#thoughts on reading

[saintsaensreads]

Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!

This year, maybe more than any other before, I've been plagued with a reading curse : a curse of DNFing books. Not out of boredom or dislike, maybe the exact opposite : a too passionate approach.

This year has been a year of many first in various aspects of my life. One of which less enjoyable than others : my health has taken a toll (which, fingers crossed, will not bear any physical consequences) but which for sure left me with quite a shaken spirit.

One of the effects of said shaken spirit was a feeling of general instability. While, at the same time, I was quite sure to have left behind most of the instability I had lived through until this year... Well, life never goes as planned it seems. Unfortunately, both my physical state and this now infamous feeling of looming instability left me reeling, and I found myself properly unable to finish books which I enjoyed a lot. It sounds strange, believe me it is even stranger to go through it !

The victims of my DNFing :

[Covers of : The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk (english edition) ; L'Arte della Gioia, Goliarda Sapienza (italian edition) ; Histoire d'un ruisseau, Histoire d'une montagne, Elisée Reclus (french edition)]

These books were fascinating for me, for different reasons :

The Books of Jacob explored a narrative style, as well as a subject and a place throughout centuries I know next to nothing about.

L'Arte della Gioia offered a uniquely endearing story, coupled with a writing style which left me breathless, while also challenging my understanding of italian in a literary setting.

Histoire d'un ruisseau, Histoire d'une montagne might be the odd one out : I would take this book, which is both a study in political ideas and geology, with me while going on hikes. I wanted to observe and be in a similar environment as the one studied there. Obviously, my health being what it is, I didn't hike nor walk as much as I had hoped for.

These books, varied as they are, were so fascinating that I gave it my whole energy when I read them. I would settle, start a sentence, think it over because of how beautiful or thoughtful it was, start dissecting it (as one can do when one is a former literature student...)... and then two chapters in, the energy is out of the window, because life is not un long fleuve tranquille, and I'd find myself at a loss on what to do when my mind cannot focus anymore as much as I would like it to. What a conundrum.

I'm not loosing hope I'll ever be able to read those books entirely at some point (maybe next year even!), but what I can take out of this year is that I might need to stop pushing myself too much.

It's easy, in a way, to feel pressured to read books quickly in our current society. Even more so when there are so many great books that seem to be waiting at your fingertips. And wen book content is being published by single readers at an unfathomable speed, content creators who talk about books are showing off monthly TBRs so high it might swallow them whole if they fall on their heads... How can you remain distant and unaffected ? The answer is quite simple : you can't. So you want to read. You want to read a lot. More. Always more.

And with such an environment, it's just as quickly guilt-tripping to know you enjoy books, to know you are able to enjoy books, but to physically or mentally be unable to read or to stick to a story. I have been through this so many times this year, it's mentally exhausting.

Now, while I had tried this year to work on finding a healthier balance in my work life, I now also hope to find a healthier balance in my hobbies, of which includes reading.

I love reading, but I don't want to feel pressured into reading. I also don't want to spend my free time only reading as a consequence (which happened sometimes, because I felt urged to finish books...for no reasons at all). I have a lot of hobbies besides reading that I which I could dedicate time to : writing first and foremost, but also (as you might have noticed) knitting and embroidery, learning languages... there are so many creatives outlets I wish I could focus on !

But most importantly now, I want to be able to enjoy the books I'm reading without depleting what little energy I have. I want to have a healthier relationship with my hobbies. And while before I was afraid of loosing time by not being in a good enough physical state, I want to take care of myself so that, when I have the energy, I can fully enjoy the hobbies I set for myself. Reading is about learning, discovering, emphasizing. It takes even a lot more out of you, if you try to get out of your comfort reads : changing genre, styles, periods or languages... there is no shame in that. And there is certainly no shame in needing time.

In the end, I DNFed these lovely books out of self-preservation, to go on with a lighter mood and find a better balance in my reading life. Hopefully, in a few months, I can come back to them in a calmer mind and a calmer environment, where I'll be able to dive without fear into their stories to discover them fully, enjoy them fully... and share them with you as much I as I like !

[rhiawriter]

What do you think of the "Death of the Author" concept in literary analysis? Do you think all art could or should be separated from whichever artist made it?

I think you can do it as an exercise. There are certainly books and poems that I didn’t write, but I’ve internalized to an extent that they feel deeply personal to me, so there are times when I separate art from the creator. 

But I don’t think you can or should do that completely or use that as your only form of literary analysis. Everything comes out of a particular culture and historical moment, and if you try to divorce art from that, you can end up perpetuating some pretty bad things.

Take Lord of the Rings as an example. I love Lord of the Rings. I grew up obsessed with the books and the movies. I’ve read the Silmarillion and a bunch of Tolkien’s other unpublished stuff. Those books helped me create my own fantasy worlds and greatly shaped the person I am today for which I will always be grateful. 

That being said, I’m not ignorant to the fact that Tolkien was a white, straight British man who fetishized the English. He wrote a fantasy where the hero is an upperclass gentleman with a manservant who follows him around. The pinnacle of goodness in this world are lazy white people getting to hang out in the garden. The bad guys are dark skinned people who work in factories in the south. If I just said well, that’s Middle Earth, it has nothing to do with this world, well that would be a problem. I don’t need to reject Lord of the Rings. I can still love the things I love about it. But I also need to engage critically with the parts of the text that came from a particular time and from a particular person who was shaped by his position in society.  

[theduchessapproach-blog]

Maya Banks and Magic Fixes: some thoughts

When I was maybe fourteen, I read this brilliant trilogy of books by Kirsten Cashore called the Seven Kingdoms series. All three books feature diverse, varied female protagonists and deal with some really important topics, so I heartily recommend them. But what really stuck with me, writing-wise, was the author’s note at the end of the third book.

In Graceling, the first of the series, a character suffers an injury that leaves him with a pretty major disability. But thanks to his special ability (called a Grace in this universe), it’s possible for him to continue his life more or less as normal and nobody even notices. Now the next book features a completely different set of characters, but he’s back for book three, and there are limitations now - there are things he just cannot do, and there are serious downsides to the whole thing. And in the author’s note, Cashore explains that this was important to her because she received a lot of comments from readers saying how disappointed they were that she gave them this magnificent character with a disability and then magicked it away.

She calls it a ‘magic fix’, or maybe that’s just how I remember it - ‘magic fix’ is what I’ve been calling it in my head all these years. She talked about how representation doesn’t count when the disability does not affect the character - what’s the point of writing a character who loses a leg if he gets it replaced with a sci-fi prosthesis and everyone forgets about it?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about Maya Banks’ Never Seduce a Scot, which I’ve been reading this last week and a half. Now there’s several reasons I’m not a huge fan of this book, but none of those are important. What really disappointed me was the magic fix. (here there be spoilers)

The heroine in this book had an accident a few years ago which left her unable to hear anything but really deep vibrations. I was pretty excited about this, because I hadn’t read a romance with a deaf protagonist before and I think representation is really important for the genre to grow. Eveline has taught herself to lipread, which in real life is apparently not very reliable at all, but I get why it was important for the heroine to be able to understand what was going on around her. I liked how she had to figure out how to make herself understood, and people she interacted with had to learn to understand what she was trying to tell them using nonverbal clues, gestures, pantomime, you name it.

I was super disappointed though when the hero encourages her to try to speak again, using muscle memory, and she then goes on to communicate out loud for the rest of the book (or at least up to three quarters of the way through, which is where I currently am). To me, it feels like a magic fix. Okay, there are some limitations,  but in my opinion having Eveline be able to speak normally detracts from the reality of her disability. 

Most deaf people can’t lipread and either cannot or choose not to speak out loud, and I was disappointed that instead of getting to focus a lot on non-verbal communication and getting a story about learning to live a fulfilled life with a fairly severe limitation, the main focus of the novel seems to be the violent feud between the protagonist’s clans. I’m not saying that a story about a disabled person should always be about their disability, but that to me it feels like that disability was neatly sorted out so it doesn’t make anything too complicated. It feels a bit lazy. It feels like a magic fix.

Now I am not disabled. I might be getting all of this wrong. if you’re a deaf person or live with any other kind of disability and you want to tell me what you think, please do! I feel like this is an important conversation to have, both as readers and as writers, because the only way we can grow and improve as a genre is to listen to as many voices as we can find and learn from that.

[sirsreadingblog]

Some Thoughts that Occur During and After Reading

Me: What did I just read?

Me: Did they mean to write that?

Me: I hate this character so much, can I slap them?

Me: Just tell them to stop meddling already!

Me: That's it? There's nothing else? THERE'S AN UNRESOLVED PLOTLINE FOR ME!

Me: *Goes on to read next book*

[nobodyrunsthisblog]

People talk about "switching off while reading" and I'm wondering how that works, because if I switch off while reading, that means I've got to go back to where I was before my mind switched off.

[hoofbeatsandhairballs]

I finished ErHa book 9 last night and I'm taking another break for some light fanfics.

My ErHa journey so far has been a rollercoaster. One that seems familiar and safe until it rattles in an unsettling way on some of the turns. And just when I think I've got comfortable again there's a mega drop into a black tunnel followed by a loop de loop and a corkscrew, but I don't have anything holding me in the cart. I'm just clinging on for dear life and hoping I come out of this ok and that it will be worth it.

That's how I'm feeling right now.

Book one was meh. It established characters and world settings.

Mid book two I was hooked.

4 and 5 - this is my jam.

By the end of book 7 I was shaken and uncertain. How could anyone be so cruel? Why can't these characters catch a break?!

I need a break!

After about a week of cleansing through the power of fanfiction, I returned. I still wanted to know what would happen next.

End of book 9. I actually had trouble sleeping that night. I was plagued by thoughts of what had happened to the characters. The abuse, the suffering, the torture.

And so once again I'm taking a break. The fic I'm reading is, so far, an unexciting fixit. But I need mundane, peaceful, harmless, hopeful. I need to feel normal again before I delve back into ErHa.

Because despite all this trauma, I still want to know how it ends. I want to know what comes after the cliff hanger. I want to know that all will be well, it has to be. Because if it isn't...

One other thing I keep thinking is; when writers say they like to torture their characters, I think very few actually achieve MeatBun levels.

Which is also why I am certain I will never read BAB. But I am also concerned for YUWU. I actually like the sound of the story for YUWU, but how much of myself will I need to sacrifice in order to complete it...?

[ladyosen]

Honestly with the classic books/read actual books/nonfanfic, I really think people just need to read something different from their usual sometimes. Like if you only ever read fanfic, read published fiction. If you only read fiction, read non-fiction, if you only read ya romance read anything else. You can still get back to what you like. And you might find you read your regular standby genre/medium far better and appreciate it more.