Book Spoils

[rachelmanija]

Like I have time to read MORE BOOKS. However, when I dropped by the library to return something, I saw that they were having a book sale…

Please comment if you’ve read or heard of any of these and want to prioritize my reading, snark, recommend, say, “Oh hell no,” etc.

Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America, by Margot Adler. Nonfiction on Wicca and neo-paganism in the US. I’ve read it before, I enjoyed it, I wanted to own it.

The Ghost Road (William Abrahams), by Pat Barker. Book 3 of the WWI trilogy; I will read Book 2 first.

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Vintage), by Bruno Bettelheim. I read this ages ago and figured it was time to read it again.

Surviving Madness: A Therapist's Own Story (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies), by Betty Berzon. Memoir by a “psychiatric patient, groundbreaking therapist, and gay pioneer.”

Ghost in the Water, by Edward Chitham. Puffin mystery; I often like obscure Puffin British kids’ books.

The Princess and the Hound, by Mette Harrison. I have been meaning to read this for ages.

A Taste of China: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking (Pavilion Classic Cookery), by Ken Hom. Memoir/cookbook/history of regional Chinese cooking.

Kingdom of the Winds Volume 1 (v. 1), by Kimjin. Manhwa set in a fantasy ancient Korea.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. Classic survival nonfiction which I have not yet read.

Tales from The Red Rose Inn and Other Plays, by Don Nigro. This guy’s plays were always being advertised on Samuel French editions of other plays I was reading, and I always felt vaguely curious about him.

ETA: Oh, drat, I realized that I actually do know who he is. Due to vague curiosity, years ago I read his Seascape with Sharks and Dancer, which featured the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, subtype Her Mental Illness Makes Her Beautiful. If I recall correctly, the hero fishes her out of the ocean after a suicide attempt and feeds her hot chocolate with marshmallows, which she obnoxiously adorably insists on calling "mushroons." (sic.) It turns out that her cathartically related Dark Trauma was that she used to live on an intersection where fluffy kittens constantly got squashed by cement trucks. And then, for bonus topical relevance and preachiness points, there was an abortion. Because she was Too Damaged to Bring New Life Into the World.

Empress of the World, by Sarah Ryan. Teen lesbians at summer camp for gifted kids. This premise could only be improved if they had psychic powers.

Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin. Narrated by a dead girl. I usually dislike posthumous fantasy – it tends toward the soggily spiritual – but I liked the excerpt on the back cover.

Comments

[twistedchick]

Drawing Down the Moon is old enough now that it could use an update; it's historical more than descriptive of current groups, I think. A lot has happened since then. You might want to look at some of Starhawk's books for counterpoint or an update in some areas if you haven't seen them.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! I knew the Adler was dated, but not who's good for a current update.

[kore]

Oh, those sound neat....well except for Manic Pixie Kitten Abortion guy.

[rydra_wong]

May I rec The Creation of Dr B to go with the Bettelheim?

[daedala]

*jawdrop* Wow.

[rachelmanija]

Yikes!

[rydra_wong]

The author obviously has a personal axe to grind because of his brother, but it's a very convincing and well-researched (not to mention well-deserved) demolition job. Bettelheim did terrible damage in the autism field alone.

[oyceter]

Princess and the Hound is a bit oddly paced and I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, but it reads a bit like McKinley if that's what you're in the mood for! I was also much more interested in the hound than the princess.

Ooooo, curious to know how Taste of China is!

[holyschist]

I enjoyed Empress of the World, but the gifted camp was weirdly white, and I was a little eyebrowy at the, like, one (?) character of color. Psychic powers would definitely have improved it. It's a book I think I would have loved a lot more when I was a teenager.

I haven't read the sequel yet.

[lnhammer]

Sequel is weaker, alas.

---L.

[holyschist]

That might explain why I haven't found it at any libraries....

(Now I feel like a novel about psychic teenage lesbians at a camp for gifted kids should really exist.)

[roadrunnertwice]

Heh, and I liked the sequel better. (Partly because I prefer Battle as a narrator, partly because it was less plotty, and partly because I'm mildly allergic to camp tales.)

[lnhammer]

My mileage -- let me show you it varying.

---L.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Empress of the World, by Sarah Ryan. Teen lesbians at summer camp for gifted kids. This premise could only be improved if they had psychic powers.

Someone please write that.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Both The Princess and the Hound and The Empress of the World struck me as enjoyable, interesting, this-is-not-the-greatest-book-ever-written-but-I-am-having-fun-in-the-correct-mood YA. Empress is elevated a bit over that by subject matter.

[larryhammer]

Empress of the World is excellent, and Endurance is one of the better books on the subject (Huntsford's bio of Shackleton is also quite good, but it has a lot of additional ground to cover). According Janni, The Princess and the Hound is quite good -- haven't read it myself.

I haven't met Kingdom of the Winds, an oversight I clearly must Rectify Immediately.

---L.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

I adore Endurance and am startled you haven't read it. It's one of my favorite stories of human triumph. I quite enjoyed the movie, too, with Kenneth Brannagh. It includes lots of photos from the real trip. Good stuff.

[zdenka]

If you like Kingdom of the Winds, there's a drama series! I have not watched it, but it's been on my to-watch list since I watched and enjoyed The Book of Three Han/Jumong, which is set a generation earlier and involves overlapping (semi-)historical figures. Now I'm curious about the manhwa. I'll have to see if I can get hold of it.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

It turns out that her cathartically related Dark Trauma was that she used to live on an intersection where fluffy kittens constantly got squashed by cement trucks.

Wait, what?

WARNING: Animal harm

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Scene 5, Tracy explaining Ben why she had an abortion and why she tries to make him hate her, by telling a story about her childhood.

Tracy: "When you were little did your parents always keep giving you these animals and things, like they thought you looked like you had to have something to be grabbing onto all the time or you’d fall over or blow away or something? Well, don’t look at me like that. Listen, if you don’t want to hear this, I can just leave, if you think this is stupid or something. So my parents kept giving me these animals, see, not just like cats and dogs but also a pregnant raccoon and two ducks named Mickey and a deflowered skunk and a chicken named Arnold and all kinds of things like that. They were really dumb. Not the animals, my parents. Well, you know how dumb they are. And the house we lived in was too close to the road, and what happens when you live too close is that all of your animals get splattered always on the road, and your brothers are always having to go out with a shovel and scrape them off and take them someplace to bury. And sometimes if they’re all squashed but not quite dead your brother has to hit them with the shovel until they stop screaming or quacking or squawking or whining or meowing as the case may be. And giving them names makes it worse but I loved to and I couldn’t help it and I did and when they got squashed it wasn’t just the cat or the duck it was somebody with a name that you lived with and slept with and talked at and listened to and fussed over and took care of and accepted you and then it was the mess that was left on the road.

And after the last one, this small Persian kitten named Clarence, after that last one got squashed I made my stupid parents promise me they would never get me another thing that was alive because I had figured out what was true and still is true that there is no excuse and no way ever to make up for the millions and millions and millions of innocent betrayed and squashed up dead, and nobody’s parents and nobody’s God was ever going to be able to explain it to me and make it all right, and the only way not to go crazy if you had the misfortune to be a compulsive namer and lover was if you never hooked yourself up with splatterable things then it can never be your fault for needing them and having them because if you don’t give you can’t hurt and you don’t get guilty because you can’t betray if you never gave to begin with. Doesn’t that make sense to you? It does make sense. It does."

Re: WARNING: Animal harm

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . i dont even whut.

Re: WARNING: Animal harm

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

It didn't occur to anyone to, I don't know, build a fence?

The guy who wrote this is a respected playwright, you say?

Re: WARNING: Animal harm

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Okay, I realize this is an oldish post and comment, but I was looking back at it to refer to something on the book list and I saw this.

And I WHAT?

For some reason my brain keeps coming back to "deflowered skunk." Is that a typo, or was it actually a deflowered skunk? Because I think the general practice for a pet skunk is to de-scent them, or de-gland them, not to ensure that they have known carnal pleasure, as it were.

I also am in awe of how regularly scraping dead animals off the pavement is apparently the solution they come to, rather than keeping the pets inside!

Re: WARNING: Animal harm

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Part of her manic pixie thing is using the theoretically hilarious wrong word, so it's a deliberate-by-author mistake for "de-scented skunk."

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I always want to do a Wide Sargasso Sea on things like that Seascape with Sharks and Dancer.

"So, yeah, I was glad the guy saved me from drowning. Drowning is even less fun than you might imagine it to be. But then he turned out to be the creepiest, clingiest guy imaginable. Sure, I played along with his twee fantasies for a while, but only until I had made my escape plans..."

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Take Bettelheim with a pound of salt.

Endurance is pretty good, but South (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5199), Shackleton's own account of the journey, is better. I suggest reading Shackleton before Lansing.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Bettelheim is not a particularly good folklorist, and not a terribly great psychoanalytical critic either. Alan Dundes, who was both, wrote a pretty thorough takedown of Bettelheim's failures of scholarship. He was basically just talking about his own ideas, without much supporting evidence.

(In fact, I recall reading accusations that he had no compunctions about making up suitable anecdotes about his patients to illustrate his pet theory -- but I can't remember anymore where I read that, so take it with a suitable grain of salt.)

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I've read that about Bettelheim also, and cannot now recall where. He is pretty well discredited. Over on that shelf with Robert Graves...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Graves at least fed my fantasy-writer brain all kinds of fascinating ideas. Bettelheim, alas, did not.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That is very good to know. Also, now I know to look up Dundes. Thank you!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of Dundes, because I'm not a fan of Freudian folklore theory to begin with -- but he's certainly one of the most respected names in that corner of the field.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I realize this may be a question that cannot be reasonably answered in an offhand LJ comment, but if you have any suggestions on folklorists who you would recommend, I would love to hear it. (For reference, I am far from an expert, but I have an interested layperson's amount of knowledge, and I don't mind reading that's dry prose-wise if the ideas are interesting.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, what are you looking for? Folktale analysis specifically, or other stuff? And what do you want to know about the folktales (or other stuff)? I won't be any use if you want Marxist analysis; I'll just warn you of that now. :-)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooh. Um. Good question! Let me think about that. (I think this may be a situation where I don't yet know enough to know exactly what I'm looking for.)

I'm not that interested in political analysis anyway, so that's cool. What I've read in the past has mostly focused on historical and social/cultural context and the evolution of the stories, because I came at it as side-reading in history classes, and I found that fascinating but wasn't sure where to go from there.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Marxist analysis, at least in folklore, isn't so much political as it is economic: in the case of folktales, for example, the writer would talk about how the Grimms' collection reflected and shaped the concerns of German bourgeoisie. Etc. But it, like Freudian analysis, tends unfortunately toward reductionism; EVERYTHING ends up being an expression of German bourgeois concerns. I would mind those two schools less if they were more willing to admit of other interpretations.

I ended up doing less research on folktales than I expected to, so I'm not the best source to consult, but you might try looking up Maria Tatar's work. Or, if you want to approach it more from a craft-ish side of what makes folktales go, Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (Russian-specific, but its general point is more extendable) and Max Luthi's The European Folktale may both be of interest to you.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a good place to start. Thank you!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Noting down recs.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, do recommend Alan Dundes. He was my professor, so I'm biased. He was also very funny and wonderful lecturer. You can get some of that from his essays, especially "Touchdown into the Endzone."

He wasn't a total Freudian purist, the one thing he did like about Bettelheim was Bettelheim's theory of womb envy, which makes so much more sense than penis envy.

One thing Dundes did a lot of was to make casebooks about certain legends, stories, creatures, etc. A book with a number of essays from different fields and points of view. The Cinderella Casebook was one of my favorites, he did the Flood Myth, Oedipus, Little Red Ridinghood and Vampires to name a few. He also wrote a couple introductions to folklore.

Thing about Dundes, and most of the stuff he had us read in folklore, was that he, and they, could write academic papers and still be reading and funny at times. Even for laypeople.

I'm afraid I took his courses long ago so am not sure what the latest good stuff is, but Richard Dorson was a big name and we read his introduction to folklore. Jan Harold Brunvand published a bunch of collections of urban legends (not myths!) but he never did anything with them. Dundes was a bear for interpretation, he thought we had collected a lot of folklore and now we needed to interpret it.

Lord Ragland wrote the original Hero Cycle, Dundes applied it to Jesus Christ, another good essay. (Dundes hated Joseph Campbell with a deep and fiery hatred, because what he did was not folklore at all) Anti Aarne wrote the first Tale Type Index and Stith Thompson added to it and wrote the first motif index. Those are mostly about the structure of narrative folklore (stories, ballads, jokes, legends, myths) but the motif index can give you an idea of how far flung, or how restricted, some motifs are. I've never thought about it but the motif index might be a fun thing for a writer to look at. It's six volumes so you'd probably need a university library to find it.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that was so long! Feel free to delete it if it's too long!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That was great, thanks!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It turns out that the ones I've read are also the ones you've read, so I cannot be of help there. (Although this reminds me that rereading "The Uses of Enchantment" would probably give me ideas for Sirens next year....) But I'd love to hear how some of these are, particularly "The Princess and the Hound" (which I own but have not yet read), "A Taste of China" "Kingdom of the Winds," and "Empress of the World."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_profiterole_/]

summer camp for gifted kids

That totally sounds like Xavier's school, doesn't it? XD I have Empress of the World and I really enjoyed the first half, but I didn't really like the second half. It's an interesting read, though.

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Bettelheim's book is partially plagiarized. http://www.jstor.org/pss/541135

So many lovely books on this list.

[pameladean]

I found Bettelheim ineffably creepy. This is true to some extent of all Freudians, unless they just make me laugh hysterically; but he seemed exceptionally creepy. He's responsible for the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, if I recall correctly.

The Empress of the World is one of my favorite YA novels, though. It's beautifully quirky and quite funny and, well, lumpy and unresolved in the way things just sometimes are, without seeming inartistic.

P.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Harrison: I remember it being decent, but more about the angsty prince than the titular characters. I liked the other 2 books in the trilogy more.

Kingdom of the Winds: I remember enjoying this, but didn't stick with it. I've had the kdrama based on it DLed for ages though.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Just about anything by Pat Barker is good, and in particular the Regeneration Trilogy. Enjoy!

[octopedingenue]

I have a lingering historical crush on Ernest Shackleton from high school English(?) class. Probably because as a person he was a character type I like, one who's fantastically competent in one area (antarctic survival and sustaining his men with absolute determination) and who's awkward & disastrous at everything else (the rest of Shackleton's life).

Princess and the Hound was disappointing to me, which was doubly disappointing since I loooove beast bridegroom tales. The main characters were just sort of...there, standing around low-key in situations that cry out for melodrama. I wanted more action!

I started Kingdom of the Wind in a bookstore but gave up struggling through Netcomics' mangled translation. Is it translate by Google robot?

Have you read Tiger Moon? It's flawed but I loved it.