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"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
wouldprefernot2's "What are you reading?" posts. And. Well. I miss
wouldprefernot2 in general.
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
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
no subject
Date: 2012-12-27 04:50 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-27 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-27 11:54 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-28 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-28 06:42 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-28 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-30 10:43 pm (UTC)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).