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Hey heeeey Hugo books are out and although I am feeling kind of unmotivated for most of the categories, I might actually end up reading some of the novels. In the meantime I am researching romance novels for Reasons (beta reasons) and have read some romance or romance-adjacent books, one of which doubles as Hugo reading.

Romancing the Beat (nonfic), Yours Truly, The Friend-Zone Experiment, A Sorceress Comes to Call )
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Hiiiii I'm still alive!

4/5. This book was recommended by my kid's high school guidance counselor office in one of the daily mass emails we get from her school. I suppose the subtitle of this one may as well be, "Why your kid won't get into the super-elite school you think they ought to get into," which is the not-so-subtle messaging to parents (and I think has something to do with why the counselor office recommended it). This seems to boil down to the premise that the current incentive system (both in terms of generally how the school is perceived and how specifically ranking lists perceive the school) make it such that colleges have a lot of incentive to be sought-after by as many applicants as possible (they want to be "sellers" -- the ones who decide whether they want the students -- rather than "buyers," in the author's terminology, which are the ones wooing the students), so colleges have arranged things so that in many cases there are a whole lot of kids vying for a relatively very small number of spots. In any case, the book also makes the case that there are enough "buyers" that provide a great education and might also give you merit scholarships that in most cases it's a bit silly to restrict oneself just to the "sellers," especially if you are wanting financial aid -- it's sort of like picking a brand name vs. a non-brand-name. (And, as in the brand name case: though you are rather more likely to get a better deal with the non-brand-name, sometimes there are reasons to pick the brand name, though Selingo doesn't get into that so much.)

The author follows a few kids as well as a couple of admissions committees to see how it all works (and documents how the admissions people have a hard job, as well as how they are trying to craft a class, not just looking at individual students) -- this is really quite interesting, to see how all of this works. Along the way, he also puts in some details I didn't know, like how it got started that kids get overwhelmed with glossy mailers from college (this wasn't always a thing!) and how Northeastern went way up in the rankings in the last 10 years (the bare fact of which I did know, because my cousin once removed is a sophomore at Northeastern, but I did not know that it was a concerted effort). And then there's financial aid, which is this whole problem of inequitable information as the financial aid awards aren't done until after kids have applied.

Along with the buyer/seller college distinction, he also makes a distinction between "drivers" and "passengers" -- the former indicates the kids (and, let's get real, their parents) who are very savvy about what they're looking for and what they want, and for their entire high school career have been driving, so to speak, toward the college goals they're looking towards, and start their applications on a relatively early time frame. These are the kids who know the difference between early action and early decision, and have mapped out where they want to apply early (if they do) and, strategically, why. Then there are the passengers, who just get carried along by the whole process... the good thing is that it seems like they mostly still end up okay, though perhaps not in as optimized a place as the drivers.

There's a bit in the book about sports recruiting, which I knew nothing about when I started the book, but I learned shortly after starting reading it that D's niece (who comes from a very sporty family) was sports-recruited (as a junior!) and is going to attend a rather-elite school year after next :) So it was interesting to read this bit of the book in conjunction with learning this information. Moral of the story, perhaps: if you think you might be good enough to play varsity for your sport in college, and you have pretty good grades (niece has straight A's and what was described to me as a "good enough" SAT for her future school), this might be a relatively "easy" way of getting into college. (I put it in quotes because I honestly think niece, who has been swimming since she was practically an infant, worked as hard or harder than any other high school kid I know. Her swim team had practice Thanksgiving morning!) It is, however, a really good thing for my kids that college is not in fact based on their sporting chops, because early sports training was very much not their thing. Although E is consistently not last place in cross-country, which I'm very pleased about! :)

Anyway, this was an interesting read and worth reading if you want to know more about what goes on with college admissions.
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From [personal profile] selenak. This is a book that plays with the line between biography and historical fiction: it quotes extensively from letters and other primary sources, but does not really cite the sources, and also sometimes talks about what characters were thinking when there doesn't seem to be any source at all, in language that is more flowing and lyrical than I usually expect from a biography.

It is about the German writer Heinrich Mann (the brother of the writer Thomas Mann, who, sorry Heinrich, may be more familiar) and his wife Nelly Kroeger-Mann, whom I got interested in when [personal profile] selenak had me watch Youtube clips of Alec Guiness playing Heinrich Mann in Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood. (The links to the clips are in the second paragraph.) It's also about the milieu of the years 1934-1944 as approached from the viewpoint of (primarily but not exclusively) the other German authors who had to leave Germany and the people around them: Heinrich's brother Thomas, Bertolt Brecht, and others, whose thoughts and letters and words paint a picture of what they were all going through and what all of this must have been like. Also, very weirdly, Virginia Woolf is one of the people who shows up in the prose on a regular basis; this is weird because as far as I can tell, she had nothing to do with any of these other people (I guess the author speculates they might have crossed paths once), and every time she showed up I was like "...what is she doing here??"

Anyway -- it's a good book and it really brings home how jarring and difficult this emigration experience must have been for all of these displaced people. (I'm also rereading The Oppermanns right now, which as a fictional portrait of that same 1933-1934 era through a mostly-non-intellectual-character lens is an interesting point-counterpoint.) Nelly Kroeger-Mann eventually committed suicide, but reading their letters and the kinds of things they had to go through, I almost found it more surprising that more of them didn't think about it more. (Except for Thomas Mann, who definitely comes across a bit as someone who had a charmed life and could be a jerk about it, too, ha.) I thought the book was well worth reading, and in many places quite beautiful.

[personal profile] selenak's less incoherent review is here.
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These are three books my sister had me read, in reverse order of how much I liked them.

I am not sick! I don't need help! (Amador) - 5/5 - This is an awesome book, basically the idea of collaborative problem-solving applied to the domain of mental illness, which has the additional issue that the person involved often does not know that they are mentally ill. (The principle is the same with dementia.) The book first goes over anosognosia, the neurological condition in which the person is unaware of their mental illness (or other brain issue) -- which can be super frustrating as it looks a lot like denial, and it seems like if one just provided enough evidence that the person has a mental illness, the person would have to admit it.

Although I'd been familiar with the concept of anosognosia from just looking up stuff about dementia online, my previous online reading had only dealt with it from the perspective of "this is how it presents." The framing of it in this book as the person's self-concept not updating due to mental illness or other brain issues was new to me, and I felt like it made it much easier for me to viscerally understand why the person would continue to be unaware of mental issues even when a ton of evidence was presented.

And the author brings up examples of trying to convince the person that they're sick (his brother had schizophrenia) and how it fails and just makes everyone angry and frustrated. He shows how to instead use a more collaborative problem-solving solution, that crucially goes around the question of whether the person has a mental illness (because the two of you are probably never going to agree on that point) and rather focuses on how to agree on treatment.

It's written in very simple, easy-to-digest language, I expect because Amador wanted it to be accessible to as many people as possible, but it seems to all make sense and I didn't feel that it was too dumbed down or trying to make claims that were too large (see also the third book in this post). I also felt like there was a minimum of fluff, which I feel can happen with this kind of book -- there was a lot of "don't blame yourself," which I didn't need but which many people probably do.

This book strongly recommends that (say) mentally ill patients be treated, but provides conversational blueprints for getting them to agree to treatment even if they don't agree they're mentally ill. The idea is to think about how it would feel if everyone around you was saying you had a mental illness but you were convinced you didn't, and to use that as a starting point to find things you agree on, and build the relationship of trust so that you can tackle the problem of treatment. The acronym he uses is LEAP: Listen, Empathize, Accept, and Partner. (Yes, that's going to sound pretty familiar if you've read other collaborative problem-solving books. And Amador doesn't say he's reinventing the wheel, he totally says right up front that he's basically just presenting other people's work, he's just trying to give it a larger audience.)

I'd love for there to be a companion volume to this dealing with dementia specifically, because of course some of the issues are not quite the same, and it would be really nice to have specific blueprint conversations to work from. And I wrote that and I guess my sister did the next step of contacting the author, whose secretary told her that he has written a more general book about the LEAP method which includes one conversation modeling what to do with someone with dementia. So, uh, I guess stay tuned for that one, because I'm definitely gonna read that.

Highly, highly recommended if you're dealing with someone with mental illness or dementia or other brain issues.

My Father's Brain (Jauhar) - 3/5 - This is a memoir by Sandeep Jauhar, a doctor and writer, about his father's dementia decline (and eventual death). His father was a scientist, and so that decline was very harsh. My sister and I agreed that the author/narrator should really have read the LEAP book because wow does he fall into every. single. trap possible. I guess he's honest about it? It was well written and brutally honest, but I also found it rather frustrating to read because I kept wanting to yell at him to do things differently. I also felt horrible for Harwinder, his father's caregiver who really just did it all herself, and it really kind of felt like they were taking advantage of her.

The End of Alzheimers (Bredersen) - DNF. Okay... there is a fair amount to like about this book, especially the points that inflammation probably causes a lot of crap to happen in people's bodies and that having good nutrition and exercise and so on can really make a big difference in all kinds of bodily functions, including the brain. And it can't hurt to get a full battery of tests to make sure that there's no underlying condition like hypothyroidism, etc. However, by the end of chapter two I was getting a really intense vibe of "I'm here to sell you my patented solution that is super expensive but fixes alllll the problems in the world!" and poking around on the interwebs leads me to believe that, in fact, his solution -- especially the parts that depend on Super Special Supplements that only practitioners Specially Trained in Bredersen's method can provide -- is not properly studied and there's no particular reason to believe it will work any better than good nutrition and exercise alone, plus, sure, testing to make sure there's no underlying condition or any vitamin deficiencies, and those kinds of supplements when needed.
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3/5. I must grudgingly give this book a score of 3 because I agreed broadly... mostly... with what he is saying (extrinisic rewards don't really work that well as a motivator), and this is an important concept, if you haven't read any parenting books (and I can imagine there being rather less of an overlap with readers of this book and other parenting books than the last pop psych book I read), and there were some interesting studies I hadn't seen before, but just about every page I'd be all "Yes BUT..." and "Okay BUT...," in large part because Kohn is wildly annoying.

It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.

Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.

So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.

That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.

There were a lot of things that annoyed me. )

Kohn's chapter on praise gets its own cut: )

(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."
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[personal profile] mildred_of_midgard and [personal profile] rachelmanija both told me to read The Explosive Child, so I reread it. I'd read it when E. was much younger (4? 6? something like that) and we had the most problems with her getting really upset about things -- and I had not found it very useful. I got the e-book from the library.

This turned out to be a VERY WEIRD experience for me because I read it and thought, wow, this book seems totally unfamiliar! I know it's been at least six years... and my memory is completely shot these days... but I had distinct memories of the book spending a lot of time on "pick your battles" which I found extremely not useful with E. (E's problem, especially at that age, was not battles of will between me and her! E's problem was battles of will between herself and herself -- she would get upset when she was not able to do things the way she felt she should, which spanned basically all activities, including quite a few that were things she loved to do, not things I was asking her to do at all, while my memories were that the book spent a lot of time on conflicts between what the parents were asking the kid to do and what the kid wanted to do, and how the parent should try just not to ask a whole lot of the former.)

The book I read was not primarily about picking one's battles. If anything I thought Explosive Child was a poor title for it; maybe Defiant Child, but really the title should have been How to Collaboratively Solve Problems with Your Child, because that's what almost all the book was about, and it was rather good at that! (The first few chapters were boring; they were all things like "why being Super Strict with your child isn't productive," which... okay, but yes, I have actually read parenting books before, thanks!) There were lots of examples, lots of discussions on the order of "if your child does X, here's a strategy to use that still keeps the focus on collaborative problem-solving and not going in an unproductive or Unilateral Telling Your Kid What to Do direction." Really it almost does a disservice to call it Explosive Child, because these strategies (as [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard remarked when she recced it) could be used with really anyone -- all children, not just explosive ones, and even adults. (Though many of the examples and details were child-centric; for example, he goes into things like what to do if a child answers "I don't know," to everything, which in my experience is a very common kid mode but not so common in adults.)

It was good and I am trying to use the techniques with both kids! (We do try to foster a family atmosphere where they feel like they have a say and can always bring up when they disagree, but I definitely do have a tendency to barrel through and say "this is what we're gonna do!" as a first pass.) I had one major nitpick: I was majorly side-eyeing Greene's claim that children would magically learn skills they were deficient in (like "difficulty managing emotional response to frustration so as to think rationally") by doing this collaborative problem-solving, because once you work on the problems the skills will naturally be exercised. Uhhhhhh you know what this reminds me of? it's like, if the kid is not able to read, collaborative problem solving and creating an atmosphere where reading is fun and snuggly is great and I absolutely am on board with it making an atmosphere conducive to reading, and some kids will pick it up automatically in the right atmosphere, but it's NOT actually teaching the kid to read, and NOT ALL KIDS WILL LEARN without explicit instruction! This is sort of how I feel about some of these skills. Sometimes you might need other tools! Some kids need more explicit instruction than others! Greene seems to think that you would never need any other tools except his, which is a common failure mode of books like these, but it annoys me :)

But anyway, I was still confused as to why it was so different than my memory; my memory isn't particularly good, but my failure mode with books is usually just to forget things wholesale, not have contradictory memories! So I did an experiment: the library also had a paper copy (first edition from 1998, I believe), and I checked that out. (This would have been the identical copy I would have read in the first place.) And lo, this book is almost COMPLETELY different from the e-book I read! Like literally, there are maybe a few pages that are in common with the e-book (two of the "sample cases," a couple of pages each, are the same). The rest of it is not just entirely different words, but also an almost entirely different focus! The collaborative problem-solving is relegated to one chapter of the book. MOST of the book talks about picking one's battles... sorting one's problems into "baskets" as to whether one wants to deal with them now or later. This is a very simple concept but gets a looooot of padding. Anyway... good choice by Greene, in subsquent editions, to greatly expand the collaborative problem-solving sections and diminish the "basket" section, because the former is way more interesting than the latter.

So my verdict is: if you are interested in the concept of collaborative problem-solving with your child, this book is worth checking out (maybe skip the first few chapters if you've ever read a parenting book before), but make sure it's the current version, not the original! (I also suspect there is a lot of overlap with How to Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk, which I also read at about that age and which perhaps I should also revisit.)
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I read Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know, a rec from [personal profile] thistleingrey, about a... month? two months?... ago. Since then it has been staring at me from the bin where we keep the library books, daring me to talk about it. I finally have had to take it back to the library, and I'm now sitting in the library with it staring back at me, daring me to write about it before we leave and I really do have to return it. [I wrote most of this on Saturday, but didn't finish until tonight.]

It's a memoir of Stephanie Foo's traumatic childhood in San Jose, and her journey through being diagnosed with complex PTSD, and her journey through healing. Her childhood was very traumatic -- over-the-top physical and verbal and emotional abuse cut for a description of the kind of thing we're talking about -- warnings for threats of murder and suicide ) Both her parents also abandon her before she graduates high school. I don't know who had the worse childhood, J.M. Straczynski or Stephanie Foo (especially since my brain is doing the thing where it's trying hard to forget JMS's traumatic childhood so I forget the details), but the fact that I'm comparing the two should tell you something.

Foo's journey of recovery is interesting and inspiring, but honestly was not what I remembered most vividly a month after reading it. The section that really got me was when she went back to San Jose to see whether it was as she remembered, and see whether there were other kids in a similar position as she was (as she remembered being the case) -- not quite as over-the-top as she was, but dealing with trauma from their parenting. Most of the teachers are like, eh, everyone was maybe a little stressed about getting A's, but fine.

One of her former classmates says, "Yes. We were all getting our asses beat. Well, not all of us. But. I know a LOT of people who got their ass beat... Yes. Why do you think we were so stressed about getting all those As in the first place?"

This former classmate also says, "I think it's why I work so hard all the time. I'll take on other people's work, I'll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I'll have this anxiety -- this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can't hit." This is a succinct description of a lot of stuff Foo sees herself going through in the first section of the book as well (which leads her to her diagnosis of C-PTSD), so it's very validating for Foo to find her classmate also saying it.

My parents never beat us. I think they spanked us once or twice when we were younger, but that really doesn't register in my memory (or my sister's) as anything particularly bad. ...But I think I need to say that my sister could have written exactly what the classmate in the previous paragraph said. (Not me. I don't have the same scars from childhood that she does, for several reasons, although that's not the same as saying I wasn't affected.)

One of Foo's sections also looks at the way dysfunction and trauma propagate over generations, and... yeah.

Wow, writing this is hard, and I'm going to punt the rest of it. There's a tension -- which Foo does address in the book -- between a bunch of things, of recognizing that Foo's story is so much worse than the story of anyone I personally knew as a child, of recognizing that this doesn't invalidate what someone else went through if it wasn't "as bad" as that, of recognizing the feeling of relief when Foo's story was worse, of recognizing the sinking feeling that I could understand some parts of it, of recognizing that my sister and I had some experiences that were very different from each other and some of which were the same, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were very very good, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were not so good, of recognizing that there were things my parents did that might even have been more helpful than not in my case and the same things being extremely devastating in the long run to my sister, of recognizing that I don't want to display my family's baggage, of recognizing that it might be important to do so.

Anyway, it's a book that I'm glad I read, that's worth reading, and part of what's worth reading about it is that it's so very Asian-American. I'd love to know what other people thought of this book. But I certainly would warn that... it's a lot.
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2/5. This is a rare ranking for me, as usually I don't finish books I dislike. And I would absolutely not have finished this book either had I not been reading it for a friend (who thinks her daughter may be on the spectrum). It's one of those irritating half-memoir-half-pop-nonfiction books. (I first wrote "pop science" but I don't think it rises to that level; O'Toole occasionally cites a paper but it's mostly her pontificating.) I think this book could be reasonably useful for a person with ASD who is exactly like O'Toole, or who has a child with ASD who is exactly like her, but wow am I not that person.

I have Feelings about this book. I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more. )
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Being just months behind on life in general (recent visit with parents involved them scolding me for not doing one thing I should have been doing, and then when I did that (the deal being that parents would look after kids in the meantime) they were like, why didn't you do this other thing??) I have not said anything about the couple of historical-ish books I read over... uh, Christmas.

1. The King's Touch (Jude Morgan): historical fiction told from the point of view of Charles II's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth. (He's often called "Jemmy" in the book to distinguish himself from Charles' brother James (later James II), and so I will call him here.) I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the Stuarts in this time period. It's both extremely readable and seems quite well researched (by which I mean that [personal profile] selenak has very few nitpicks about it). Morgan makes the people of this era come alive, so that they're real people to me, entangled in a web of relationships, rather than (as they'd been previously) a list of characters and titles tenuously related by anecdotes told to me in salon -- Minette (Charles's sister) and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and their disastrous marriage, and Minette and Charles's relationship; James (II) and the ways in which he was awful and was clearly on a path to disaster once he became king; William of Orange and Mary (James (II)'s daughter) and their arranged-to-love marriage and how they related to Charles and James and Jemmy; Jemmy himself, obviously, and the way he related to all of these people, and overall to Charles II himself, and a lot more as well. This can be read with no knowledge of the era or the people; I'd had the salon synopsis (see the first few comments), but could be read without that.

I feel that Morgan tries to make the presentation as balanced as possible given that Jemmy is the narrator (probably to the extent of making Jemmy more understanding than he might have been in real life), but Jemmy does have strong feelings about things. (For example, I came away with very strong negative feelings about Philippe, who doesn't seem to have been a super nice person anyway but who was at least incrementally nicer to his second wife, which one wouldn't have known from reading this book, since Jemmy wasn't related to the second wife.)

2. Game of Queens (Gristwood) - Nonfiction book about the 16th century, focusing on the queens: beginning with Isabella the Catholic and going down to Queen Elizabeth of England. It was highly recommended by [personal profile] selenak here. Now, I will say that I think I don't know enough (basically zero) about this era for this kind of survey book to be ideally suited to my learning about it -- all the early queens in the book (Anne de Beaujeu, Louise of Savoy -- Margaret of Austria being something of an exception because she's so very cool) are honestly kind of blending together for me aside from a few disjointed facts, a couple of months after reading it. However, I'm still glad I read it, because the next time I encounter these women I'll have more context for them (and it's already happened a couple of times in salon that they've been referenced and I was like "oh right!"). Once the book got to Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, I was on much more familiar ground (even when I didn't know details, I at least had a fair bit more knowledge about the contextual history of Henry VIII and so on), and so I found those parts much easier going.

Anyway, I still recommend this! Just, it's easier to read if one is even vaguely familiar with the period, and I found the Morgan novel a better way to quickly ingest a large quantity of information about a period I knew very little about.
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So, A. likes for me to read things that he reads, and E. doesn't like me to read things that she reads, but this year she has had this school challenge to read books in a bunch of different categories (this is genius by her teacher, because it's definitely gotten her to read books she wouldn't have read otherwise), and so I've had to read some books to see whether they were books she would enjoy reading. :) (And sometimes I got her books that were books I thought I might like to read :) )

And a question for the DW hive mind! One of E's categories she needs to read a book for is "political thriller," and it is stumping us because most political thrillers are, well, for grownups. I am not too worried about strict categories -- her teacher is flexible, anything that could even very slightly be described as such would probably work. The catch is that it has to be middle-school/at-most-YA, otherwise it will be too much for E. (Which rules out a lot of political SF, which otherwise I could use to fulfill the category. Hm... maybe Foundation would be at her level, although I worry it might be too dry for her. I am absolutely happy to count Foundation as "political thriller" for this purpose :P )

-Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney) - I've now read a bunch of these; they're a series but don't really need to be read in order (though there's some continuity; e.g. you'd have to read The Long Haul to figure out how they got a pig as a pet). A. absolutely loves these. I have mixed feelings about them. I can see why he loves them and they're certainly awfully addictive -- even as an adult in my 40's I got sucked into them just about as hard as A. did. They have a sense of humor that is funny both to kids and adults, and the drawings are hilarious. On the other hand, Greg (the narrator) is also just kind of mean and not very nice, and is often just awful to the people he calls his friends. And then again, his meanness isn't at all condoned by the narrative, and he usually gets some sort of comeuppance for it at the end. A. and I have had some talks about when Greg does things that aren't very nice, and A. doesn't seem like any of the meanness is rubbing off on him, so I guess it's okay? Anyway, my favorite is The Long Haul, because there aren't any shenanigans with him being mean to his "friends," and the Terrible No-Good Vacation is one that any parent can empathize with :P and also the subplot with the pig I actually quite liked :PP

-Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger (Sachar) - My beloved third-grade teacher introduced us to Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which I adored, but I didn't know there were sequels until E. came along, and then apparently I didn't read them (E. did) until A. came along and wanted me to read it. These books are hilarious and very, very weird. Props to Sachar for really tapping into the third-grade geek mindset here -- they honestly do read as rather alien to my adult brain, and yet I remember the book making total sense to my third-grade self.

-The Outsiders (Hinton) - I'd never read this before, despite seeing it at the library countless times and knowing it was Great Lit :) This was for the category of "under-18" (one of the stupidest categories in my opinion) because apparently Hinton wrote it before she was 18, and it was the only book I could find that I didn't oppose her reading (well, I suppose there's Diary of Anne Frank, but she would have bounced right off of that one). Buuuuut I guess I'm glad for that stupid category, because this book is really good, there's a reason I'd heard of it so many times :P Of course there's no lack of grimdark YA today, but I can see how this was groundbreaking as the first, and it talks about class in a way that I think is still quite relevant today, and it's deftly written, it's written by someone who knew what they were doing, and it's really surprising that it was written by someone that young. E. liked it as well.

-They Called Us Enemy (Takei) - DNF, but not because it wasn't excellent -- what I read of it was excellent and I highly recommend it. What with... 2021... and everything... I couldn't take reading about the Japanese-American internment camps and anti-Asian sentiment. It was just too much. E. read it and liked it. (I forget whether she counted it as one of the history categories or the Asian-American category.)

-I'd Tell You I'd Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You (Carter) - Best title ever! This one's been on my radar for a long time, since Sarah Rees Brennan mentioned it off-handedly on her blog many years ago. Spy boarding school, what's not to love! This was for the "thriller" category. I think I would have liked this a lot had I read it as a middle schooler, but as an adult I ended up skimming about half of it. Partially it's that I'm just too old for it now; partially it's that the spy girl ends up lying and lying to the love interest character, and I don't like that as a plot device. (I'm glad to report though that it's not sanctioned by the narrative.)

The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Fleming) - I knew basically nothing about the Romanovs or about the Russian Revolution before reading this book, which manages to make one both sympathetic towards the Tsar and his family, and also massively facepalming at them. (One of the quotes on amazon characterizes them as "doomed and clueless," which... yeah.) And the book brings in a lot of sources (quotes from primary, when possible) about what it was like for the peasants and workers at this time, which I really appreciated and which provides a lot of good context for what was going on. And the middle-to-high-school reading level really worked for me as a primer for stuff I didn't know anything about to start with. I really liked this, and will progress on to Massie once I've finished his other books (I'm reading Peter the Great right now) :D E. was frustrated by it and did not get very far; it is clearly a little beyond her reading level.
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Winter's Orbit (Maxwell) - 3+/5. I read this when it was a SF prince's-arranged-marriage-to-a-widower origfic on AO3, and I liked it a lot, but I also remember it primarily as being being a lot of angst by one of the arranged-marriage couple about how his new husband couldn't possibly love him because his dead former husband was so much more awesome, and thinking it was a bit, well, too much relationship angst (especially since given the genre, obviously this was not quite right because they were going to get together...). But I liked it well enough that when I saw this at the library I snagged it.

I'm happy to say that in being turned into a novel, the angst got tamped down to what I thought were totally reasonable levels, and the book grew a plot and politics (this helped a lot with tamping down the angst, as often the characters were too busy dealing with the plot and politics to angst too much) and I am just very pleased :D I really liked it and I'll totally read more by this author in the future. I will say that I didn't find it particularly deep -- Maxwell isn't necessarily trying to Say Profound Things about the Universe -- I'd characterize it as more like an In N Out burger than like, idk, filet mignon with a fancy sauce. But sometimes an In N Out burger is exactly what one wants :D

Together We Will Go (Straczynski) - 3+/5. Before I read this book I had not watched anything by JMS (between reading this book and now, I've now watched one episode of B5 :D ), but I did read his memoir and came away thinking, "that guy can WRITE, whoa." And that's what I thought about this book too. It was super compelling and I blazed through it in a day or two; he really just has the craft mastered of how to write compelling characters and prose and also things like pacing; every time I started wondering how he could sustain the level it was at and think that it might get boring if it went on like this for a while, he would notch it up another level. Just very well done.

I do not recommend the kindle version of this, as a couple of times it wouldn't let me zoom in on graphics (there are little graphics of things like text conversations).

If you trust JMS, like I do, and don't mind a content note for, well, substantial content related to suicide, I think it's worth going in knowing zero about the book. But if you'd like to know more, [personal profile] selenak has an excellent review, no spoilers, that convinced me to read it :)

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence (Cooper) - 3-/5. - I saw a rec for this when reading random blogs for reasons I don't remember now, and the library had it, so. It was... kind of an odd book. It's a true crime book, but it's also trying to be about Harvard and power, but it's also trying to be sort of a memoir about what it says about her that this case captivated her. I think that the sheer size of what she was trying to do kind of made it not work so well for me -- but also I think I picked it up because I was curious about the Harvard-and-power aspects (which were indeed the most interesting part of the book to me) and not the true crime aspects (which are, of course, most of the book). It made me realize that I have a hard time with true crime books because a) I like things in my media to wrap up neatly, and real life isn't known for that b) I kind of feel like I'm a voyeur deriving entertainment from someone's pain? Not that this should stop anyone else from reading true crime, of course; I'm in fact totally inconsistent about this (it doesn't seem to stop me at all from asking for stories about the 18th Century... idk, apparently if it happened more than a hundred years ago it doesn't trip this particular circuit?), it's just my reaction to this particular thing.

The Man in the Brown Suit (Christie) - 3/5 - I always enjoy Christie, and when [personal profile] skygiants posted about it I realized I hadn't read this one, so I got hold of it :D Skygiants' review ( a couple of implicit spoilers, mostly at the end) is really great and I think really gets across both the hilarious breeziness of it and the rampant racism.

But I do not want to talk about either of those! I want, of course, to talk about shipping! One of the characters in this novel I'd met before, in Death on the Nile, which I suppose partially spoiled this book for me (as I therefore knew he was not the villain). The main character, Anne Beddingfield, has a love interest, but there's a definite draw towards this character as well before she meets the love interest. At the end, all three are in a room together and I'm like, idk, I think there is a case to be made for UST in all directions there! That is to say, I would totally OT3 them :P
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-The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity - rec from [personal profile] lightreads. As lightreads warned, contrary to the title, this is not a self-help book but rather more of a scientist's memoir by Nadine Burke Harris, Surgeon General of California. It's fairly breezily written, easily read, not a whole lot of delving into the nitty gritty of the science (I'm currently reading Robert Sapolsky on that, also on lightreads' rec, which I'm really enjoying) and what I loved about its style was that Harris does, I think, get across the feel of the excitement of doing both science and policy-related-to-science.

And then there's the content: lightreads was like "yeah, yeah, I already knew all that" but I guess I live under a rock because somehow I had never heard of an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, much less knew about the correlation between one's ACE score and adverse medical outcomes, and this... kind of blew my mind. (One of the things I'm thinking about: There are six full cousins in my family on my dad's side (including my sister and me) and three of them have auto-immune problems. Of note is that both the families represented here were pretty high-pressure in general, and also that these three are the youngest in their families and so had a lot of pressure on them to follow the accomplishments of their siblings in a way the older ones didn't. IDK, it's an anecdotal sample size. But still... I wonder.)

-Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Carreyrou) - The rise and fall of Theranos, the company that claimed to do everything, medical-testing-wise, and... really really didn't. [personal profile] ase read this a while back, and it's been on my radar since then -- and I finally got around to it. And WELL that was something.

Let's just say that the book starts with Theranos doing a demonstration in which they purport to show that their blood testing technology works, and it turns out they can't get it to work so at the demo they show a FAKE RESULT. (Also, the CFO is like "...maybe we shouldn't do that?" and then he gets fired.) This is not even the craziest thing that happens in the book. It's basically like a primer on How Not To Do Science Or Technology. Or maybe How To Do Technology Totally Unethically. I actually had trouble reading the first half because the sheer scale of the amorality turned out to ping my embarrassment squick. Like, it's embarrassing to do science ("science") so awfully! When Carreyrou himself showed up in the book and I knew stuff was about to go down, I can't tell you how relieved I was.
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5/5. [Adapted from a salon comment.] This may be my favorite biography I've ever read (to be fair, that's not a super long list... but still). It dates from 1966 (English translation 1979) but is still a classic and I can see why. It was SO GOOD and near the end I could feel myself drawing it out a little so I wouldn't have to finish reading it and not have any more left. Orieux really gets that what I want out of history is well-thought-out-and-well-analyzed-and-well-sourced gossipy sensationalism delivered in anecdotal bite-sized chunks, but still with overriding themes. And boy was Voltaire's life basically tailor-made to deliver that -- but Orieux also leaned into it for all it was worth. And he has got this dry sense of humor that is evident on every page and just hilarious.

I really loved how Orieux makes Voltaire come alive as someone who had so SO many faults (SO MANY, lol, Voltaire was a champ at both holding grudges and not letting things go, and there were just innumerable places where Orieux was all "...and here's yet another example where ANY ACTUAL GROWNUP would have LET IT GO, but did Voltaire? I will give you one guess.") but also at the same time so many amazing virtues, many of which were in some sense part and parcel with his flaws: the Voltaire who Could Not Let Things Go is the same Voltaire of the Calas affair.

I highly encourage you to read selenak's description of L'affaire Calas (scroll to near the end) -- and really her whole very excellent review of Orieux, which goes into much more detail that this one and which convinced me to read it -- but briefly, the Calas family was wrongfully accused and convicted of killing their own son/brother, and Jean Calas (the father) was tortured to death. Voltaire decided to investigate, found evidence that the Calas family was innocent, and Would Not Let It Go until the verdict was overturned-- and Orieux points out that this was a huge deal because before this judges had been the last word, and there was no recourse if there was a wrong verdict.

It did kind of make me wish that we got more biographies these days that were written as literature (the writing is excellent, and also kudos to the translator for keeping the excellence of the writing and that dry wit) and where the biographers weren't afraid to have overt opinions. Orieux has Decided Opinions about everything and is not shy about owning it (and usually has evidence, though selenak did find a couple of sloppy bits in her review, but I'm finding that's waaaay better than most biographies), and it is GREAT.

I must also say that it is a pretty long book (even though the English version is abridged -- the French/German version is 1000 pages! The English version is only ~500) and though I was riveted almost the entire time, there were bits where Orieux goes on about various visitors Voltaire had (especially in his later years) where I was, okay, kinda bored :) But generally speaking I adored this book.
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October: (aside from finally finishing the Oster Wilhelmine bio for fandom, and Yuletide canon review)

-Le Petit Prince, read in French and (reread in) English to anticipate French-reading-group someday in the near future. If I had stayed at my first high school (with Awesome French Teacher) I would have read it as part of the third-year French curriculum (which is probably why I have my copy at all); as it was, this was the first time I'd read it in French. I have read that book enough times in English that for large portions of it I barely had to consult the translation. (Hmm, maybe I should try this for The Dark Is Rising series; I bet I also have large swathes of those books all but memorized.) This book is about love and grief. )

-Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest - Another reread. It struck me on this reread that Dean Priest is really skeevy, which apparently I'd failed to wholly pick up as a kid -- that is, I never liked him much, and I definitely never forgave him for what he said about Emily's book, but I don't remember actually recoiling from the page like I did this time. Like, he meets Emily when she's... thirteen? twelve? He was a FRIEND OF HER FATHER'S. And he says -- this is a literal quote -- "I think I'll wait for you." (And he, of course, does.) AUGH.

The perennial question for Emily's Quest is, who do you ship Emily with? (Which in and of itself tells you why it's my least favorite of the three.) In that elementary-to-high-school-ish period, I shipped a lot of people in various books -- Will/Jane in The Dark is Rising was always my ship, I was firmly on the side of Jo/Bhaer at the time -- I think this may have been my first experience with a book where I never did ship Emily with anyone in the book, really. She ends up with Teddy, but he's pretty... boring and just not that great. Perry isn't boring and I like him rather better than Teddy, but Emily just seems so uninterested in him! (Of course, an AU would be interesting...) Dean is Right Out, of course.

November: my concentration, attention span, and available time are pretty much totally shot until... Christmas :P But I did a lot of rereading, at least. Uhura's Song, L.M. Montgomery, Darkspell - mentions of (book-textual) pandemic, depression, severe drug side effects, (possible) suicide, and war. Also mentions of music and doing one's best. )
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When I posted on rereading Severed Wasp recently, [personal profile] rymenhild had some perceptive comments that led to a rabbit hole of finding some more about L'Engle's life, which was... illuminating. (Note that the following makes for some hard reading, especially if one has read her memoirs -- which I have only lightly skimmed parts of, but enough that I had an idea of how they ran.)

I think these should be considered as a set:
The Storyteller [The New Yorker] (Cynthia Zarin)
Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices (Leonard Marcus)
(Here is the review of the above book that got me to buy/read it)
That is to say, Listening for Madeleine (a collection of interviews with people who knew/were touched by Madeleine L'Engle) is, as the review says, in conversation with and is a response and companion piece to Zarin's "Storyteller" article.

In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a sort of half-autobiographical work of fiction not totally unlike Severed Wasp or Meet the Austins, the authorial character, Francie, talks about how one of her teachers told her, " In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story." And the author says, if it weren't for that teacher, Francie might well have grown up to be a terrible liar.

Zarin's article is about how L'Engle got those things mixed up, the way things happened, the way they should have happened, and the way we construct things making sense in our minds, which are often three different things. Read more... )

But anyway. L'Engle was a complicated person. She did a lot of good and helped a lot of people. She hurt the people closest to her. She wrote memoirs that didn't have enough truth in them, and novels that had too much. She wrote books that I still remember fondly, and books that I now approach with some (or a lot of) trepidation. And some of those are the same books.

I guess I don't really have a good conclusion here, except that I wish peace to L'Engle's family, and to L'Engle herself, wherever she may or may not be.
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I gave it a good try, anyway!

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski (Harper Voyager US) - 4/5. This was very very good. This guy can WRITE and I was riveted the entire time despite not being entirely sure who he was when I started and never having watched B5 or anything else the guy has done. Content note for extremely severe spousal and child abuse. Like, it was so bad that in self-defense my brain was hoping that he'd made some of it up. (I don't think he made any of it up.) Voting this to win. and now I have even more reason to watch B5 (one day!)

I should also maybe mention that Harlan Ellison is one of his heroes and shows up several times in the book, and he doesn't treat Ellison being, er, problematic, really at all. This didn't blunt my enjoyment of the book, but if it would bother you just be aware that it's there.

Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones (University of Illinois Press (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)) - excerpt in packet. I don't think I finished the excerpt. This was very dry, and I haven't read much Russ.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara (Hanover Square) - Introduction in packet. I would have tried to read this if the book had been in the packet, but although the introduction was intriguing it didn't wholly convince me I was interested in it (not being really into monsters or movies).

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn (Unbound) - 3+/5. I enjoyed this a lot and it succeeded in what it set out to do, which was remind me how much fun Heinlein's SF can be, and inspired me to reread a bunch of it. I thought Mendlesohn did a great job of being balanced about Heinlein, never casting him as either perfect or perfidious, but a guy who had some interestingly progressive ideas and also had some hidebound ideas of his time, and could often not disconnect the two. And also who wrote some extremely readable stories :)

“2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech”, by Jeannette Ng - I'm not totally sure how I feel about this. I think on the whole I would rather award actual books.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry - did not watch because for whatever reason it's hard for me to watch video on a screen right now. But if someone's watched it and it's good I might try it?

Rating:
1. Becoming Superman
2. Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
...ugh, I don't think I can really rank anything else.

May reading

Jun. 1st, 2020 10:14 pm
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Prinz Heinrich von Preußen (Ziebura) - NR. Biography of the brother of Frederick the Great. Read in (machine) translation. I ended up skimming huge swathes of the last half of the book, not having nearly enough historical knowledge to put it in context properly, though I understand that it's great for those who have that historical knowledge :) That being said, Prince Heinrich is one of my problematic faves in this fandom and I love him to bits and pieces, so I enjoyed this a lot, especially the ensuing conversations with [personal profile] selenak and [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard. But certainly it is rather niche :)

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Harrow) - DNF. Hugo homework.

Should I finish this? I had a hard time with the twee style that is probably in large part I, The Reader, Have Tastes Do Not Align with Other Hugo Nominators but which I think of as Let Me, The Narrator, Teeter on the Edge of Pretentiousness And Sometimes Fall Over. (I also got thrown out when the narrator, a young lady who is narrating about being a well-to-do American child in the early twentieth century, says "I should have scurried back...where none of these damn people could reach me," and there isn't any context given for that being weird. Let me tell you, a child, or even a pretentious young lady, using the word "damn" would be weird much later than that :P Unless this is supposed to be a clue about something?) I also feel like there is SO much telling-not-showing. Like this bit: "He paused on the threshold... but I didn't move... It seems cruel to you, doesn't it? A sullen child punishing her father for his absence." Oh, how nice of you to tell us that's what was going on! In case we couldn't figure it out.

Okay, sorry, I suppose a lot of it is just me not gelling with the style. I don't think the style will change at all, but I think I'd be willing to go through more of it if there's a really great plot and good character arc. (But I think I need both.) Is there?

(In related news, I'm actually reading Light Brigade all the way through -- it grew a plot and characters as well -- but I didn't manage to finish in May, so it'll slot into June reading.)

Catfishing on Catnet (Kritzer) - discussed here.

Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson) - Reread. Partially because of a discussion of Paterson with [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard and [personal profile] thistleingrey, and also partially because E has started demanding stories with bike rides or walks/hikes, where everything is a quest of Our Heroes (three priests, one wizard and her fox familiar, one warrior, a bard, a ranger, and a paladin -- she chose the group composition, although I chose genders). At first I thought maybe I should encourage more of liking walks or whatever for their own sake, and then I was like, wait, your child is basically re-enacting Terabithia (hopefully without tragedy, of course!) and you're complaining? So she gets the stories now :)

Anyway, long digression aside, this is one of those books where I just get sucked in and come up for air sometime after the story has ended. I really love it so much I can't think about it straight. As a kid I identified with Jesse a lot for someone who doesn't have a whole lot in common with him superficially -- but I really got how he was trying to get by, how his family wasn't good at anything even resembling emotional sensitivity, how Leslie and her family were to him this window into another world that weren't like anything he understood from his family or his school.

Interestingly, the part I didn't get as a child was his relationship with his dad -- I reacted to the raw emotion in it, but I didn't really get it, and now, as an adult, it's one of the most moving part of the book for me.

This book has a lot of grace in it. Handle with care -- everything -- even the predators. <3
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OK, [personal profile] rachelmanija has raised the challenge to blog about every single book read this year. I don't know that I can handle this for an entire year, but let's take this a month at a time and see :) Fortunately (I guess?) I didn't read too many books this month, so I can do it for this month :P

Émilie du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (Judith Zinsser) - reviewed in a portmanteau post here along with [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard's review of a Voltaire/du Châtelet bio by David Bodaris. (To find my review, scroll down about halfway or search for my username.) Briefly, I liked the bio a lot; although Zinsser had a couple of flaws as a biographer (I'm not always convinced of her arguments) but they were ones I could live with; and as a very big plus she generally is good about citing her sources. She also clearly really doesn't like Voltaire :) (And may have convinced me. What do you do with a guy who, comparing his writing a play to Émilie's just having had a kid (and by the way was also finishing her math-physics magnum opus AT THE SAME TIME, LITERALLY ON HER BIRTHING BED), says, "I am one hundred times more fatigued than she." )

Wylding Hall (Elizabeth Hand) - 4/5. This is an interesting and weird book that [personal profile] rachelmanija's review convinced me to read. Apparently I missed [profile] skygiant's review entirely?? because that would have convinced me to read it too. (Mild spoiler -- the same spoiler -- at both links.) It's told entirely in a series of interviews with people in or associated with a folk rock band, and I am here for that!
But also -- [personal profile] skygiants described it as "Wylding Hall feels like someone took the premise of 'what if FAIRIES! met a FOLK ROCK BAND!' and ruthlessly stripped all the romanticism out of it and just kind of let a chilly wind blow through the empty spaces that were left." And, yeah.

(ROT-13'd for spoilers, but
jung jnf hc jvgu gur raqvat?? Yvxr, V gubhtug V jnf sbyybjvat gung gur tvey vf guvf snrevr/zbafgre/jera gung Whyvna pnyyf naq gung qribhef uvz va fbzr jnl. Ohg gura ubj qbrf ur fubj hc ntnva va gur irel ynfg erzvavfprapr?)

The Dutch House (Ann Pratchett) - 4/5. The blurb that made me want to read it is "stepmother kicks brother and sister out of their house." Because, uh, family history (my step-grandmother kicked my dad and his sister out of the house). But it's really a story about families and people, and I really liked it.

The Quantum Doctor (some guy I don't remember) - 1/5 DNF. UGH. This is the kind of book I hate more than anything because it preys on people's troubles with legit medical issues AND is horrible terrible no-good very bad science, and I only looked at it because my sister asked me to. Even then I had to stop after the first couple of chapters. Like, I don't even disagree with his main idea that mind and body affect one another! But don't bring quantum consciousness (ARRRRGH) into it.

Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak (Simak) - reread. I was looking for something sweet and comforting and Simak isn't always that, but he is frequently that. He believes that human beings are good at heart, that we can grow and learn, and I just wanted to read something like that. My favorite story is "Immigrant," which maybe reads as old-fashioned these days, but is just really... sweet.
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These books describe social roles for boys (Masterminds) and girls (Queen Bees),particularly in the teen years, as well as discussing general parenting for the teen years (including video games, porn, etc). They were recced to me by E's best friend's mom, who has two boys and who said she saw the dynamics in this book taking place as early as kindergarten ...These books scared me, as it sounds rather like raising older kids is even more fraught than I'd thought.

I will heavily caveat these books by saying that they aren't at all (as far as I remember) researched in a methodical way. Wiseman has worked with a bunch of teenagers in groups and individually, and she had a group of boys serve as "editors" for Masterminds. So it's not just her opinions, but it... kind of is just her opinions, in a large way. And especially in Masterminds (she has two boys), she will often refer to her own parenting and use it as an example.

In Masterminds specifically, Wiseman identifies a large portion of the boy dynamics as dependent on what she calls the "Act Like a Man Box," where there are certain specific (American-centric -- this was clearly written for an American audience) qualities that are considered positively masculine, like being good at (particular) sports, downplaying emotion, a quick sense of humor, etc. Because of this, she claims, boys feel forced into acting in a certain way that drive them into particular "roles" in a hierarchical society (where the more you "fit in the box" the higher you are, generally speaking), and things like showing emotional pain are very hard.

I don't know how prevalent this is; as I said, the parent who recced it to me says she saw it happening in their public elementary school. At the private school we're now both at, the dynamics are quite different, I think, because the sorts of parents it attracts generally try very hard not to put their kids in that box (or have kids who don't fit in that box, or both), and because it's so small. (Recently I was in a conversation with three other moms from that school, and I was the only one with a child at the school who didn't like to wear skirts. I also had the only girl of the four of us at that school.)

Queen Bees and Wannabees I confess I skimmed. Okay, so, were all the other girls out there attuned to all the girl-politics that were apparently going on in our middle schools and almost all of which I seem to have entirely missed by hiding out in the library? Like, I was vaguely aware that there were girl-politics going on and that I couldn't hold my own and that occasionally my life would be made miserable (and I will always be grateful to the one popular girl who specifically rejected being mean as a life strategy, even in middle school) but... I didn't know any of this stuff was going on! BFF-breakups-and-getting-back-together, friend group dynamics and hierarchies, interactions with boys and how those interacted with BFF-ness and friend group dynamics... all of it was alien to me. Not quite totally alien, because I've read my share of teen novels, but I think part of me always thought it was made up or exaggerated, that real people didn't actually interact this way! It was very odd because it was basically a sociology book dissecting... my life... and coming to conclusions where I was unaware there was even data, if that makes any sense. (And also when I was a junior and senior I went to the gifted high school where the dynamics were very different.) It's not wrong, either! Any of you who know me and my mom in RL will not be at all surprised that my mom turns out to have been way more clued in to the girls' dynamics than I ever was, and occasionally we have these conversations where something comes up about how X and Y interacted with Z and cut out W and I'll be like "...what??"

Relatedly, no discussion of ASD girls the way there was of ASD boys in Masterminds, probably because the latter was written later.

I skimmed this one because it's just... not going to be relevant for E, for the same reasons it wasn't relevant to me. Like me when I was an adolescent, she doesn't even have the apparatus for detecting all this going on. (I am encouraging her to read books about ordinary kids (not just mice or people with swords, which she prefers) so that at least she has minimal access to this. She is now willing to read Ramona and Superfudge, so: progress!)

Anyway, these were both interesting for me to read, even if as alien sociology rather than explicit parenting guide. I may buy Masterminds for reference when A. gets older (I checked them out from the library). I'll almost certainly buy Queen Bees for my sister, as it's going to be relevant for her daughter.

I am really interested to hear, though, how those of you with older kids have seen these kinds of social dynamics working out (or not), and how they do or don't work out for those of you (like me) with younger kids.
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Ack! Voting is almost over and I never did post on this category! And it was my favorite, too!

An Informal History of the Hugos (Walton): Talked about Walton already here.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing: This was a very slight Le Guin -- an interview with her, in fact -- but I feel like even slight Le Guin has interesting and profound things to say. She talked about pastiche being valuable -- she didn't use the word fanfic, and she was right not to, as that word carries with it other interesting connotations -- and yet, what she was saying about mimicking other writers being a good apprenticeship resonated heavily with me, somewhat interestingly because I feel that mimicking Le Guin's writing style has given me the potential to be a much better writer and reader. (Not that I am, necessarily -- you'll note that these posts are written in as convoluted and un-readable-out-loud prose as they ever were -- and of course I haven't written any fic for a while so it's all worn off anyway, but I have found that I can turn on much more of an awareness of the sound and rhythm of prose than I could before.) And it's interesting to me that her poetry is not, as a whole, SFF, but that it comes from the same place -- a keen observation of the world. And her thoughts about Women in the Canon... well. You can see I had a lot of feelings about a short slight book.

Hobbit Duology (documentary in three parts): I was actually not gonna watch this because, well, video, until [personal profile] psocoptera reviewed it favorably. It's actually quite good! Though it reinforces my sense that I was absolutely right never to watch the Hobbit movies. Link to the first here and the other two parts after.

The Mexicanx Initiative Experience at Worldcon 76: I think the experience was pretty cool! The documentation provided was kind of a slog for me, honestly. Not sure whether I'm supposed to be voting for the experience or the materials, but I assume it's the former (which I would actually vote for, but I wouldn't vote for the materials).

Astounding: This is pretty well-written! Though I will probably not finish it before deadline. It's not the book's fault that I'm not super interested in the subject, I guess. What I've read of it I've liked and it has made me more interested in it (...but man, they were all kinda messed up...)

Archive of Our Own: ...I don't have anything to say about this?

I don't even know how to vote on this! Strong category, and I'd be happy with any of these winning. (Although most happy about the Walton because robbed!) Probably the order of this post, though.

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