cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2009-10-27 10:31 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2009-10-27 10:31 pm
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Books I really must take back to the library
Who have already sent me one polite note. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I always found it odd to encounter, in fiction, book-mad children who had deep sympathetic bonds with their local librarians. In converse, my relationships with libraries involve a superficial layer of civility covering the fact that they have BOOKS and I want to take them all home (the books, not the librarians) and keep them, especially the ones that I would appreciate better.
Jennifer Sey, Chalked Up. Autobiography of a former US national gymnastics champion. This is not really the tell-all shocking expose the appallingly worded subtitle is going for (“Inside elite gymnastics’ merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and elusive Olympic dreams”), but it is what happens when a driven perfectionist finds a system that’s prepared to exploit these characteristics to the full. There’s still an unanswered tension in the text about how much Jennifer feels her parents should have supported her – she says now that they should have questioned her, should have also considered her brother, shouldn’t have split the family up to make her training easier, shouldn’t have encouraged her to keep going through injury after injury – but there’s a younger self in there who kept pushing, regardless, and even the older narrator can't shove that aside.
In some ways, it’s easier to judge the coaches, especially when Jennifer shifts from one who cares about her students to ones who just care about results (or, as Jennifer suggests about some of the male coaches, spending a lot of time with apparently pre-pubescent girls). The gymnastics system, as well – I hadn’t thought about how age is such a barrier for gymnasts, who may only get one Olympics (or not even that), and the degree to which judges will apparently favour gymnasts they know or who have a good record also surprised me.
I kept thinking of Tim Kennemore’s The Fortunate Few all through this, which is an alternate UK where (women’s) gymnastics has replaced (men’s) football in the public’s affection. It’s a good book, and it ends with the protagonist fully buying into the system that’s made her. This isn’t the flip side of that, despite the blurb – without gymnastics, the author would, I think, have found something else to drive her, but it does highlight some of the problems with her choice. I would actually like to read something similar by a male gymnast, because I'm unsure how much the problems women's gymnastics are simply reflections of the broader social restrictions on femininity and female bodies.
Witi Ihimaera, Where's Waari? 28 stories about Maori, in order of author’s date of birth, from a short from a dubiously titled 1901 collection (“Tales of a Dying Race”) to the late 1990s (Ihimaera has just edited another collection of 2000 onwards Maori fiction, Get on the Waka). The first story in the collection by Maori is JC Sturm’s “For all the Saints”.
I’m not a mad fan of the short story anyway, and majoring in NZ literature has left enough residual scarring that I tend to get grumpy about yet another story that painstakingly evokes past childhood experiences without going anywhere (or, for the NZ novel, stories that end with clichéd deaths due to the author’s inability to signal a conclusion otherwise). I am also going to skip all the non-Maori authors, which in this is not really a hardship unless I also wanted to discuss the “problem” short story or the young man has sexual awakening in lyrical prose subgroup.
So, while I liked Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s The basketball girls and Keri Hulme’s He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware, both of them felt as if they needed to be part of something larger to work as more than a brief flash of insight. But Patricia Grace’s Ngati Kangaru has that something larger, and was the one story in the collection that I really liked and thought moved beyond Ihimaera’s thematic argument. It’s a carefully pointed piece of satire that doesn’t lose its characters along the way; the reverse colonisation of New Zealand, with one Maori family organising the take-over of Pakeha holiday homes (“reclaiming and cultivating a moral wilderness”) by Maori keen to return home from Australia, inspired by the story – and underhand – methods) of the early Pakeha settlers. I haven’t thought of Grace as a particularly funny writer before, but this was great.
Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix. Ai Ling sets out to look for her father and ends up on a quest through a medieval/mythic China that involves multiple encounters with bizarre and fantastic creatures, various gods, and two brothers on a quest of their own that intersects with hers. I got this rec from the 50books_poc community, and it was fun, but oddly flat – the encounters are great, but they’re episodic to the point that many of them they could be shuffled without altering the overall balance of the story, and there are inconsistencies that threw me a little (are all the demons transformed humans? This only seems to be the case when a sympathetic dead character is required). I’m also, basically, not all that enthralled by reincarnation as a story trope, unless there’s an awful lot of interacting with and fighting destiny.
What’s good about the book, though, is the enthusiasm that carries the reader through, the amazing and frequent scenes of highly enticing food, and Ai Ling herself, who is likeable despite her specialness (mind-reading, an encyclopaediac memory of a relevant forbidden text, a magic pendant and the reincarnation thing), and who manages to both make mistakes and recover from them. I’m not convinced I want a sequel, although I would like another by the same author; fun, anyway.
Jennifer Sey, Chalked Up. Autobiography of a former US national gymnastics champion. This is not really the tell-all shocking expose the appallingly worded subtitle is going for (“Inside elite gymnastics’ merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and elusive Olympic dreams”), but it is what happens when a driven perfectionist finds a system that’s prepared to exploit these characteristics to the full. There’s still an unanswered tension in the text about how much Jennifer feels her parents should have supported her – she says now that they should have questioned her, should have also considered her brother, shouldn’t have split the family up to make her training easier, shouldn’t have encouraged her to keep going through injury after injury – but there’s a younger self in there who kept pushing, regardless, and even the older narrator can't shove that aside.
In some ways, it’s easier to judge the coaches, especially when Jennifer shifts from one who cares about her students to ones who just care about results (or, as Jennifer suggests about some of the male coaches, spending a lot of time with apparently pre-pubescent girls). The gymnastics system, as well – I hadn’t thought about how age is such a barrier for gymnasts, who may only get one Olympics (or not even that), and the degree to which judges will apparently favour gymnasts they know or who have a good record also surprised me.
I kept thinking of Tim Kennemore’s The Fortunate Few all through this, which is an alternate UK where (women’s) gymnastics has replaced (men’s) football in the public’s affection. It’s a good book, and it ends with the protagonist fully buying into the system that’s made her. This isn’t the flip side of that, despite the blurb – without gymnastics, the author would, I think, have found something else to drive her, but it does highlight some of the problems with her choice. I would actually like to read something similar by a male gymnast, because I'm unsure how much the problems women's gymnastics are simply reflections of the broader social restrictions on femininity and female bodies.
Witi Ihimaera, Where's Waari? 28 stories about Maori, in order of author’s date of birth, from a short from a dubiously titled 1901 collection (“Tales of a Dying Race”) to the late 1990s (Ihimaera has just edited another collection of 2000 onwards Maori fiction, Get on the Waka). The first story in the collection by Maori is JC Sturm’s “For all the Saints”.
I’m not a mad fan of the short story anyway, and majoring in NZ literature has left enough residual scarring that I tend to get grumpy about yet another story that painstakingly evokes past childhood experiences without going anywhere (or, for the NZ novel, stories that end with clichéd deaths due to the author’s inability to signal a conclusion otherwise). I am also going to skip all the non-Maori authors, which in this is not really a hardship unless I also wanted to discuss the “problem” short story or the young man has sexual awakening in lyrical prose subgroup.
So, while I liked Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s The basketball girls and Keri Hulme’s He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware, both of them felt as if they needed to be part of something larger to work as more than a brief flash of insight. But Patricia Grace’s Ngati Kangaru has that something larger, and was the one story in the collection that I really liked and thought moved beyond Ihimaera’s thematic argument. It’s a carefully pointed piece of satire that doesn’t lose its characters along the way; the reverse colonisation of New Zealand, with one Maori family organising the take-over of Pakeha holiday homes (“reclaiming and cultivating a moral wilderness”) by Maori keen to return home from Australia, inspired by the story – and underhand – methods) of the early Pakeha settlers. I haven’t thought of Grace as a particularly funny writer before, but this was great.
Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix. Ai Ling sets out to look for her father and ends up on a quest through a medieval/mythic China that involves multiple encounters with bizarre and fantastic creatures, various gods, and two brothers on a quest of their own that intersects with hers. I got this rec from the 50books_poc community, and it was fun, but oddly flat – the encounters are great, but they’re episodic to the point that many of them they could be shuffled without altering the overall balance of the story, and there are inconsistencies that threw me a little (are all the demons transformed humans? This only seems to be the case when a sympathetic dead character is required). I’m also, basically, not all that enthralled by reincarnation as a story trope, unless there’s an awful lot of interacting with and fighting destiny.
What’s good about the book, though, is the enthusiasm that carries the reader through, the amazing and frequent scenes of highly enticing food, and Ai Ling herself, who is likeable despite her specialness (mind-reading, an encyclopaediac memory of a relevant forbidden text, a magic pendant and the reincarnation thing), and who manages to both make mistakes and recover from them. I’m not convinced I want a sequel, although I would like another by the same author; fun, anyway.