May Booklog
May. 30th, 2015 11:54 pmSo You've Been Publicly Shamed - Jon Ronson
Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder
The Creation of Anne Boleyn - Susan Bordo
Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent - Marie Brennan
It turns out that what's really good for getting me back into reading more is actually having a dedicated e-reader rather than trying to read on the kindle app on my tablet (tumblr is a ridiculous timesuck, News at Eleven!)
I find Jon Ronson's pop journalism immensely readable and really enjoyed his latest, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, about public shaming in the digital age, and what it means now that there's no longer really such a thing as it'll all be tomorrow's chip wrapping. I had lot of natural sympathy with Ronson's view that call out culture had started from a place of good intentions and great justice (his example was people's reaction to Jan Muir's horrible, homophobic article about Stephen Gately's death; I suppose a fandom equivalent might be race fail) and has since migrated to a place of willful misunderstandings and unwillingness to let people move on.
I went back and read Them, where Ronson embeds himself with extremists of various stripes and discovers that they all believe in a secret cabal of powerful people running the world, even if they disagree about who exactly is in that cabal. This has... not aged well. It was researched and written in the late 90s, and you can sort of tell that it predates constant, easy access to the internet because a lot of Ronson's investigations/misadventures could have been rendered moot by five minutes on google.
I was very young when the Berlin Wall came down, and I remember seeing the images on TV but not really having any idea of what was going on or why, and like all products of the British eduction system almost everything I knew about Germany was in relation to WWII. So although I've been to Berlin twice (I'm going again on Wednesday, actually; I think it's a brilliant city) and done all the usual tourist things I still didn't know much about the rational behind the Wall or life in the GDR. So in a fit of belated intellectual curiosity I read Stasiland which was brilliantly researched and written, and fascinating, and awful. Recommended.
The central premise of The Creation Anne Boleyn is that portrayals of Anne Boleyn throughout history owe less to any historical fact and more to the prevailing social norms at the time; which is an argument that I, at least, find difficult to argue with. It's a cultural history that moves from Anne the historical figure, to Anne the patron saint of the reformation/villainess in chief in the Protestant/Catholic culture wars, to Anne the fictional character up through The Tudors, to Anne Boleyn online 'fandom'.
As much as I agreed with the author's premise, and as much as it was really, really interesting as a cultural history I did have... niggles. I'm not sure the editing was great (my point of view when it comes to editing, btw, is that if I notice it, it's probably not great) with lots of arguments, indeed entire paragraphs, repeated almost verbatim. There's lots of criticising other historians for not questioning unreliable sources (mainly Chapuys' letters), or speculating without making it clear that that's what they're doing, then turning around and doing the same thing herself. There's also some attacks on historians and writers who've tackled Anne; I've never read Phillipa Gregory, and I know that a lot of people hate her writing, but the attack on her felt weirdly vitriolic; I objected less to her digs at David Starkey whose documentaries have always had an unpleasant veneer of sexism for me. Anyway, interesting but flawed.
The Voyage of the Basilisk was the only fiction I read this month (non-fiction can be really good for getting out of a reading slump, I find) and in this installment our pseudo-Victorian lady dragon naturalist rides sea monsters and gains a love interest. If you're not already on this ride then I highly recommend you hop on; it is so much fun!
*
As previously mentioned I am off on my holidays later this week, to Berlin, no less, which is awesome because huzzah, holiday! and because it means I get to hang out with the awesome![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fitz_y and her equally awesome partner. But is less than awesome because it means I have to get on a plane. I... do not fly well. I have strategies in place for getting me through flights:
1. Have an extremely large Gin & Tonic in the airport.
2. Pretend I'm not going. I'm not going to get on a plane; I am, for unrelated reasons, going to fill this suitcase with a week's worth of clothes and toiletries. I'm not going, of course, and the fact that I've booked a taxi to the airport doesn't mean that I am. I'm not going; I am going to join this queue at security, though, because I'm British and it is a queue... and so on and so forth until the plane is taxing down the runway.
3. Have a book to read on the plane that is so engrossing that I forget that I'm however many miles up in the air and not just on the high speed train to Aberdeen.
Does anybody know of such a book? Seriously, though, a total page-turner, or the sort of book you just vanish inside, or both? A book to see off an incipient panic attack, if that's not too much to ask. Any genres, fiction, non-fiction, anything?
Them: Adventures with Extremists - Jon Ronson
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder
The Creation of Anne Boleyn - Susan Bordo
Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent - Marie Brennan
It turns out that what's really good for getting me back into reading more is actually having a dedicated e-reader rather than trying to read on the kindle app on my tablet (tumblr is a ridiculous timesuck, News at Eleven!)
I find Jon Ronson's pop journalism immensely readable and really enjoyed his latest, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, about public shaming in the digital age, and what it means now that there's no longer really such a thing as it'll all be tomorrow's chip wrapping. I had lot of natural sympathy with Ronson's view that call out culture had started from a place of good intentions and great justice (his example was people's reaction to Jan Muir's horrible, homophobic article about Stephen Gately's death; I suppose a fandom equivalent might be race fail) and has since migrated to a place of willful misunderstandings and unwillingness to let people move on.
I went back and read Them, where Ronson embeds himself with extremists of various stripes and discovers that they all believe in a secret cabal of powerful people running the world, even if they disagree about who exactly is in that cabal. This has... not aged well. It was researched and written in the late 90s, and you can sort of tell that it predates constant, easy access to the internet because a lot of Ronson's investigations/misadventures could have been rendered moot by five minutes on google.
I was very young when the Berlin Wall came down, and I remember seeing the images on TV but not really having any idea of what was going on or why, and like all products of the British eduction system almost everything I knew about Germany was in relation to WWII. So although I've been to Berlin twice (I'm going again on Wednesday, actually; I think it's a brilliant city) and done all the usual tourist things I still didn't know much about the rational behind the Wall or life in the GDR. So in a fit of belated intellectual curiosity I read Stasiland which was brilliantly researched and written, and fascinating, and awful. Recommended.
The central premise of The Creation Anne Boleyn is that portrayals of Anne Boleyn throughout history owe less to any historical fact and more to the prevailing social norms at the time; which is an argument that I, at least, find difficult to argue with. It's a cultural history that moves from Anne the historical figure, to Anne the patron saint of the reformation/villainess in chief in the Protestant/Catholic culture wars, to Anne the fictional character up through The Tudors, to Anne Boleyn online 'fandom'.
As much as I agreed with the author's premise, and as much as it was really, really interesting as a cultural history I did have... niggles. I'm not sure the editing was great (my point of view when it comes to editing, btw, is that if I notice it, it's probably not great) with lots of arguments, indeed entire paragraphs, repeated almost verbatim. There's lots of criticising other historians for not questioning unreliable sources (mainly Chapuys' letters), or speculating without making it clear that that's what they're doing, then turning around and doing the same thing herself. There's also some attacks on historians and writers who've tackled Anne; I've never read Phillipa Gregory, and I know that a lot of people hate her writing, but the attack on her felt weirdly vitriolic; I objected less to her digs at David Starkey whose documentaries have always had an unpleasant veneer of sexism for me. Anyway, interesting but flawed.
The Voyage of the Basilisk was the only fiction I read this month (non-fiction can be really good for getting out of a reading slump, I find) and in this installment our pseudo-Victorian lady dragon naturalist rides sea monsters and gains a love interest. If you're not already on this ride then I highly recommend you hop on; it is so much fun!
*
As previously mentioned I am off on my holidays later this week, to Berlin, no less, which is awesome because huzzah, holiday! and because it means I get to hang out with the awesome
fitz_y and her equally awesome partner. But is less than awesome because it means I have to get on a plane. I... do not fly well. I have strategies in place for getting me through flights:1. Have an extremely large Gin & Tonic in the airport.
2. Pretend I'm not going. I'm not going to get on a plane; I am, for unrelated reasons, going to fill this suitcase with a week's worth of clothes and toiletries. I'm not going, of course, and the fact that I've booked a taxi to the airport doesn't mean that I am. I'm not going; I am going to join this queue at security, though, because I'm British and it is a queue... and so on and so forth until the plane is taxing down the runway.
3. Have a book to read on the plane that is so engrossing that I forget that I'm however many miles up in the air and not just on the high speed train to Aberdeen.
Does anybody know of such a book? Seriously, though, a total page-turner, or the sort of book you just vanish inside, or both? A book to see off an incipient panic attack, if that's not too much to ask. Any genres, fiction, non-fiction, anything?