![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So recently I have watched/read:
"The absolutely true story of a part-time indian" by Sherman Alexie
I think, unfortunately, that I've just gotten sick of young adult fiction. But FOR a young adult book this was really good. It managed to deal with some heavy themes without glossing over the nastiness or getting bogged down in angst, and had a light, snarky, readable style throughout.
It was an interesting experience reading this: like the main character I grew up in a poor area and made the choice to go to a fairly distant higher class highschool in order to reach my academic potential. So a lot of his experiences I could relate to (not being able to afford things my friends took for granted, being rejected back home for "thinking I was better than them" etc). On the other hand, the life of a white australian girl in the suburbs (working class or otherwise) is really not comparable to the life of an american indian boy from a reservation, and those points of similarity helped emphasise the differences.
Anyway, I'm glad I read this, since it'll hopefully wash out some of the absurd stereotypes which are the only imagery of american indians we get over here, and it's given me slightly more insight into what it must be like in remote aboriginal communities. And also because it was just a good book :)
Stars in my Pockets like grains of sand by Samuel R Delaney
I somehow got entirely the wrong impression about this book: I knew it was supposed to be a classic, but got it mixed up with her swords and sorcery novel Neveryóna and so I decided it wasn't going to be my sort of thing.
But it's science fiction, and really good science fiction at that. Unfortunately, it was designed as the first half of a diptych which was never finished so the ending is a bit unsatisfying.
She does a fantastic job of showing not telling. It's all in first person or limited third, so we never get a really "objective" point of view and have to decide for ourselves what we think of the places and characters, and since one of the themes is the relativity of cultural norms this can be interestingly disorienting. A very simple but remarkably effective device is that the main viewpoint character speaks a language where female pronouns are used as the default for all genders (and species), and so when you meet a "woman" it takes a while to figure out if they're male or female, human or alien, and sometimes it's never made clear at all. (I decided to use this device for this review, just to give a hint of what's like :))
While the style is quite different, the themes and ideas reminded me of Iain M Banks Culture novels, except with unflinching sex instead of violence. (Which is a nice change. I am increasingly annoyed by Banks heteronormativity, I think it limits her books)
Also, I watched a little bit of Jeeves and Wooster starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I think they inhabited the characters perfectly, and it was true to the books: which is to say, inoffensive and dull. Ah well.
"The absolutely true story of a part-time indian" by Sherman Alexie
I think, unfortunately, that I've just gotten sick of young adult fiction. But FOR a young adult book this was really good. It managed to deal with some heavy themes without glossing over the nastiness or getting bogged down in angst, and had a light, snarky, readable style throughout.
It was an interesting experience reading this: like the main character I grew up in a poor area and made the choice to go to a fairly distant higher class highschool in order to reach my academic potential. So a lot of his experiences I could relate to (not being able to afford things my friends took for granted, being rejected back home for "thinking I was better than them" etc). On the other hand, the life of a white australian girl in the suburbs (working class or otherwise) is really not comparable to the life of an american indian boy from a reservation, and those points of similarity helped emphasise the differences.
Anyway, I'm glad I read this, since it'll hopefully wash out some of the absurd stereotypes which are the only imagery of american indians we get over here, and it's given me slightly more insight into what it must be like in remote aboriginal communities. And also because it was just a good book :)
Stars in my Pockets like grains of sand by Samuel R Delaney
I somehow got entirely the wrong impression about this book: I knew it was supposed to be a classic, but got it mixed up with her swords and sorcery novel Neveryóna and so I decided it wasn't going to be my sort of thing.
But it's science fiction, and really good science fiction at that. Unfortunately, it was designed as the first half of a diptych which was never finished so the ending is a bit unsatisfying.
She does a fantastic job of showing not telling. It's all in first person or limited third, so we never get a really "objective" point of view and have to decide for ourselves what we think of the places and characters, and since one of the themes is the relativity of cultural norms this can be interestingly disorienting. A very simple but remarkably effective device is that the main viewpoint character speaks a language where female pronouns are used as the default for all genders (and species), and so when you meet a "woman" it takes a while to figure out if they're male or female, human or alien, and sometimes it's never made clear at all. (I decided to use this device for this review, just to give a hint of what's like :))
While the style is quite different, the themes and ideas reminded me of Iain M Banks Culture novels, except with unflinching sex instead of violence. (Which is a nice change. I am increasingly annoyed by Banks heteronormativity, I think it limits her books)
Also, I watched a little bit of Jeeves and Wooster starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I think they inhabited the characters perfectly, and it was true to the books: which is to say, inoffensive and dull. Ah well.
