Lawrence (academic nonfiction)

[sage]

"Real" Indians and Others : Mixed-blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood by Bonita Lawrence

( This book is a study of 29 individuals in the Toronto Native community identifying as mixed race. )

eta: Just for the record, the author is part Mi'kmaq and undertook the study as part of her own attempts to understand and validate the range of urban mixed-race Aboriginal experience.

#1- Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, Aurélia Aurita

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I actually read this quite early in January, but it's taken some time to mull over this complicated little book.

A bit of background: in the mid-nineties Frédéric Boilet, a French comic book writer and artist of some critical renown, moved to Tokyo and became successful in manga. Boilet felt that many French comics were stifled by outmoded genre and publishing restrictions, and that many manga had a more naturalistic, less stereotypical aesthetic, but that the manga that were most interesting to him were fairly unlikely to be translated. After a while, a group of artists vaguely under Boilet's organization coalesced into what he calls la nouvelle manga movement. Nouvelle manga focuses on French-Japanese collaboration and on what in the U.S. we would call an alternative comics aesthetic; artists involved with it have included Kan Takahama, Moyoco Anno, Jiro Taniguchi, Joann Sfar, Nicolas de Crecy, Kiriko Nananan, and Emmanuel Guibert. Several nouvelle manga are available in English, including Boilet and Takahama's Mariko Parade, Kazuichi Hanawa's Doing Time, Vanyda's The Building Opposite, and my personal favorite comic of the last several years, the anthology Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators.

The latter anthology was a product of Boilet and the French Institute, who flew French artists to Japan, housed them in different parts of the country, and asked them to draw comics based on their experiences; Japanese artists from each region then contributed a piece based on their thoughts about the place. (There are eight French and eight Japanese pieces; one of the French ones is a collaboration between a writer and an artist.) Aurélia Aurita was one of the French artists, and contributed probably my favorite piece in the collection, so I was on the lookout for more of her work. I found a copy of Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, her latest, during a visit to Montreal.

I should note right now that none of Aurita's work is available in English except for the piece in the anthology. I read French. However, I'm sure there are other people who do who might be interested, and this book has aspects to it that I think people who may not be able to read the book would still find interesting in discussion.

( Cut for length. )

The Twelve Kingdoms, Book One: Sea of Shadows, by Fuyumi Ono

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Yoko Nakajima is a modern Japanese teenager distinguished only by her total passivity and natural red hair. One day a bunch of monsters explode into her classroom! And a blonde guy hands her a sword and tells her to fight! She bursts into tears and refuses, and he makes a disembodied head demon crawl into her body and take it over to fight with that sword!

Yoko is taken to a very cool otherworld, where she proceeds to be the most reluctant, whiny, and passive heroine ever. If this didn't make the read difficult enough, nothing good happens to her for the entire first two-thirds of the book.

I watched part of the anime based on this and was intrigued by the worldbuilding, but ultimately gave up due to disliking every single character. I was told that character development was the entire point, but I didn't stick it out long enough to get to that part. But since I can take a book at my own pace, I speed-read this to see if the changes were actually worth it.

To my surprise... yes, they are. At the two-thirds mark, Yoko has changed a lot, the plot stops being one of relentless grinding misery, and it becomes an intriguingly different epic fantasy with some unusual takes on old tropes. I did think the pay-off made the whole book worth reading, but your mileage may vary. The translation is pretty clunky, incidentally.

Click here to see it on Amazon: Twelve Kingdoms - Paperback Edition Volume 1: Sea of Shadow (v. 1)

Spoilers for the beginning of the anime, which may be spoilers for later books in the series.

( Read more... )

Mind of My Mind, by Octavia Butler (#4)

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Mind of My Mind, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

Mary is a young woman who is part of an... unusual community. Her father is Doro -- sort of; her father is capable of switching bodies at will (and possessing a body kills its original 'inhabitant'), and he was wearing her biological father's body when she was conceived. (He's wearing a different body now, having switched through many in the interim.) Her mother, Rina, is a latent telepath who retreats into drugs and prostitution to deal with the overspill of human emotion she can't block out. Her grandmother slash nanny slash keeper is Emma, who is nearly as powerful in her own way as Doro -- and who doesn't approve of Mary. And Mary is having ever-increasing problems blocking out the emotions of people around her, but clings to Doro's faith in her, that she will be able to come through a true telepath, unlike the hundreds of failed latents that make up most of Doro's scattered 'family.'

Mind of My Mind is about a breeding program to develop people with psi powers, a breeding program run by the enigmatic Doro. And because it's a genuine breeding program, and one that has gone on for countless years, it's not just an experiment but also a family: a sprawling, wildly dysfunctional family. Butler depicts a 'telepathic family' that's about as dysfunctional as you can get: most of the telepaths Doro has been able to create are able to feel the thoughts and emotions of others, but are unable to shield them, making it a torment to live among other humans -- and yet they have also been bred with a desire to find and bond and mate with others like them, which means that they are subject to the hedgehog's dilemma times a thousand. (The Hedgehog's Dilemma: you need to be with others like you to survive and thrive, and yet getting too close to others like you means that you get a painful faceful of sharp spines.) Doro has built a community of people who are extremely powerful and yet deeply unstable and full of pain.

And he's unrepentant: to circumvent the problem that his people can't abide one another for long enough to successfully breed, he simply takes over one half of a pairing for long enough to ensure that the other half becomes pregnant.

And the culmination of his breeding program thus far is Mary, who is extremely special because... because what? Doro isn't saying; Mary doesn't know; and if Emma has an inkling, she also isn't saying.

The books is pretty clearly Mary's story, even though it's told from many points of view, because Butler uses a fascinating POV technique: there are many points of view, but only Mary's is in the first person. Thus Mary's point of view is considerably more intimate, and -- for me -- easier to empathize with. Mary's is the viewpoint that I find myself sympathetic to, if not completely agreeing with, and her own very closely-described confusion and lack of agency regarding her own fate, which is intimately and somewhat terrifyingly described early on, is very compelling.

( Spoiler cut for discussion of what Mary is, and does )

Mind of My Mind is a fascinating science fictional look at the development of a telepathic society -- emphasis on 'society.' It's not a book about independent individualist telepaths: it's about how you have more than one telepath, without them competing each other out of existence. It's about the struggle to have a society of semi-equals... and the way that varying power dynamics complicates that significantly. Recommended. (But again, I do recommend that the Seed to Harvest quartet be read in order.)

Real World by Natsuo Kirino

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Natsuo Kirino "Real World" - 4.5/5

This is the first book I've read by Kirino, but I have Out on my shelf and Grotesque on my wishlist, and I'm really looking forward to reading both.

I wasn't sure what style of book this was when I picked it up (in fact, I didn't even read the cover blurb). The cover looks like it could be horror, and I see people have tagged it as a thriller, but I wouldn't call it either (definitely not horror). It's a book about five teenagers, four girls who are all good friends, and a boy who lives next door to one of them. One day the boy kills his mother and goes on the run, and although none of the girls have ever spoken to him before, they all end up getting involved with his escape in some way. But even though there's a murder and someone's on the run from the cops, it's not a thriller or an adventure. It's more...character studies, almost. Kind of typical literary fiction, really. I really liked it a lot.

I read this in translation, and I'm happy to say that it reads really well in English. (I'm always kind of hesitant because the popularity of all things Japanese these days means a lot of shoddy translation, not just in manga (though that's probably where it's worst), but in novels as well. I tried to read The Ring in English out of curiosity and it was horrible.)

catching up... (1-18)

[littlebutfierce]

I used to be so diligent about posting here, alas! My reviews have gotten shorter, too. But seeing all the new folks joining & everyone posting their reads has inspired me to try to catch up! Here's what I've read since I finished the challenge last year (using IBARW as my deadline). Links go to my reading journal.

Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity & the Cultural Politics of Space - Rick Bonus

America Is in the Heart - Carlos Bulosan

Racing the Dark - Alaya Dawn Johnson

Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women - Edited by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California

Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America - Edited by Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara

Race Manners for the 21st Century: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans in an Age of Fear - Bruce A. Jacobs

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White - Frank H. Wu

Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam - Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera

Funny Boy - Shyam Selvadurai

Waiting to Be Heard: Youth Speak Out about Inheriting a Violent World - The Students of San Francisco's Thurgood Marshall Academic High School

The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats - Joanne Chen

The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking - Simon Singh

A Century of Migration (Bristol's Asian Communities) - Munawar Hussain

Chinatown Beat - Henry Chang

Stuffed & Starved: From Farm to Fork, the Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Raj Patel

Kin: New Fiction by Black and Asian Women - Edited by Karen McCarthy

Women, Race & Class - Angela Davis

From Outside In: Refugees and British Society - Edited by Nushin Arbabzadah