Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

I assumed Dreamwidth was down the last few days but nope, my VPN no longer likes it, anyway. Hi. Whoops.

Just finished: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. I loved this, I need you all to read it 1) to understand certain aspects of my identity and 2) so that I can scream about it with someone else. 

I want to particularly note the prominence of Exodus, which is a book/film that had a huge influence on me as a kid, turned me into an insufferable Zionist for a couple years, actually had a massive role in ending the Hollywood Blacklist, and no one ever talks about as a work of Riefenstahl-esque propaganda. Night Night Fawn devotes a large segment of its middle act to the film and its role in shaping Barbara's relationship with Israel, as well as with her husband and ultimately her son (who she names after a secondary character). 

Anyway, it is really good. Incredibly good.

Currently reading: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed. This is the third novella in The Annual Migration of Clouds, which I haven't read, but it follows a side character on a completely different story. So. Post-apocalypse, climate catastrophe, weird parasitic infection, society trying to rebuild. It's set in Alberta, which is cool. Henryk, who has made some kind of mistake that has led to a death back home, leaves his relatively safe community to travel to his uncle's much less safe village, where there are still raiders and bears. But, critically, there is a tree farm, which is vital in regrowing the forest. Everyone is deeply unfriendly to him. It's kind of cool reading the third in a series when you haven't read the other two because so much of the worldbuilding is backgrounded. Also, she's just a hell of a writer.

Comments

[magid]

DW was posting about doing various types of maintenance the last couple of days that might’ve affected things.

[sabotabby]

It's an ongoing thing, which makes me think it is the fault of my VPN and not DW. DW works fine on my phone.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, Premee Mohamed is an excellent writer!

[sabotabby]

Love her.

[gingicat]

Exodus was a formative novel for me as well, but I also read stories of the shtetls - Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer both bring home not only how they were little oases of Jewish identity in the hostile world of pre-WW1 Pale of Settlement, but also how unquestioningly fundamentalist they were.

The irony of the Israeli government working hard to convert Israel from a theoretically-socialist country to a theocracy is not lost on me.

[sabotabby]

Right? When I young, I genuinely believed that Israel was this little socialist utopian project and I wanted to go live on a kibbutz. Can you imagine me being a farmer? Dear God. I should have stuck to Grade and Singer.

[sovay]

Can you imagine me being a farmer? Dear God.

I am leaving my own art here again; the referent will be apparent.

[lcohen]

you probably already read this journal, but just in case, i wanted to make sure you saw that leslie liked "cascade."

https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/4025127.html

[sabotabby]

Huzzah!

[sovay]

I want to particularly note the prominence of Exodus, which is a book/film that had a huge influence on me as a kid

I can see how encountering that in someone else's biography could be weird.

(Another piece of the American Jewish experience I can feel that I missed. I believe we have a mid-century paperback of the book in the house and I almost certainly read it as a child because I read everything within reach, but I cannot remember anything about it beyond the fact of its existence. I have never seen the film.)

[sabotabby]

The film is...certainly something. Like I remember it being extremely good but also the entire thing is so fucked up. And also it was Dalton Trumbo's triumphant return to using his name on the stuff he wrote, which is hard for me to reconcile because he's kind of one of my heroes.

[sovay]

And also it was Dalton Trumbo's triumphant return to using his name on the stuff he wrote, which is hard for me to reconcile because he's kind of one of my heroes.

People are complicated. How did Trumbo get involved with the project? I'm much more familiar with Spartacus.