Reading Wednesday 30/09

[liv]

Recently read:

• A couple of striking pieces on people talking about their experiences of living in their bodies:
  • My invisible skin, by Omar Sakr, who talks really interestingly about about his experiences of bi invisibility and ethnic visibility.
    
    
  • The Difference Between Dysphoria and Negative Body Image by Amy Dentata, a trans woman discussing her experiences of seeking facial feminization surgery.
  
  
• A thorough and informative long read about my brother's poetry book and the political background: Poets Of The Rifle: Cultural Resistance From Saharawi Refugee Camps, by Jen Calleja.
  
  
• commodorified's thinky essay and discussion about how fandom talks about writing about rape. I've been meaning to link to this for ages, it's very complex and nuanced and I don't think I can really summarize it, but if you're at all interested in fandom culture and communities of trauma survivors more broadly it's well worth reading (if you can cope with a meta discussion about rape and trauma, of course).

Currently reading: The first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North. I'm actually most of the way through, I'll probably finish it next time I have half an hour to spare. It's... ok, there's nothing obviously terrible about it, but it just doesn't give me any sense of wanting to read on to find out what happens next. It should be exciting, because it's all about Harry's arch-enemy trying to alter the timeline so that Harry never exists, risking destroying the whole world in the process, so there's plenty of both personal and global peril, but for some reason I'm not emotionally engaged with the plot.

It feels like much of the book is North exploring a cool idea, that rare people are "Ouroborans" who when they die return to their own births with their memories of their lives, now in the relative future, intact. But she never really moves on beyond exploring the implications of this cool idea, tFFLoHA just doesn't quite hang together as a story. I think a lot of my problem is that I don't like Harry August as a character, he's very self-centred and just annoying, and that's preventing me from engaging with the plot.

Up next: Next on my Bringing up Burns challenge list is A book by an author you love. So maybe it's time to read the third in Chris Moriarty's Spin cycle, Ghost spin. Or perhaps The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, which I was really excited about a while back but then didn't read because Brasyl really disappointed me.

Also I'm thinking of reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx, along with a friend who is looking to fill a gap. I love the idea of reading seminal texts collaboratively, but it's possible that this may be a bad idea as said friend is quite a bit to the left of me politically, which might make me an annoying reading partner. And if I do pick up a big scary political tome I will probably read a novel at the same time.

Comments

[damerell]

The Communist Manifesto is quite a slim volume and might be an interesting start...

[liv]

Maybe maybe. I think knowing my own psychology I'm more likely to get stuck into a big intellectually dense project that a friend is also doing, than I am to read a smaller work without that motivation. But if the collaborative read doesn't work that might be the way to go.

[chickenfeet]

I tend to agree that the small works; not just the Manifesto are a better start if your goal is to get some grasp of the whats and whys of Marxist politics. The trouble with Kapital is that it's immensely long; 2500 pages, and not very political. It's essentially an attempt to formulate a comprehensive economic theory on a premise (the Labour Theory of Value) that doesn't hold up very well to more recent developments. 2500 pages of technical exposition on a somewhat flawed premise is pretty hard going. Even if one wanted to understand enough of the theory to grasp what critics of both right and left have said there are much easier ways than reading the source text!

[liv]

OK, thank you, that is a more convincing argument why Das Kapital is not what I should be spending my time and brain on. Perhaps I should read Piketty instead.