Book meme

Dec. 26th, 2012 04:32 pm
sabotabby: raccoon anarchy symbol (motherfucking books)
[personal profile] sabotabby
"To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?"

My responses:

Currently reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch and Sashenka by Simon Montefiore.

Most recently finished reading The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.

Next up: The Dark Side of the Earth by Alfred Bester. (No, not that one.)

On hold: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.

Should you generally be interested in my reading material, I log everything because I'm a nerd that way.

In other news, I miss [livejournal.com profile] wouldprefernot2's "What are you reading?" posts. And. Well. I miss [livejournal.com profile] wouldprefernot2 in general.

Date: 2012-12-27 04:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] misslynx.livejournal.com
Republic of Thieves, the third Gentlemen Bastards book, has been a long time coming because Lynch is battling massive problems with depression and anxiety (not violating anyone's privacy here, he's been pretty open about it). But it's apparently in the final rounds of editing, has cover art, and has had a couple of tentative release dates posted by the publisher, though the release has been pushed back multiple times. For a while they were saying early 2013, then late 2013, and now Amazon's got it listed as coming out in spring 2014.

Re Bear and Racefail - it started over something she wrote, but ended up spiralling out to include a lot more authors than just her. My recollection is that she seemed to eventually (after being initially defensive) try to engage with the criticisms made of her work and try to learn something out of it all, but by that time so many other people had jumped into the fray, some of them very overtly racist and abusive, that nothing she said was going to make much of a difference any more. The impression I got was that while she'd made mistakes, she wasn't a terrible person, but a lot of terrible people jumped in to defend her, which made everything exponentially worse.

An additional complicating factor is that one of the genuinely terrible people, who has written some really appalling things, has an unfortunately similar name to hers - Elizabeth Moon. So sometimes people seem to meld them into one entity, or at least mix up which one did what. The really awful Islamophobic stuff was Moon, not Bear.

Date: 2012-12-27 11:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] marlowe1.livejournal.com
I actually went and looked up part of the racefail controversy and I'm almost embarrassed that I missed it. Actually relieved since a couple of the people involved are people that I hate and even if I agreed with them in these cases I would still find their manner atrocioius.

But the passages from Bear's book - ugh - this is why white people avoid writing about black character entirely because they really don't want to have such awful stereotypical silliness attached to them. But then taht means that they write books where everyone is white.

Date: 2012-12-28 06:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] marlowe1.livejournal.com
I remember Michael Boatman talking on a panel of race and horror literature (or something like that) and besides the irony of the fact that he and John Edward Larson were the only black people at the entire convention (although there were less than 100 people there - but still) and how the general prevailing belief was that white writers should be very careful when writing from a non-white character's perspective.

His perspective is that people can be too careful and as an actor, he gets offered a LOT of roles which basically come down to Black Judge with Three Lines.

So that's bad too. (a side note - he was so pissed off at a Joe Lansdale story that was basically "black people get chased down and killed by white rednecks" that he wrote Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers which is the first story I read by him - the white people don't fare very well in it - in fact, some reviewers called the story overtly preachy which is weird. I thought it was hilarious.)

I was thinking about thsi when watching Django Unchained. Particularly Samuel Jackson's Uncle Tom character who is a different person depending on who is around him. It was cool writing that managed to use those cliches and comment on them at the same time.

Date: 2012-12-28 05:57 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] misslynx.livejournal.com
Yeah, that was pretty much exactly my impression.

Date: 2012-12-30 10:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] smhwpf.livejournal.com
Urgh, that's sad to hear re Scott Lynch. Very much empathizing there. I looked around his website/Livejournal a bit, but I guess I hadn't looked far enough back in the archives.

Yeah, that was pretty much my impression of where Elizabeth Bear fitted into the whole thing. Well, I will avoid Moon but perhaps read Bear as I have heard good things about her (not least on this comment thread).

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