Four Good Books
Sunday, March 22nd, 2015 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kBy Blood—Ellen Ullman
regular print and ebook
This (literal) psychological thriller begins with an obsessed man listening to the therapist next door and her patients. He convinces himself that one of them is The Woman in his life, and doxxes her. Since the setting is 1974 San Francisco, this task is analog, awesome, and instructive. Origins and documentation are running themes: both the therapist and her patient are adopted, and the story eventually resolves as it draws the early-life connection between them during the Final Solution in Germany.
Read if ... you're a fan of E.A.Poe or Ruth Rendell. You want to examine the meanings of psychotherapy. You're interested in the details of a so-recently thriving long-lost world.
Avoid if ... You like realistic fiction, short sentences, action. CONTAINS; matter-of-fact descriptions of life and death in the Holocaust; het male objectifying lesbian female.
Madness: A Bipolar Life—Marya Hornbacher
http://maryahornbacher.com/madnesssummary.html
regular print and ebook
Outstanding memoir of Hornbacher's life-long dance with bipolarity. You may recognize her name from Wasted, an earlier memoir of her disordered eating that she now frames as part of extensive self-medication for her BP. Her writing is beautiful. Her detailed descriptions of the trip down and up and down and up and into the psych ward are stunning yet informative. Her at-home psychotic interludes, made possible by a rota of concerned friends, highlight that those of us with mental illness have friends, are part of communities, and can contribute to the interdependent mesh.
Read if ... You're interested in mental health issues; you want the next chapter in her memoirs; you're a sucker for a love story; you're ready for a glimmer of hope that sometimes meds do work.
Avoid if ... You believe memoirists must be old; you prefer self-help narratives; you believe nobody should use psych meds. CONTAINS: psychotic episodes; self-harm; ECT (shock therapy); psych wards.
Lock In—John Scalzi
first five chapters on Tor.com
available in English print, large print, ebook, commercial and print-disabled audio as well as German print
Fascinating premise, near-future SF, murder mystery: a virus causes "lock in," where a person is fully awake but unable to physically move anything. Millions are affected and there's a moon-shot cure effort. In the meantime, the folks affected have already created a fully furnished reality for themselves online. Offline, they can use prosthetic presences—brainwave-controlled robots. Scalzi does a good job representing disability culture, as well as the heroic and unseemly cultures of Big Medicine. Finally, he plays around with gender presentation and expectations, since these are always the result of a conscious decision for the locked in folks.
Read if ... You're eager for a skewed, humorous take on Washington; interested in disability culture and the ethics of body-sharing; you want an engrossing read for a four-hour plane trip.
Avoid if ... You're interested in character development; your disbelief suspenders are busted; you want all your ends tied up neatly on the last page; US pop-culture references from the last 30 years are opaque to you. CONTAINS: cartoon violence, suspension of civil liberties.
Peace meals: candy-wrapped Kalashnikovs and other war stories—Anna Badkhen
https://www.facebook.com/AnnaBadkhen
Available in print and ebook
Thanks towildirises for the rec.
Badkhen balances each battlefield visited with a trip to the nearby home front, details of the food they shared, and a recipe. She writes from her experience as a secular Jew born in the former Soviet Union. Her perspective of Afghanistan and Iraq don't fall into the categories which we most often see in our news.
I was delighted that folks living in war zones still attend closely to delicious cookery. Her thoughts on Israel/Dixie particularly intrigued me. She claims "Middle East" correspondents (who carry two passports since Israeli transit stamps would prevent entry to any of the region's other countries), use the "Dixie" epithet to refer to Israel without the political meanings most of the other names carry. "Dixie" isn't so neutral for this American, and again I recognize how one's location define politics.
Read if ... You're interested in how humans survive living in war zones or how war correspondents scam their way through; you are hungry for the flavors of "Asia Minor" or a hint of what a world run by women might be; you wish to populate the daily headlines with the names and lives of actual human beings.
Avoid if ... You're seeking deep historical context and analysis; you're not interested in having your assumptions challenged. CONTAINS: Unremitting war, rape, and devastation, but no gory details
regular print and ebook
This (literal) psychological thriller begins with an obsessed man listening to the therapist next door and her patients. He convinces himself that one of them is The Woman in his life, and doxxes her. Since the setting is 1974 San Francisco, this task is analog, awesome, and instructive. Origins and documentation are running themes: both the therapist and her patient are adopted, and the story eventually resolves as it draws the early-life connection between them during the Final Solution in Germany.
Read if ... you're a fan of E.A.Poe or Ruth Rendell. You want to examine the meanings of psychotherapy. You're interested in the details of a so-recently thriving long-lost world.
Avoid if ... You like realistic fiction, short sentences, action. CONTAINS; matter-of-fact descriptions of life and death in the Holocaust; het male objectifying lesbian female.
Madness: A Bipolar Life—Marya Hornbacher
http://maryahornbacher.com/madnesssummary.html
regular print and ebook
Outstanding memoir of Hornbacher's life-long dance with bipolarity. You may recognize her name from Wasted, an earlier memoir of her disordered eating that she now frames as part of extensive self-medication for her BP. Her writing is beautiful. Her detailed descriptions of the trip down and up and down and up and into the psych ward are stunning yet informative. Her at-home psychotic interludes, made possible by a rota of concerned friends, highlight that those of us with mental illness have friends, are part of communities, and can contribute to the interdependent mesh.
Read if ... You're interested in mental health issues; you want the next chapter in her memoirs; you're a sucker for a love story; you're ready for a glimmer of hope that sometimes meds do work.
Avoid if ... You believe memoirists must be old; you prefer self-help narratives; you believe nobody should use psych meds. CONTAINS: psychotic episodes; self-harm; ECT (shock therapy); psych wards.
Lock In—John Scalzi
first five chapters on Tor.com
available in English print, large print, ebook, commercial and print-disabled audio as well as German print
Fascinating premise, near-future SF, murder mystery: a virus causes "lock in," where a person is fully awake but unable to physically move anything. Millions are affected and there's a moon-shot cure effort. In the meantime, the folks affected have already created a fully furnished reality for themselves online. Offline, they can use prosthetic presences—brainwave-controlled robots. Scalzi does a good job representing disability culture, as well as the heroic and unseemly cultures of Big Medicine. Finally, he plays around with gender presentation and expectations, since these are always the result of a conscious decision for the locked in folks.
Read if ... You're eager for a skewed, humorous take on Washington; interested in disability culture and the ethics of body-sharing; you want an engrossing read for a four-hour plane trip.
Avoid if ... You're interested in character development; your disbelief suspenders are busted; you want all your ends tied up neatly on the last page; US pop-culture references from the last 30 years are opaque to you. CONTAINS: cartoon violence, suspension of civil liberties.
Peace meals: candy-wrapped Kalashnikovs and other war stories—Anna Badkhen
https://www.facebook.com/AnnaBadkhen
Available in print and ebook
Thanks to
wildirises for the rec.begin quoteWar correspondent memoirs are a favorite yet frustrating genre. The ones I can read (in English) seem to inevitably champion the imperial point-of-view. Even when the author brings a different background and deep skepticism, as in this one, the war she's covering is the result of American imperial ambitions.
In the blighted places where I work, food is the closest thing to normalcy. you hold your breath tiptoeing across a minefield, and you hold your breath again at the deathbed of a child. You take notes as people kill in fear and die in agony. You write, your stomach muscles grabbing and your throat tight of the injustice of the world. You weep as you write. You file.
And then, if you're lucky, you eat.
end quote
Badkhen balances each battlefield visited with a trip to the nearby home front, details of the food they shared, and a recipe. She writes from her experience as a secular Jew born in the former Soviet Union. Her perspective of Afghanistan and Iraq don't fall into the categories which we most often see in our news.
I was delighted that folks living in war zones still attend closely to delicious cookery. Her thoughts on Israel/Dixie particularly intrigued me. She claims "Middle East" correspondents (who carry two passports since Israeli transit stamps would prevent entry to any of the region's other countries), use the "Dixie" epithet to refer to Israel without the political meanings most of the other names carry. "Dixie" isn't so neutral for this American, and again I recognize how one's location define politics.
Read if ... You're interested in how humans survive living in war zones or how war correspondents scam their way through; you are hungry for the flavors of "Asia Minor" or a hint of what a world run by women might be; you wish to populate the daily headlines with the names and lives of actual human beings.
Avoid if ... You're seeking deep historical context and analysis; you're not interested in having your assumptions challenged. CONTAINS: Unremitting war, rape, and devastation, but no gory details
(no subject)
Date: 2015-03-22 10:11 pm (UTC)Interesting point that hadn't occurred to me. I'm not sure the pop-culture references are much of a barrier, they certainly didn't keep me from loving Lock In.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-03-23 03:38 pm (UTC)Yeah, I also loved it. My caveat is mostly aimed at people who aren't reading my reviews online—which doesn't make much sense, does it.
The low ranking reflects my pig-headed insistence on holding all published works to the same writing standard. In the company of Hornbacher and Ullman, Scalzi needs a few more decades' practice. His ideas, however, are delicious.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-03-23 04:42 pm (UTC)