bookpost sep
heh. i wrote this in early november. i forgot to write a single personal note about what i read last month again and then i forgot to publish it. what's up
Finished:
my death, by lisa tuttle
short story about a biographer whos subject's life eerily mirrors her own
[wibbles hand] Ehh. Wasn't what I was looking for from the description. I think too short, not up its own ass enough to really stick the landing for me. Felt like the pace was closer to a horror movie reveal ending. If I'm reading a story about a woman and then another woman who seems to also be her or have lived her life then I want some wanky ruminations on what it means to be and to tell. Especially when it comes to, y'know, Untold Women's Stories. You can get really into the weeds about the way womanhood is passed down. It's a good subject with a lot of fodder and it deserves more than a short story that gestures briefly at metaphor and then leaves. The ending was abrupt - it muddles and gets hard to tell who's who and what time they're in, but the implication is a timeloop - and I guess I wanted more of that muddling? man i hope i like rakesfall when that comes out here
the will to battle, by ada palmer
book 3, terra ignota
I forgot what happened in this one. It wasn't bad, I just forgot. It's more transitional than book 2... it's very much a prelude to book 4, the finale. The slow march towards war, major cliffhanger ending. It's got a lot of courtroom scenes and gets more into the global politics of the setting. Still a lot of yaoi in it, though.
convenience store woman, by sayaka murata
autistic woman finds peace and purpose working in a conbini
This one got one billion sales. It's alright. You could do worse for your autismo aroace rep. It's ridiculously short.
I had a lot of thoughts on the part of the plot where Furukura decides to 'move in' (read: keep in bathtub with iPad) with an incel she briefly worked with, to pretend to be Normal to her family and friends who are concerned at her lack of job progression and lack of partner. But - this incel - Shiraha - he's also really boring, and I can't quite reconcile if that's just the natural result of treating a dumbass incel as a meaningful character with things to say (because they are all deeply boring and shallow people), or as a quality of the writing/prose itself. His specific impact on the themes is good but his dialogue was completely broken record shit about the sexual dynamics in "the Stone Age" and it's like. Hey, get a new bit. In this book about a woman who cannot ever get a new bit. But I also know that sort of text repetition is more commonplace in Japanese...
So... my instinct is to grade a character like this on the respect they are given, which I think is a bit of a holdover from some real Hays Code Tumblr-ass thinking where the incel needs to be 'punished', but I'm going to follow this thread anyway. "Block that piece of shit" is good advice for social media and running communities/groups, but boring advice for art, I think.
Shiraha's repetitive dialogue makes him seem disrespected via the prose, but it's difficult to tell if he is respected by the internal rules of the book; if Furukura respects him in turn, because she is by nature very flat, and her primary reason for being near him is for her own misguided social gain, but she also isn't repulsed by his speech (or bad hygiene). She tries to explain that she understands what it's like to be a social outcast and that's why they need to use each other but it doesn't really get through to him. It ends with her trying to explain that she's given up on lying and needs to go back to her conbini job because it's the only place that works for her particular needs, and I guess Shiraha doesn't understand because he's still under the belief that if he just gets laid then he'll be Normal. Ergo; incels are stupid because they can't have empathy for their fellow social outcasts when they're women? I guess? Shiraha has a debt problem, something that's only discovered when Furukura accidentally overhears him on the phone. It doesn't justify his actions, and it doesn't change anything for Furukura.
I keep coming back to this bit where Furukura, for a single line, imagines violence against a child. A kid is noisy and won't calm down, a neurotypical person complains that they don't know how to deal with it, she looks at a nearby knife and draws the conclusion that there's a simple solution here. I don't understand what purpose it served... It's striking, but I can't determine if it's humanising or alienating the reader from Furukura. She doesn't respond, or panic about her intrusive thoughts, but she also doesn't act on it. Is the reaction here that you've bought in so far that she can still be an upstanding and moral person despite her different life progression, so you can understand that she's still in control and that her intrusive thoughts are not her actions? Or is the result that you think she's much closer to an imagined 'edge' than you thought she was? It feels like a risky play to just leave on the table like that, unaddressed. It made me think about the only time I've been to a comedy show, where one of the guys did a routine about his intrusive thoughts as though they were so #relatable, and I don't think his bit about imagining pushing prams into the way of oncoming trains really resonated with the whole audience.
tender, by sofia samatar
short stories, vaguely fantasy
Forgot a lot of specifics for this one too sorry. I had it on and off for a really long time. Samatar's heritage - American, with a Somali Muslim father and a Swiss-German Mennonite mother - lends an interesting perspective. She likes to play with form and metaphor - as I skim through it, the second story is a faux-nonfiction list; the third is a child's essay on a local cryptid; the fourth is a series of unreturned letters; the fifth a retainer telling a myth to an unnamed travelling researcher with list-asides. Very confident, poetic prose. I think she likes to start with a concrete form and setting and then unravel it before snapping back to the original conceit. It's loosely organised into 'stories' and 'landscapes', where a lot of the first half is about myths, and there's a recurring theme in the back half of it of people in very lonely positions. A radioactive containment centre keeper (the titular Tender), a solo space station worker who requests an extension. The final story is the longest, and I really liked the way it slowly revealed its world. It's a great collection, and I should have sat up for it some more.
dnf:
notes of a crocodile, by qiu miaojin
ran out of time on my library loan. including here as a reminder to actually go back and read it