Weekly reading post
Oct. 4th, 2019 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRecently read
I finished reading Caleb Crain’s Overthrow, which turned out to be less about possibly telepathic Occupy activists trying to hack the government with their brains, and more about a group of young activists being manipulated/entrapped into hacking the government by a surveillance/security contractor that wants to prove its value to potential investors, and having to deal with the fallout of that— not just the legal consequences but the impact on interpersonal relationships, having the worst moment of their lives play out in the glare of media attention and public opinion.
Crain has a penchant for obscure, multisyllabic words and careful attention (perhaps over-attention) to scene-setting details, but it wasn’t a struggle with the prose that had me re-reading the same paragraph over and over, or reading a handful of pages at a time and then going back and re-reading them; it was that I couldn’t figure out where he was going with all of this and tried to comb through every paragraph for clues. This would have been extremely frustrating if the last chapter hadn’t felt like the last piece of a puzzle clicking into place, and suddenly I was able to make out the picture that had been eluding me the whole time.
Also finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, which I’ve attempted before – a couple of months ago, when I was in a Greek mythology mood after seeing the Oresteia – but gave up just one or two chapters in because I found it weird and unpleasant. It gets better, though! I even quite liked it by the end. I was particularly intrigued by Miller’s Penelope and Telemachus, and how they compared to Margaret Atwood’s interpretation of the same characters in The Penelopiad.
Also read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden, a fantasy novel set in medieval Russia (or Rus’). Vasilia (or Vasya) is a young woman with the rare ability to see and communicate with the household and forest spirits that exist in the unseen corners of her world; when the arrival of a zealous young priest from Moscow to dissuade her community from their ~pagan traditions~ places these spirits, and her village, in danger, it’s up to Vasya to save the day.
Currently reading
The fairy tale-ness of The Bear and the Nightingale put me in the mood to re-read Howl’s Moving Castle, so I curled up with that and a cup of tea last night and felt the happiest I have all week.
To read next
Having now read a couple of different retellings of the Odyssey (or parts of it, anyway) I thought I should probably read the real thing, so I put the Emily Wilson translation on hold on Libby.
I finished reading Caleb Crain’s Overthrow, which turned out to be less about possibly telepathic Occupy activists trying to hack the government with their brains, and more about a group of young activists being manipulated/entrapped into hacking the government by a surveillance/security contractor that wants to prove its value to potential investors, and having to deal with the fallout of that— not just the legal consequences but the impact on interpersonal relationships, having the worst moment of their lives play out in the glare of media attention and public opinion.
Crain has a penchant for obscure, multisyllabic words and careful attention (perhaps over-attention) to scene-setting details, but it wasn’t a struggle with the prose that had me re-reading the same paragraph over and over, or reading a handful of pages at a time and then going back and re-reading them; it was that I couldn’t figure out where he was going with all of this and tried to comb through every paragraph for clues. This would have been extremely frustrating if the last chapter hadn’t felt like the last piece of a puzzle clicking into place, and suddenly I was able to make out the picture that had been eluding me the whole time.
Also finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, which I’ve attempted before – a couple of months ago, when I was in a Greek mythology mood after seeing the Oresteia – but gave up just one or two chapters in because I found it weird and unpleasant. It gets better, though! I even quite liked it by the end. I was particularly intrigued by Miller’s Penelope and Telemachus, and how they compared to Margaret Atwood’s interpretation of the same characters in The Penelopiad.
Also read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden, a fantasy novel set in medieval Russia (or Rus’). Vasilia (or Vasya) is a young woman with the rare ability to see and communicate with the household and forest spirits that exist in the unseen corners of her world; when the arrival of a zealous young priest from Moscow to dissuade her community from their ~pagan traditions~ places these spirits, and her village, in danger, it’s up to Vasya to save the day.
Currently reading
The fairy tale-ness of The Bear and the Nightingale put me in the mood to re-read Howl’s Moving Castle, so I curled up with that and a cup of tea last night and felt the happiest I have all week.
To read next
Having now read a couple of different retellings of the Odyssey (or parts of it, anyway) I thought I should probably read the real thing, so I put the Emily Wilson translation on hold on Libby.
