Reviews 1-11

[vass]

I've been slacking on writing reviews, so now I have to do ten in one gulp. Here goes.

( chitra bannerjee divakaruni, queen of dreams )

( chitra bannerjee divakaruni, the conch bearer )

( raj patel, stuffed and starved )

( david anthony durham, pride of carthage )

( nalo hopkinson, brown girl in the ring )

( r.k. narayan, ramayana )

( marjorie m liu, tiger eye )

( cindy pon, silver phoenix )

( lisa see, snow flower and the secret fan )

( malcolm gladwell, blink )

( r.k. narayan, a tiger for malgudi )

Quick reviews

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Apologies for the brevity of these reviews, but they're from my Twitter book-review project (@booktweeting, for those of you who Tweet).

Life is Short but Wide, by J. California Cooper
New York: Doubleday, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0385511346

20th-CENTURY FABLE of a black family and community in Oklahoma, told in rich, lyrical language. Vivid characters. A MINUS

(More than I could say on Twitter: J. California Cooper is an incredible writer with a distinctive style, who should in my opinion be right up there with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in the pantheon. There's something so engrossing about her writing; its very simplicity makes the characters seem real and very close.)

Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America, by Linda Furiya
Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1580051910

SWEET MEMOIR of growing up Japanese in rural Indiana has charm, poignancy, but may seem slight to some readers. B PLUS

IS~Neither Male Nor Female~ & Wandering Son

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I don't usually review manga here, because I don't count it as books, but I really wanted to share these two series.

IS~Otoko Demo Onna Demo Nai Sei~ (IS~Neither Male Nor Female~) by Rokuhana Chiyo is a story about intersex people. The first couple chapters are stand-alones, but the bulk of the manga (15+ volumes ongoing) is about a boy named Haru.

I really love this series because while it does have its flaws, it's the first series I've ever seen that deals realistically with intersexuality. The author has worked closely with an online intersex group to make sure she has her facts straight and isn't getting offensive or appropriative, which shouldn't impress me as much as it does, because it should be how everyone approaches fiction, but we all know that's not how it works, so I do admire her for how respectful she's been with this topic, especially considering the fact that her original idea was for a generic fantasy story that had a "hermaphrodite" hero/ine and it was only when she started poking around online for research that she realised, hey, this could be offensive, and then trashed that idea and wrote this story instead.

I made a long, rambling post here the other day with a longer summary, as well as what I love and don't love about it (long story short: it's wonderful in so many ways, but disappointing heteronormative). Despite my reservations, I highly, highly recommend it.

The first eight volumes have been scanlated and can be found online in English here. Unfortunately there is no official English translation. If you read Japanese, there are 15 volumes out so far, with vol. 16 due to come out next month. You can order them on Amazon Japan.

Hourou Musuko (Wandering Son) by Shimura Takako is about trans kids. The main characters are Nitori Shuuichi (aka Nitorin) and Takatsuki Yoshino. Takatsuki is ftm and Nitorin is mtf. There is also Ariga Makoto (Mako), another mtf kid in their year at school, and Yuki, a trans woman they meet and become friends with. The story starts when the kids are in 5th grade and they are currently in 8th.

I love this story so, so much. Unlike with IS, I really have no reservations about this and love it wholeheartedly. (I mean, I could wish for it to be more queer, yes, but I'm not afraid the eventual ending might disappoint me, the way I am with IS.) I have never read another manga like this. Japanese media often features okamas (a term that can be applied to trans women, drag queens, or just (usually effeminate) gay men), but they're usually comic relief or bad guys. Even when they are sympathetic, they're likely to be very minor characters, and like in western media, it's much, much harder to find representations of trans guys.

This is your basic slice of life manga, just following the characters as they grow up. There are so many little things that ring true. I think one of my favorite bits has been Chii-chan, a new girl they meet in 7th grade, who occasionally comes to school in a boys' uniform, or wearing a tie with her girls' uniform instead of the ribbon she's supposed to. She's not trans or genderqueer, just likes doing what she wants to do, and I love how Takatsuki envies her, because for Takatsuki it's not that easy because it actually means something to wear boys' clothes.

This one also has no official translation, but has been completely scanlated, to the most recent chapter available in Japan (download here or read online here). If you read Japanese, you can order from Amazon Japan or download the first eight volumes here. There are currently 8+ volumes, with vol. 9 scheduled to come out this autumn (sadly, this one is released only one volume per year).

Oh, and for both of these, I read them in Japanese, so I have no idea whether the translations are any good or not. :-/

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. 28.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I was initially put off of Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent work of pop sociology by a review that said that he explained the better math scores of Asian countries as compared to European ones by saying that working in rice paddies makes you good at math. Now that I’ve read it, I still don’t buy his rice paddy theory, but the theory itself isn’t quite as dumb and direct as the claim above. I’ll explain what it actually is as a snapshot of the value and drawbacks of the book: some plausible explanations, some poorly supported theories, some mind-blowing anecdotes and analysis, some goofy overreaching.

Gladwell’s theory is that working a rice paddy is more labor-intensive and responsive to individual experimentation than working a wheat field (interesting if true; he provides good evidence in favor of rice, but little against wheat), and that virtually the only factor separating kids and countries which do well at math with kids and countries which don’t is the amount of time and effort put into studying and doing math. The latter claim is very well-supported, especially by the hilariously telling 100% correlation of scores on an international math test with the percentage of questions completed on a long and dull survey handed out at the same time: the kids who are willing to plow through the survey are the kids who do well on the math test, and the kids who get bored and give up on the survey score poorly on the test.

Gladwell then attempts to link the work ethic necessary in rice farming to the work ethic passed down culturally long past the point when many people in the country are farming anything, so that rice farming is a sort of first cause for seeing things like a longer school year as valuable. I still think this is a stretch. But the chapter itself has all sorts of fascinating material— and the fact that my attention was held by math is a testament to Gladwell’s writing.

His thesis is that no one really pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, and that exceptional success depends on advantageous sociological factors and chance as much as it does on merit, and sometimes more. This is probably not a startling idea to anyone here, but some of his individual examples are genuinely eye-opening. I especially liked the first few chapters, on the disquieting intersection of early birthdays and talent tracking, and the crucial ten thousand hours of practice. There’s also a good section on how a number of factors (including the years of their birth and the unintended repurcussions of a particular brand of anti-Semitism!) gave some Jewish lawyers the chance to become legal superstars.

Recommended if you enjoy pop sociology and are willing to read some cultural and other generalizations that may make you tear your hair out.

My favorite works by Gladwell are his magazine articles, which tend to be more in-depth and less prone to sweeping conclusions than his books, and Blink, about the benefits and perils of snap judgments, which has some great material on subconscious prejudices and what can be done to overcome them. And is very entertaining.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Articles: http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html

Tagging

[oyceter]

Or: in which I actually start making good on my word to my fellow co-mods and take a stab at organizing tags

First, how do you guys use the tags? Do you use the tags?

1. deepad posted a while ago asking how people tagged authors of color on LibraryThing, Shelfari, and GoodReads. I'd also love any brainstorming here for tags for the community, and I'll create a poll out of the options people generate later. Some options: authors of color, authors: poc, a: poc, poc author, a: chromatic, etc. I'll follow the same schema for editors and illustrators as well. There's further discussion here as well.


2. I noticed that the comm has many race tags and then "[race] writers" tags. Is it helpful for people to have both? I figured having both means you can pick up a book about Japanese and Native American people and know that the author is Japanese. If it is helpful, I'd like to follow whatever schema we decide for the first question (ex. authors of color: black, authors: black, a: black, black author, etc.). Also, how granular would people like this to be? Ex. just author: asian or author: asian + author: japanese?


3. I'm going to get rid of hyphenated races and go with unhyphenated (ex. black british instead of black-british) unless people have reasons not to. I'll also be using the "@" symbol for words that switch according to gender (ex. Latin@ instead of Latina/Latino).


4. Does anyone have opinions on "Asian Pacific Islanders" vs. separating them out? I do not want to exclude Pacific Islanders, but I also want people specifically looking for Pacific Islanders to be able to find them...

Let me know if any of these schemas are problematic! I want the community to be as useful to its members as possible and would love any suggestions or comments.

Triton by Samuel R. Delany

[firecat]

Triton is set in a future in which humanity has spread to various moons and planets in the solar system. On the moon Triton, people have a lot of freedoms that we don't have on present-day Earth, for example, ( vague spoilers start here; there are no major spoilers in my post but there might be in comments )

Nalo Hopkinson and Bil Wright

[anitabuchan.livejournal.com]

8. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

This has already been reviewed several times, so I doubt I'm going to say anything new here. Overall, I liked this book a lot, and have added other books by Hopkinson to my wishlist. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes the writing was a bit clumsy, and at times I felt it was a bit slow moving. There was a lot of detail and description, which was great because it established this fascinating and original future world, but I felt it also slowed the pace a little. I loved that this was different - not based on European mythologies, like most fantasies are. I also thought the dialogue was very well written, and the big finish was perfect.

9. Sunday You Learn How To Box by Bil Wright

This has also been reviewed here before. It's set in 1968, and centres on a 14 year old boy, Louis Bowman, who lives with his mother and stepfather in a housing project.

It is a very good novel. The writing style is great, and it tackles many issues I'm interested in - Louis is gay, suffers from depression, and really doesn't fit in. The scene in which he went to a party and stood pretending he was helping the DJ instead of socialising felt painfully real. The characters were complex and real. Louis' mother let his stepfather abuse him - encouraged it, even - but was also shown to be a woman with her own ambitions, struggling to do her best to improve her life. Ray Anthony, the local 'hoodlum' Louis gets a crush on, defies stereotypes to act as a kind of protecter to Louis, and the friendship that grows between the two is very sweet.

It did take me a while to get into this. Louis is a character I found difficult to like, although that changed as the book went on. To be honest, I didn't much like the beginning - it starts with a very dramatic event, then skips back several months, which is something I'm never a fan of. But the ending was beautiful and sweet, and left me with a happy glow.