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31December 2015
maura @ 5:42 pm
Sometimes I wait until the new year to do this, and sometimes I don’t. But I’m not going to finish any books in the rest of today and I have some down time right now and I’ve been jonesing to get my list out there since reading Alycia’s, Jenna’s, and Meredith’s lists, so here goes.
Just like last year I made a conscious effort to read more this year, and I managed to read 39 books in 2015 (up by 3!). I feel pretty good about this number, though; I read an actual book most days this year, which is truly my main goal. I didn’t have many explicit content goals for reading this year. I still have a few reading projects I’m planning on — including more on feminism and racism — plus some author goals: reading the stuff I haven’t read yet by Nnedi Okorafor, reading the Ursula LeGuin books I haven’t read, and rereading all of Octavia Butler’s books. But these feel like projects I can chip away at over time (or maybe I’ll go all in next summer like that one summer years ago when I read everything by Willa Cather). I didn’t make an official We Need Diverse Books pledge this year but I did continue to try to read mostly books written by people of color and women. Like last year this was an easy win — all of my favorites this year were written by people of color or women.
Not to be all negative but I did finish a few books I didn’t like this year (which is sort of unusual because recently I’ve tended to abandon books that I don’t like rather than force myself to finish). I wanted to like VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and there were aspects of it that I did — the biological stuff was cool and X-Files-y and the character study of the biologist and director were great. But I ultimately found the lack of answers unsatisfying. I also barely finished the Very Short Intro to critical theory, which I picked up feeling like I needed a bit more theoretical grounding for my interest in critical pedagogy/librarianship, but which was just too dull for me to get into (though I did take notes, go me).
It took me a while to read Station Eleven because the hype was so very hypey, but I finally did and it was hands down my favorite book this year. I’m generally a fan of the postapocalyptic story and this one was realistic and melancholy in its plot and description of what things would actually be like, and not overly depressing or scary (though occasionally so, but not awfully). Really great, I just devoured it staying up too late on school nights. Other faves for fiction this year were Planetfall, Get in Trouble, and Everything I Never Told You. I also loved My Real Children — alternate universes/timelines have always interested me, but with my mother-in-law and a close friend of ours both dying suddenly late last year I think I was especially primed to be grabbed by this book.
For nonfiction my favorite book was Between the World and Me, 100% worth all the accolades and attention. Devastating.
As in past years this list is in reverse chrono order (because that’s how I keep my reading journal), ebooks are starred, tilded are books we own (vs. library books). I read more ebooks this year than last year, which is interesting — I’m not sure why that is, other than that it’s easy to request them from the library as soon as I learn about them and then just wait for them to come in (though I still hate that they’re only able to be checked out for 2 weeks rather than 3).
~ The Summer Prince, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, by Anna North
* Planetfall, by Emma Newman
~ Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, by Maria Accardi
Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov, by Kirin Narayan
Horrorstor, by Grady Hendrix
* In the Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume
Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction, by Stephen Eric Bronner
* Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby
The Bone People, by Keri Hulme
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
* My Real Children, by Jo Watson
~ Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay
~ Critical Journeys, edited by Robert Schroeder
~ Get in Trouble, by Kelly Link
The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work, edited by Nicole Pagowsky & Miriam Rigby
* Find Me, by Laura van den Berg
Digital Technology and the Contemporary University, by Neil Selwyn
~ Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor
* Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, by Jennifer Finney Boylan
* Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
~ Lines, A Brief History, by Tim Ingold
~ Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
* Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brene Brown
Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham
* Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
~ Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer
* Zarah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
~ Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
* Citizen, by Claudia Rankine
* Inheritance, by Malinda Lo
* Adaptation, by Malinda Lo
The Almost Nearly Perfect People, by Michael Booth
* Echoes of Us, by Kat Zhang
*~ Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (So originally I got this from the library but then I loved it so much and Jonathan wanted to read it so we bought it.)
~ Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson
Panic, by Lauren Oliver
* Once We Were, by Kat Zhang
* What’s Left of Me, by Kat Zhang
Started, not finished:
The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman — I only got about 20 pages in and realized I wouldn’t be able to deal with the slang that this book is written in.
31December 2014
maura @ 4:50 pm
I tried hard to read more this year and I guess I did: 36 books in total, up from 28 last year (and identical to 2012’s number). I did add work-ish books into the list this year which helped boost my overall tally. And I guess I’m mostly satisfied with this number. I had a couple of productive, fun reading jags over the summer, though sadly did not read as much at the end of the year as I’d originally planned.
Looking at last year’s post there are a couple of goals I didn’t hit. I read a bit of feminism but not much, didn’t have a chance to read some library/info science books I’d hoped to read, and didn’t get to LeGuin or Butler either. I also started but didn’t finish the 4AD book. It’s terrific though very long; I read about half of it over the summer when we were in Indiana and hope to finish it in the nearish future. It’s been challenging to read this past semester with my new job, I just don’t have a lot of spare cycles in the evenings and tend to fall asleep only a few pages in to anything I read. But I have some new books of short stories and essays that should fit the bill, and with the 4AD book’s arrangement of a chapter for each year (I think I stopped after 1985), that might work too.
On the positive side, this year I tried to read fiction only written by women and/or people of color, and I did meet that goal. It wasn’t hard at all, of course there’s lots of great stuff out there, and lots of library and literary folks have made lists of fiction, YA, sci fi, etc. written by women/poc. Faves were the two books by Nnedi Okorafor which both Gus and I read, and Americanah which was as amazing as everyone is always saying. All of those reminded me of the African Civ class I took in college and all of the fiction reading we did in one of the quarters — I’m glad I kept those books and will perhaps reread them in the coming year. I’m also looking forward to reading Nnedi Okorafor’s other books — the future Africa she writes about is super compelling. My other faves this year were: Eleanor & Park, about two high schoolers in love set against a background of family disfunction and mix tapes, and Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s incredible story of her parents’ decline and eventual death, told in that incredible Roz Chast way that will make you laugh and cry.
Like in previous years the list below is in reverse chronological order. Starred books are ebooks and tilded books are those we own rather than those borrowed from the library or from others. Books with a plus sign are graphic novels, all of which are Gus’s except the Walden one which was from the library (and on Gus’s summer reading list). I found several graphic novels to be a boon for me at difficult times this year — most of the ones I read this year went down easy though with enough of a narrative to be compelling, and with illustrations predominating over text they often seemed more escapist than novels, even YA novels. That said, I pooped out of the Amulet series halfway through when it turned out to be aimed more at an older elementary than YA crowd.
+ American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang
The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
~ The Real Boy, by Anne Ursu
+ Boxers and Saints, by Gene Luen Yang
+ In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
~ Picture Me Gone, by Meg Rosoff
When We Wake, by Karen Healey
Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor
~ + Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, by Roz Chast
* The Word Exchange, by Alena Graedon
Four, by Veronica Roth
* The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
+ Thoreau at Walden, by John Porcellino
Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, by Gaye Tuchman
Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship, by Andre Cossette
Before We Were Free, by Julia Alvarez
College, by Andrew Delbanco
* The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin
* Oryx & Crake, by Margaret Atwood
+ Amulet 1-3, by Kazu Kibuichi
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen
Short Girls, by Bich Minh Nguyen
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Attachments, by Rainbow Rowell
After, Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
~ Feminism is for Everybody, by bell hooks
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
* Pure, by Julianna Baggott
* Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century, by Cathy Davidson
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Rules for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff
Rethinking College Student Retention, by John M. Braxton et al.
Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell
Pain Free at Your PC, by Pete Egoscue
The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer
Started not finished:
+ Amulet 4, by Kazu Kibuichi
1January 2014
maura @ 10:17 am
Hmm, when I counted up the books on this list I was disappointed to see this year that I didn’t read as many books as last year, only 28 compared to last year’s 36. Starred books are ebooks and tilded books are those I own (rather than borrowed from the library), and the list below is in reverse chronological order. Again this doesn’t count books I read for academic reasons, which would bulk things up a bit. Also I think this reflects that 2013 was perhaps more disjointed than 2012. We didn’t really take any vacations that offered space for lots of reading, and the summer overall (which is when I tend to get most of my non-academic reading done) was sort of scattered. But on the plus side, only one book falls into the started not finished category, so that’s a good thing. And Debt is eNORmous, maybe it should count as several books?
I think I hit the wall with dystopian YA books this past year. I still find them enjoyable to read, but I’m also finding them more disturbing and depressing than I have in the past. I was excited to read Allegiant and wind up the series, but found it kind of meh in the end (though I’m *totally* excited for the movie — when we saw the previews there were shots of Mansueto and the Reg!).
Balancing out the dystopia were some books I really enjoyed. Every Day was fantastic — layered and thoughtful and real. As I babbled about in other posts, I loved Tracey Thorn’s book, Fangirl, and Sisterland. I did a bit of revisiting books I’d already read — Wrinkle in Time and Ender’s Game because Gus was reading them (also the latter to prep for seeing the movie), and Wizard of Earthsea (just finished yesterday!) because I’m thinking that I need to read more LeGuin in the new year and rereading the trilogy (plus the other two Earthsea books I haven’t read) seems like a good place to start.
My reading goal for 2014 is to read more, obvs. I’d like to read all of LeGuin’s work, and possibly reread Octavia Butler’s books (in prep for recommending them to Gus). I have some big holes in my knowledge of feminist theory that I’d like to plug, too. I also can’t wait to read Facing the Other Way: The 4AD Story. And Gus got 21 (!) books for his birthday and xmas some of which I’d like to read too, including a graphic novel series called Amulet and another graphic novel set — this one about the Boxer Rebellion — called Boxers and Saints. He tore through them all in less than a week so they’re uncontested.
With that said, here’s the list:
~ A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin
~ Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh
~ Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son, by Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott
* Sisterland, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell
Allegiant, by Veronica Roth
Wool, by Hugh Howely
* Shards & Ashes, edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong
Debt, by David Graeber
First Light, by Rebecca Stead
Among Others, by Jo Walton
~ A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle
Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, by David Weinberger
Peanut, by Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe
~ The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan
The 5th Wave, by Rick Yancy
~ Bedsit Disco Queen, by Tracey Thorn
* Every Day, by David Levithan
A Darkling Plain, by Phillip Reeve
Legend, by Marie Lu
Requiem, by Lauren Oliver
Infernal Devices, by Phillip Reeve
Bossypants, by Tina Fey
~ Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
~ Why Do I Love These People?, by Po Bronson
The Age of Miracles, by Karen Walker Thompson
Predator’s Gold, by Phillip Reeve
Started not finished:
* Oryx & Crake, by Margaret Atwood
27December 2013
maura @ 9:26 pm
So before you’re all “OMG two posts in one day” I should probably mention that I wrote that last post last night, though wasn’t able to post it until this morning because we didn’t have internet at the neighbors’ apartment where we were staying. This year we’re having a mostly home-based holiday season — though we did travel to exchange gifts with some of my family before xmas, it was a quick trip of only 42 hours duration. Now we have family visiting and took advantage of our neighbors’ generosity to use their place as an extra sleeping space while they’re out of town. It’s nice to travel at xmas though it’s nice to be home, too, with a tree and the kitties.
I recently read two novels in a row about twins, each told from the perspective of one of the twins, which when added to the season has me thinking much more about family than usual. The books were great. First was Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, about twin girls in Nebraska who write Harry Potter-esque fan fiction and the events of their first year away at college. It was a fun read: the characters were both super likable and since I spend lots of my research and scholarly time thinking about the academic culture of college students it was also interesting from an ethnographic perspective. (Is there a term for ethnographic fiction? Is all fiction ethnographic?)
I was particularly entranced by one scene in which the main character is accused of plagiarism by her English prof when she submits a fic for a creative writing assignment. I scanned those few pages from the book and plan to ask my students to read the excerpt when I next teach our library’s research and documentation course. Which is nerdily exciting — we talk a lot about plagiarism and remix culture and intellectual property, and I’ll be interested to see what the students make of the reading. Plus it’s only 4 pages which is absolutely fair use, so I can post the PDF of the scan on our course website.
Next (and completely accidentally re: the twin theme) I read Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve never read any of her books before — the cover of Prep, her first novel, completely turned me off and she fell off my radar after that. But reading Jenna’s review of Sisterland piqued my interest, and since it was available as an ebook and I didn’t have any other ebooks checked out it seemed like a good call (I like to have an ebook on my phone if possible, just in case I ever get stuck someplace with nothing to read). And it was! Like Jenna, I found the main characters unsympathetic, but the story was well-paced and interesting.
These twins are adult women who are both somewhat psychic, though one has suppressed her ability. The narrative of the book is framed by an event that happens early on, when the more-psychic sister predicts that an earthquake will strike St. Louis, where the book takes place. The bulk of the book (which is told by the less-psychic sister) recounts the story of what happens with the sisters and their lives and families between the time of the prediction and the date on which the earthquake is predicted to happen. There’s lots of flashbacks to the twins’ childhood and early adult years, and lots of discussion of their ESP and the circumstances under which they’ve used it. What I liked best is that even though the psychic powers lend the book a vaguely magical tone, most of the issues with which the characters grapple are pretty much just normal, everyday problems.
In both books the twin sisters are identical yet surprisingly different, with a relationship at least as complex as that between non-twin siblings. And I guess that’s what made me start thinking about my family. I love my family, though I’m often quite baffled when I think of us. While my nuclear family members — my parents and my younger sister and brother — are (of course!) related and have much in common, we are also each very different. And we all continue to change as we age, which along with partnering and childrearing adds other wrinkles (ha!). My parents are long divorced and we all mostly live far apart, and I wish we saw everyone more often. But I sometimes find myself torn: I don’t want to leave New York to live in one of the places they live, but living here makes it difficult for folks to visit us because NYC apts aren’t great for hosting sleepover visitors. And I wonder: are we all so different because we live in different places? Or do we live in different places because we are all so different?
7September 2013
maura @ 8:19 pm
The semester started over a week ago but the combination of Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah means that the public schools haven’t even started yet, not til Monday. So while things are still beginning-of-the-term nutty (enrollment is up! 3300 first year students! nearly 17K total students! CUNY’s tuition is so reasonable! 142 sections of English I! each has one session of library instruction! wheee!), the end of this week was a bit slower with no meetings, so we decided to hightail it to the Catskills for a last-couple-days-of-summer getaway.
Even though we were only going to be away for a couple of nights, we rented a small house on the recommendation of a friend (as opposed to staying in a hotel). In the summers that we’ve gone to the beach we’ve usually rented houses — with both of my sibs and all of their kids a house is by far the most practical option. Beach houses are pretty standard fare: sand-colored carpeting, VHS tapes from the 80s, dull knives in the kitchen, all manner of lighthouse/sand dollar/sailboaty knick-knacks, and leftover laundry detergent from the prior week’s renters if you’re lucky.
This house was different, and not only because it was smaller. This house most definitely seemed more lived-in. There was the usual random selection of books and board games and DVDs, but also a real kitchen with all the tools and cookware you’d expect for someone who actually cooks there. In a beach house the owners typically have one closet or a shed with their own stuff in it (often locked): the drawers are empty, and you have to bring your own sheets and towels. But in this house the owner’s stuff was right there alongside space for renters’ (our) things — two drawers in each dresser were empty, towels were on the (made) bed and extras in the wardrobe.
It was a lovely house and a nice treat to be able to actually cook dinner without having to curse our forgetting to bring some real knives. But I’ve found myself wondering how, exactly, it works with a house like that. Does the owner live there most of the time and just go somewhere else when there are renters? What if renters stay for a week? Or two weeks? And where does the owner go when she’s not in the house? To stay with friends? Does she have another house? There’s the trustworthiness issue too — how can she be sure that everything will be as she left it? There was a hefty security deposit to put down, so perhaps that’s the insurance. And we’re kind of fussy (unsurprisingly) about leaving things the way we found them so no worries there.
More than anything it seemed like this house had more stories in it than other houses we’ve rented in other places. Being surrounded by all of those belongings that clearly belonged to someone who cared about them made it impossible not to speculate about that person and her stories. I’ve also been reading Among Others by Jo Walton (intrigued by Jenna’s review), and stuff being infused with personal magic plays a big part in the book’s narrative, which I’m sure helped me think about the house in that way, too. I should have been finishing Debt; really I am almost halfway and have renewed it twice and I *do* like it, for real, but it’s just so serious and I was on vacation and wanted to read about fairies and interlibrary loan and adolescence instead. I have ’til September 26 to finish Debt, plenty of time, right?
4July 2013
maura @ 6:22 pm
Over last weekend while we were away I read Tracey Thorn’s book Bedsit Disco Queen. It’s a fast fun read that I found hard to put down, consuming it in huge gulps over two days. Not that I’ve read lots of them, but I’m finding that I really like reading memoirs of musicians I admire. A few years ago I read Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh and had many of the same feelings about that book. As an aside, thank you, reading journal, for reminding me that it was not last year but December 2010! Honestly I can’t believe I ever didn’t keep a reading journal.
Tracey Thorn is probably best known as 1/2 of Everything But The Girl (her partner Ben Watt the other 1/2), but she’s also famous in indiepopland for her earlier band the Marine Girls. More recently she’s been releasing solo records that are also fantastic (and not just because her lyrics sometimes speak to growing-older-lady stuff that resonates increasingly well with me). Her voice is frankly amazing, and it’s lovely that she’s back to recording again. I wasn’t cool enough to listen to Marine Girls when they were actually making records, though I came to them later during my serious indiepop phase in the early-mid-90s. Probably the first song I ever heard that featured Tracey Thorn’s singing was “The Paris Match” by Style Council. I feel like I used to own a vinyl copy of EBTG’s 2nd record “Love Not Money” — I have a vivid memory of listening to it in our living room when I was about 15, and my younger sibs giggling at the cover photo of the two little boys peeing into a puddle. But I can only find the CD in our house now.
The thing about reading a book about music (and this book sprinkles lyrics throughout, as did Kristin Hersh’s book) is that you can’t help but hear the music the whole way through. It’s a strange experience: as a fan I know the music side of the story, the discography and maybe the bare outlines of the musicians’ lives, in addition to occasional insights from the song lyrics. In some ways you’d think it would be boring to read this kind of a book because of what’s already known. But it’s fascinating, really. Context is added, details filled in (e.g. the story of “Hatfield 1980”). It’s also compelling despite the known bits: at one point last weekend Jonathan was calling me and I said “not just yet, I’m at the part when they release ‘Missing'” as if it were a cliffhanger — which, in a way, it was. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have 3 kids who are a little bit older than my kid, so hearing about them was naturally interesting for me, too (as with Kristin Hersh’s writing/tweeting about her kids).
Knowing those details changes the music for me, too. This week EBTG has been on fairly constant repeat — I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d already ripped the CDs at work as well as home (go me!). The extra narrative in my head that now accompanies many of the songs is quite nice. The only down side is that all of this is making me wish I’d seen them in concert more than just the one (fabulous) time. Until about a minute ago I thought it was the “Walking Wounded” tour, but I just pawed through all of my old ticket stubs to reveal that no, it was Hammerstein Ballroom in November 1999, the “Temperamental” tour and the very last time that EBTG ever played live in the US. Hammerstein is a pleasant if somewhat-huger-than-I-prefer venue, and this concert was also one of the first that I remember feeling like I was really a grown-up: given the choice between the open dance floor below and the balcony with seats, we opted for the latter.
1January 2013
maura @ 4:35 pm
I’ve written intermittent posts about reading here, though never a big year-end roundup. But I’m feeling pretty good about the number of non-work books I was able to read last year, as well as inspired by Jenna and Alycia. So here it is, the list of leisure books I read in 2012, totaling 37. Yeah, there’s lots of YA stuff there, and I know it reads faster than other books, but they still count!
(I’m not including work-related books in here mostly because I don’t keep track of them in my reading journal and I’m too lazy to corral them all together in my brain. Plus often with work books I’m reading a chapter here and there, not the whole thing).
Starred are the books I read on my phone, which was mostly new for me this year. I still prefer paper books but it’s definitely convenient to have a phone book for subway rides and other travels. Of course, the library doesn’t always have the books I want for my phone which is a drag. It’s odd, I do have an ipad but I haven’t tended to use it for leisure reading at all, rather just for academic articles (using the awesome iannotate app to take notes on the pdfs and sync with dropbox). I think it’s because the ipad is so heavy and I don’t usually bring it with me to work each day, whereas my phone is always with me.
These are in reverse order, btw, with the most recently-read first.
The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
Diverse Energies, edited by Tobias S. Buckell and Joe Monti
Lynda Barry: Girlhood Through the Looking Glass, by Susan Kirtley
Feed, by M.T. Anderson
* Liar and Spy, by Rebecca Stead
Mortal Engines, by Phillip Reeve
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
The Death Cure, by James Dashner
The Scorch Trials, by James Dashner
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Insurgent, by Veronica Roth
The Dead & the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
How to Do Things with Videogames, by Ian Bogost
Pandemonium, by Lauren Oliver
Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Delirium, by Lauren Oliver
Invisible Things, by Jenny Davidson
Divergent, by Veronica Roth
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Extras, by Scott Westerfeld
Degrees of Inequality, by Ann Mullen
* Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver
* The Messenger, by Lois Lowry
The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson
Specials, by Scott Westerfeld
Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld
Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
* Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry
* The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
All Clear, by Connie Willis
Blackout, by Connie Willis
The Curfew, by Jesse Ball
Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal
And, in the interest of full disclosure, here are the books I put down without finishing. I used to never ever ever do that, but the older I get the more I want to read and the less time I have, so no regrets!
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente
Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi
* Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell
1Q84, by Haruki Murakami
Anyway, keep up the good reading work, me, in 2013!
5August 2012
maura @ 10:52 am
Whatever else I can say about this summer I can say that I’ve done lots of reading. 12 books since the beginning of June, 4 more if you add May into the mix. Most have been dystopian YA fiction, barring the new Alison Bechdel book. (Though I’ve also been reading lots for the research project I’m writing up, none of which is YA, dystopian, or graphic novel, so there!) Here’s the full list:
The Giver, Gathering Blue, The Messenger by Lois Lowry
Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras by Scott Westerfeld
The Explosionist and Invisible Things by Jenny Davidson
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Before I Fall and Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
It’s hard to say exactly why the dystopian YA stuff has had such a hold on me. Maybe it’s this crazily creepily hot summer, which was already kind of freaking me out (and making me cranky) even before I read Bill McKibben’s depressing article in Rolling Stone a few weeks ago. Reading that article made me wonder whether the dystopian YA fiction craze should actually be seen as a way to think through possible scenarios and envision what kinds of skills we’ll need. Turns out the nearest archery range is in deepest Queens so I don’t think we’ll be training like Katniss anytime soon.
I think what I like best about these books is that they’re easy to read: the action is fast-moving and the stories are reasonably satisfying so I can gulp them down quickly, classic summer reading. They’re pairing well with the Buffy Rewatch, too; both make me feel very summery. I’ve got 3 to return today and 3 more to pick up at the library, along with some crazy manga for Gus. Let’s hide inside by the coolth of the a/c, kids, and read til we’re blind!
26May 2012
maura @ 6:12 pm
I’ve been trying to get back in the swing of fiction reading lately but I’m having trouble reading anything other than YA dystopia. Blame the Hunger Games, of course, but also probably my brain-fried-at-the-end-of-the-semester-ness, which seems to have rendered me incapable of reading grown-up books. Is it the slower plotting? I just don’t know — it’s 800 bajillion degrees out today and my brain has melted.
The last grown-up novel I tried to read was Swamplandia!, which I checked out from the public library onto my phone and was unable to finish before it expired. Partly it was the annoyingness of the fact that ebooks expire in the first place, which seems so silly and made me dig in my heels about finishing it, esp. since the pagination on my phone made it 1274 pages long. Also I found it kind of depressing, and I recently decided to shake off my prior self-restriction about finishing books even if I don’t really like them because hey! life’s too short! And there are always other things to read.
I checked out two YA dystopian ebooks onto my phone, too: The Giver and Gathering Blue, both by Lois Lowry. They were pretty good, both set in the same world, I think, though the characters in each didn’t overlap. They share a similar trait that I can’t decide how I feel about: both end right in the middle of some action. The endings are basically upbeat, but it’s just kind of weird to have things break off and not be resumed in the next book. There’s one more book in this loose trilogy so I’m planning to get that from the library, too.
Then I got kind of annoyed that the library has such a craptastic selection of ebooks (which is not our fault! blame the publishers, not the libraries! we WANT to have a better selection, honest, but they won’t sell them to us!) because I had to place a hold on my next two YA books (plus the new Alison Bechdel book) in paper since an ebook version wasn’t available. Not that I mind paper (and in many ways I prefer it, see above re: pagination) but I’ve had a bunch of meetings in Manhattan recently and ebooks are so much easier to schlepp on the subway. Plus the instant gratification thing: if the title is available, that’s kind of crack-tastic.
I’m also reading Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan books (finished the first last week, onto the second now), a steampunk + genetic manipulation of animals World War I trilogy that Gus devoured last year. So one of the books I requested from the library is Uglies, Westerfeld’s YA dystopian book (first of 4, I think?). The other book I requested is The Explosionist, which I found again while trolling my Delicious for things I tagged “to read”.
I’d meant to pick those two up over the weekend, because I got the email that they’re on the hold shelf for me, but the library’s closed for the holiday. Denied!
10March 2012
maura @ 8:51 pm
I finally read Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. Maybe you’ve seen her TED talk, which is 20 pretty enjoyable minutes; I recommend it. The book, which is well-written and fun to read, expands on the basic themes of the talk: lots of people spend lots of time playing games, games make us happy, how can we channel that energy and repurpose that time into solving the big hairy problems facing us and our planet today? The strategy she suggests is to figure out how to make games that can save the world, so we can all spend lots of time playing games and saving the world.
Okay, I’ll grant that I just wrote a really, really simplistic summary of the book. In fact, it’s fairly well-argued and cited, and full of details. And I’m glad I read it. But am I convinced? As you may remember, I’m kind of a fan of games. I should be easy to convince, right?
But I feel like Mulder: I want to believe, so much. But something about it just doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s all of the positive psychology research included in the book. I think of myself as a fairly optimistic person, but I just read something (which of course I can’t find now) which asserts that too much optimism (a strangely American condition?) can actually be bad, because inability to seriously consider the bad things that could happen means that you’re less likely to be prepared if a bad thing does happen. So I guess I feel like it’s good to be optimistic, but not too much, and which makes me less willing to buy in to positive psychology.
I’m also uncomfortable with the corporate ties and funding that such big, giant, world-changing games are almost guaranteed to require. McGonigal’s developed lots of games, some with corporate backing, and some not. I’d rather play a game that grapples honestly (if whimsically) with what’s required to be a global corporation like McDonald’s than play a big game sponsored by McDonald’s.
Unfortunately, finally reading the book reminded me of the negative press it got last summer when it was released. My CUNY Games Network colleague Carlos Hernandez wrote a post about it on our blog, which hits the high points well. Lots of that negative press was pretty sexist, which bugged me at the time and bugs me even more now in our arguing-about-birth-control world. The sexism inherent in the game development industry (about which this is only the most recent piece I’ve read) hardly a secret. But I can’t help but wonder, would the press have been so dismissive if McGonigal were male?
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