Books Books Books.
Feb. 13th, 2009 03:29 amI'm hoping to do more reading this year, newly purchased television notwithstanding. Here's some of what I've been reading.
Currently Reading
Short Fiction
Currently Reading
- The Haunting of Hill House—Shirley Jackson. I've made considerably more progress since the last time this book went AWOL, and I'm enjoying it. I saw the 1999 version of the film, and thought it was awful, but saw enough interesting things in the margins to make me think that the book would be reading (especially after I learned it was by Jackson).
- City of Quartz—Mike Davis. One of my goals this year is to learn more about the history of the Los Angeles area of Southern California. Davis's outlook feels overly Marxist to me—one endnote bewilderingly asks the writer for sympathy toward Aleister Crowley because he once wrote letters to Trotsky. But while I sometimes question the conclusions, the far-left position provides a good vantage point to deconstruct the various mythoi of Los Angeles across its history. Sadly, my library branch did not have the revised edition.
- How Did You Get to Be Mexican?: A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity—Kevin R. Johnson. I was about to put this in finished books, but I just recalled that I haven't read the final chapter. I have mixed feelings about it. The theoretical sections are interesting, and because Johnson is a law professor, I have access to most of his cited sources at my workplace. On the other hand, the autobiographical sections feel meandering, as though he were shying away from driving strongly toward a thesis (in many cases, perhaps, in deference to those in the field in which he still works).
- Továngar = World: A Gabrieliño Word Book—Anne Galloway. Only a smattering of words from the language spoken in Los Angeles before Spanish colonization. I had been hoping for more information.
- Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City—Deepak Narang Sawhney (ed.). The book contained the line I criticized earlier. It was an uneven collection of work, and I ended up skipping much of it. It did point me toward City of Quartz, because nearly every essay derived in some way from the line of thinking put forth in Davis's book. In retrospect, I think that the reliance is in some cases so strong that the Quartz (or some other legend) is needed like to prevent the slide into incomprehensibility. That line still doesn't make any sense, though.
- I would've sworn I read something else last month. I need to look more closely.
Short Fiction
- "Until Forgiveness Comes—K. Tempest Bradford. Perhaps I'm a little weird in that the facts of the story—a terrorist attack and the discourse over how it should be remembered—pale in comparison to my interest in the form of the story. Bradford has an excellent grasp of the rhythm of an NPR segment (down to the reporter, with a name suspiciously and whimsically similar to the "musical" Sylvia Poggioli), to the point where I could easily hear the ever-present, but rarely informitive ambient sound that would accompany the piece. Made me tear up at work, which makes it memorable.
- "The Men Burned All the Boats"—Patricia Russo. As a tale told in dialogue, it's hard to tell at first, whether the protagonist is simply being ironic. But while there is certainly a great deal of deception, the core of grief and despair clarifies itself, and is not overtaken by hope.
It made me think that there's a tendency in all storytelling—though particularly, I suspect, in science fiction and fantasy—to use Hope as not merely a cure for grief, but nepenthe, relief by forgetting, or ignoring, or otherwise discounting the source of grief. In that context, the narrator's commitment to mourning is a brave and startling decision, one that challenges the reader to imagine what is to come, but what has gone before, which is far more than merely the boats that were burned.