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Reading Wednesday 2.20.19
Feb. 20th, 2019 05:26 pmWhew. After a plane, a train, and a mile walk with a 52-pound suitcase, I am home from my trip, and pretty wiped out. But glad to be back in sunny (right this second) Northern California. So let's see if I can jot down a few reading-related notes before I... take a nap, honestly, is what's going to happen.
Like I said in my last post, I got to commune with my old stomping-ground Powell's Books on my trip back to Portland, which is always so great. I feel sort of politically suspect having such a strong comfort- and spirit-nourishing relationship with a retail establishment, but I basically grew up in this bookstore and it's central to many, many formative memories for me, so there you have it. What was interesting, on this trip, was the degree to which the library app Libby has changed my approach to a Powell's trip in the time since I last visited. I only started using Libby in 2018, but now, whenever I hear about a new book that I'm interested in reading, my first taxonomic step is always to check whether the ebook is available on the app via one of my five library memberships. (The "what to do about this book" flowchart then branches into "On Libby" and "Not On Libby.") This means that, on this recent Powell's trip, I was really focusing on books that I knew weren't available on Libby, either because they're academic, obscure, or published by small presses. All four books I ended up buying fall into the latter camp:
I also got a little bit of reading time on my trip, although not as much as I'd have liked. On the plane out I finished Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, which I'd written about a couple of previous weeks. It continued to be well-written, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful in its dealing with heavy subject matter. The narrators' multipleness leads to some reflections on gender representation which were sometimes troubling (largely because of the destructiveness and violence that is bound up with how Ada's others relate to her, especially in the earlier sections of the novel), but which I also really appreciated for their acknowledgment of the many possible ways to relate gender to presentation to selfness:
Later on in my trip, I got a little reading in on Herb Macdonald's Cape Breton Railways: An Illustrated History, and because I've had an explicit expression of interest, I will share the most interesting train-related fact I've learned so far, which is that in the 1700s and early 1800s, English coal companies apparently had horse-powered railways. !!! Did y'all know this? This fact toys with my brain in the same way steampunk can, except the whole point here is that we are pre-steam-powered locomotives. In fact, in the earliest examples, both the wheels and the rails were made of wood. Here is a later (c. 1820) picture of a single-horsepower "train car" with a primitive hand-brake, carrying what looks like a shit-ton of coal for one poor horse along a track that was probably by this time reinforced with iron bars on the top surface, and features some kind of fill between the tracks to protect the horse's hooves:
Macdonald says that they tried very hard to even out the grades on these early railways (UNDERSTANDABLY), and if a steep uphill or downhill was unavoidable, they sometimes supplemented the horse power with a winch-and-pulley system. The whole thing did run on tracks, though, which makes these the first railroads in both England and Canada. Fascinating!
(I then lost about an hour trying to figure out whether the "General Mining Association" which was deeded the mineral rights to Nova Scotia in 1826 to settle the debts that the Duke of York had racked up with the jewelry company owned by several GMA shareholders, was in any way related to the "British Mining Company" which helped dig the underground battlefield tunnels at La Boisselle during WWI, as featured in Chapter 17 of A hundred hours. This remains a burning question! Well, maybe not burning but smouldering! In the extremely unlikely event you know the answer, hit me up.)
Finally, on the plane home I started Frances de Pontes Peebles's The Air You Breathe, a sort of queer picaresque novel about two Brazilian girls who run away from home in the mid-1930s to become famous samba singers (and then, in the case of the more successful, to die young and tragically as a(n implied) result of her rock & roll lifestyle). It's got that shuttling back and forth between the present and the past thing going on, and the two work convincingly together, I think: especially the way in which the whole narrative is saturated, even decades later, by Dores's grief over Graça's death, and the way that grief has rippled out and affected all her other relationships and elements of her life. Think Moulin Rouge but with queer women, set in Rio and Vegas. Thus far it's nothing very groundbreaking, but it's a page-turner and I'm enjoying it.
Like I said in my last post, I got to commune with my old stomping-ground Powell's Books on my trip back to Portland, which is always so great. I feel sort of politically suspect having such a strong comfort- and spirit-nourishing relationship with a retail establishment, but I basically grew up in this bookstore and it's central to many, many formative memories for me, so there you have it. What was interesting, on this trip, was the degree to which the library app Libby has changed my approach to a Powell's trip in the time since I last visited. I only started using Libby in 2018, but now, whenever I hear about a new book that I'm interested in reading, my first taxonomic step is always to check whether the ebook is available on the app via one of my five library memberships. (The "what to do about this book" flowchart then branches into "On Libby" and "Not On Libby.") This means that, on this recent Powell's trip, I was really focusing on books that I knew weren't available on Libby, either because they're academic, obscure, or published by small presses. All four books I ended up buying fall into the latter camp:
- Trysting, by Emmanuelle Pagano (trans. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis): I discovered this piece by a slightly roundabout route: Andrea Blatz wrote a post on the Asymptote blog about spending the summer looking for a novel to translate. One of the novels she discussed, Les adolescents troglodytes, is also by Pagano, and caught my eye because of the unusual combination of a rural French setting and a protagonist who's a trans woman. Since that novel's not yet translated into English, I went looking for other stuff by Pagano, and came across Trysting, which is a sort of Lydia-Davis-esque collection of extremely short stories and vignettes, all centering around different "means of attraction" in relationships of all gender and sexuality configurations. Sounds intriguing!
- Notes of a Crocodile, by Qiu Miaojin (trans. Bonnie Huie): This was the only spontaneous purchase from the Powell's trip. I've had Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre on my TBR for some time (young, counterculture, unapologetically queer Taiwanese novelist! Writing about Montmartre!), but its unrelenting gloom has made it slow going every time I've picked it up. Notes on a Crocodile looks to be a much more upbeat take on queer early-20s malaise (not that that's a high bar), this one set in, according to the blurb, "the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei."
- Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn: I heard about this book via an interview with Dawn in Lambda Literary, and knew immediately that I had to seek it out. A lesbian ghost story set in 1990 in an economically depressed Ontario suburb, and featuring a recently-decommissioned amusement park? From an author who is also involved in sex work advocacy, and wants to play with horror tropes while meditating on the complex legacy of trauma?? Sign me up!
- Night School: A Reader for Grownups by Zsófia Bán (trans. Jim Tucker): This collection, newly translated from the Hungarian, was the January selection for the Asymptote Book Club, which is where I first read about it. The faux-textbook "reader" element is very tongue-in-cheek; this is essentially a book of short stories, and judging from the snippets I read in the store in Powells, very funny ones. Likely to be a quick read and a pick-me-up.
I also got a little bit of reading time on my trip, although not as much as I'd have liked. On the plane out I finished Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, which I'd written about a couple of previous weeks. It continued to be well-written, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful in its dealing with heavy subject matter. The narrators' multipleness leads to some reflections on gender representation which were sometimes troubling (largely because of the destructiveness and violence that is bound up with how Ada's others relate to her, especially in the earlier sections of the novel), but which I also really appreciated for their acknowledgment of the many possible ways to relate gender to presentation to selfness:
Before the [top] surgery, the Ada had told her friends that she couldn't wait for when she could wear dresses again. They were confused. They stared at her bound chest and boy clothes.
"Why would you go more feminine without boobs?" they asked. "Most people get it done to be more masculine."
The Ada shrugged and we moved in her shoulders. It was simple how we saw ourself, dresses creeping up the thigh, gashing open at the front to show chest bone—tulle and lace and clouds of clothes. Just like how having long hair weighing down our back made us want to wear buttons up to our throat, men's sleeves rolled up our biceps, handsome, handsome things. None of this was a new thing. We had been the same since the first birth, through the second naming, the third molting. To make the vessel look a little more like us—that was the extent of our intent. We have understood what we are, the places we are suspended in, between the inaccurate concepts of male and female, between the us and the brothersisters slavering on the other side.
Later on in my trip, I got a little reading in on Herb Macdonald's Cape Breton Railways: An Illustrated History, and because I've had an explicit expression of interest, I will share the most interesting train-related fact I've learned so far, which is that in the 1700s and early 1800s, English coal companies apparently had horse-powered railways. !!! Did y'all know this? This fact toys with my brain in the same way steampunk can, except the whole point here is that we are pre-steam-powered locomotives. In fact, in the earliest examples, both the wheels and the rails were made of wood. Here is a later (c. 1820) picture of a single-horsepower "train car" with a primitive hand-brake, carrying what looks like a shit-ton of coal for one poor horse along a track that was probably by this time reinforced with iron bars on the top surface, and features some kind of fill between the tracks to protect the horse's hooves:
Macdonald says that they tried very hard to even out the grades on these early railways (UNDERSTANDABLY), and if a steep uphill or downhill was unavoidable, they sometimes supplemented the horse power with a winch-and-pulley system. The whole thing did run on tracks, though, which makes these the first railroads in both England and Canada. Fascinating!
(I then lost about an hour trying to figure out whether the "General Mining Association" which was deeded the mineral rights to Nova Scotia in 1826 to settle the debts that the Duke of York had racked up with the jewelry company owned by several GMA shareholders, was in any way related to the "British Mining Company" which helped dig the underground battlefield tunnels at La Boisselle during WWI, as featured in Chapter 17 of A hundred hours. This remains a burning question! Well, maybe not burning but smouldering! In the extremely unlikely event you know the answer, hit me up.)
Finally, on the plane home I started Frances de Pontes Peebles's The Air You Breathe, a sort of queer picaresque novel about two Brazilian girls who run away from home in the mid-1930s to become famous samba singers (and then, in the case of the more successful, to die young and tragically as a(n implied) result of her rock & roll lifestyle). It's got that shuttling back and forth between the present and the past thing going on, and the two work convincingly together, I think: especially the way in which the whole narrative is saturated, even decades later, by Dores's grief over Graça's death, and the way that grief has rippled out and affected all her other relationships and elements of her life. Think Moulin Rouge but with queer women, set in Rio and Vegas. Thus far it's nothing very groundbreaking, but it's a page-turner and I'm enjoying it.
