain about it, something elusive. some things i will say: vivid, lyrical prose; the setting (oxford canal boat community) is great, the monster is genuinely creepy, and i really like the three (or 4?) narrative strands and how they interweave. i kind of wish i hadn’t known which greek myth it was a loose adaptation of (so i won’t say here) bc i definitely spent too much time trying to map the myth onto the book - and the ‘reveal’ might have been better w/o that knowledge anyway. 3.5/5

the sparrow, maria doria russell wonderful wonderful warm & human & tragic scifi novel about JESUITS IN SPACE!!! told in two timelines: in the first, set mainly in 2019 (which is great) music from another planet is transmitted to earth and emilio sandoz, jesuit linguist + multilingual (@hbo or netflix: cast oscar isaac please & thank), and his closest friends are chosen (by god?? MAYBE) to go on a secret space mission to make first contact bc jesuits.... have a lot of.... experience... with that. everyone is hopeful, curious, excited, and our guy emilio is literally radiant with god’s love or whatever. in the second timeline, 2060, emilio has been sent home by a second expedition, who have since gone radio silent, the only survivor, disturbingly (!) mutilated, broken in mind and body and unwilling to talk. all we know: the 2nd expedition found him in a brothel & he immediately killed the alien child who led them to him. so... what went wrong? (how could... first contact.... possibly go wrong...?) what did emilio do? was whatever happened god’s will? sorry i’m not super coherent about this but IT’S GREAT MY DUDES. also between this & canticle my scifi subgenre really just is ‘scifi but make it religious’. 4.5/5 

on the whole, not a great reading month, but the sparrow... *chef kiss* & i’m currently reading the artifical silk girl (relatable hot mess in weimar berlin) which is.... AMAZING... alfred döblin who???

#*i say this as if i'm not constantly experiencing at the very least mild asoiaf feels but yanno #anyway i'm sure there's a ton of cool ways you can perform shrew that make it subversive #(play kate's speech as her hogging the stage/upstaging petruccio!) #but like.... let's not kid ourselves #the books i read #this is sloppy & mostly unedited bc i'm vibrating with stress #long post