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Jun. 15th, 2009 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileMan, I haven't book/movie logged in a really long time.
Ermmmm. So, recently, I read The Sweet Far Thing, the sequel to A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels, which is about as long as the first two put together. TSFT definitely gets a lot more explicit with its This Is A Progressive Book For Progressive Girls message, which occasionally seems a little contrived in its deliberate attempt to treat every single social issue ever (women's rights, child rights, worker's rights, race relations, class warfare, and GLBT), but it might just seem like that to me after an entire semester of reading really long, meandering Victorian novels in which we had to pick out the ways the Victorian British Suck At Life In Relation To Race, Class, Gender And Empire ourselves. Also, still hate the Kartik subplot; he's still following in the mold of Obligatory YA Love Interests where they give him irritating-as-fuck random mood swings as a shortcut for making him mysterious/realistically flawed/has-a-complex-personality or some shit instead of developing him as a character. Other than those two gripes, however... it was so nice to see Gemma and Ann and Felicity and Pippa again! Dead!Pippa is wonderfully creepy, especially. The plot twists are ridiculous, and as usual the juxtaposition between all the crazy hardcore magic politics and fate and destiny shit of the Realms, and the stiflingly infantilized world of everyday Victorian privilege, is simultaneously appropriately jarring and brilliantly tied together via ~forbidden magic powers~. Also, Felicity just keeps getting more and more awesome.
Then I read Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth, which has three basic tenets: 1. the virgin/whore dichotomy is complete BS and needs to go, 2. the Christianists/right-wing abstinence nutters are dangerously insane and have way too much political power, and 3. the notion of "masculinity" is at least as dangerous a lie as #1 and needs a serious overhaul, pronto. It was very informative, but also scary, especially reading it right in the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination.
Now I's reading The Godfather. Go me.
In screen-staring at news, I finally watched Memento, which is really hard to say anything about because it's a very complicated movie and the full strength of its awesome cannot be communicated by telling you that it's about a dude investigating a murder, and he has short-term memory loss so he has to take pictures and tattoo shit all over his body. It's much more brilliant than it sounds.
I also started Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was interesting since I know nothing about the Terminator franchise whatsoever, but Summer Glau is in it so I figured I'd watch it anyway. Not far enough along to figure out their time-travel rules enough to pass judgment on them as internally consistent or making sense. There is a major inconsistency in Summer Glau's character--namely, that when we first meet her she passes herself off as a normal human decently well for about two scenes, what with making and understanding jokes and all that, but the minute we find out she's a robot it goes into comical Robot Lady Is Social Retard territory and she can't go two seconds without making somebody's life really awkward. Other than that, there are lots of explosions, and also time travel and Summer Glau, so overall I'm inclined to keep watching.
Do need to finish Buffy season 6 at some point. Have kind of stalled at the musical episode, because it was so awesome I kind of just want to stay there. Oops.
What have you been reading/watching?
Ermmmm. So, recently, I read The Sweet Far Thing, the sequel to A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels, which is about as long as the first two put together. TSFT definitely gets a lot more explicit with its This Is A Progressive Book For Progressive Girls message, which occasionally seems a little contrived in its deliberate attempt to treat every single social issue ever (women's rights, child rights, worker's rights, race relations, class warfare, and GLBT), but it might just seem like that to me after an entire semester of reading really long, meandering Victorian novels in which we had to pick out the ways the Victorian British Suck At Life In Relation To Race, Class, Gender And Empire ourselves. Also, still hate the Kartik subplot; he's still following in the mold of Obligatory YA Love Interests where they give him irritating-as-fuck random mood swings as a shortcut for making him mysterious/realistically flawed/has-a-complex-personality or some shit instead of developing him as a character. Other than those two gripes, however... it was so nice to see Gemma and Ann and Felicity and Pippa again! Dead!Pippa is wonderfully creepy, especially. The plot twists are ridiculous, and as usual the juxtaposition between all the crazy hardcore magic politics and fate and destiny shit of the Realms, and the stiflingly infantilized world of everyday Victorian privilege, is simultaneously appropriately jarring and brilliantly tied together via ~forbidden magic powers~. Also, Felicity just keeps getting more and more awesome.
Then I read Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth, which has three basic tenets: 1. the virgin/whore dichotomy is complete BS and needs to go, 2. the Christianists/right-wing abstinence nutters are dangerously insane and have way too much political power, and 3. the notion of "masculinity" is at least as dangerous a lie as #1 and needs a serious overhaul, pronto. It was very informative, but also scary, especially reading it right in the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination.
Now I's reading The Godfather. Go me.
In screen-staring at news, I finally watched Memento, which is really hard to say anything about because it's a very complicated movie and the full strength of its awesome cannot be communicated by telling you that it's about a dude investigating a murder, and he has short-term memory loss so he has to take pictures and tattoo shit all over his body. It's much more brilliant than it sounds.
I also started Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was interesting since I know nothing about the Terminator franchise whatsoever, but Summer Glau is in it so I figured I'd watch it anyway. Not far enough along to figure out their time-travel rules enough to pass judgment on them as internally consistent or making sense. There is a major inconsistency in Summer Glau's character--namely, that when we first meet her she passes herself off as a normal human decently well for about two scenes, what with making and understanding jokes and all that, but the minute we find out she's a robot it goes into comical Robot Lady Is Social Retard territory and she can't go two seconds without making somebody's life really awkward. Other than that, there are lots of explosions, and also time travel and Summer Glau, so overall I'm inclined to keep watching.
Do need to finish Buffy season 6 at some point. Have kind of stalled at the musical episode, because it was so awesome I kind of just want to stay there. Oops.
What have you been reading/watching?