In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 19/52

Six books this week!

Think Like a Freak is the third book by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner.  One is an economist, one is a journalist.  Together, they point out interesting things in social economics.  This one felt a bit shorter than the others, with less examples, and more commentary on how people came to have new ideas and new realisations about things you wouldn't expect.

Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Shanghai Girls.  The first book focuses on Pearl and May, two sisters who live in Shanghai in the '30s, when it was the 'Paris of Asia'.  They are sold to 'Gold Mountain Men' - men who have left China to make fortunes in America - as wives and shipped to Los Angeles.  Most of it takes place through the second world war, and it seems to have drawn quite a lot from  the experiences of Lisa See's family as documented in On Gold Mountain.

The sequel takes place in the 60s when Joy, truly believing that Mao's vision of a communist China will lead to a better world, returns there.  As well as being a good story, together, the books make up a fascinating history of Chinese people in America and China over the last century.

Chart Throb is a book I've read many times before, though this one is the audiobook as performed by Glen McCready, who is excellent.  I listened to this with my Tom in the car.  Very enjoyable.  It's about the Prince of Wales entering an X-Factor style show, with a huge focus on how it is produced and how heavily the contestants are manipulated.  Very believable, considering Ben Elton works for the BBC and can be expected to have a great deal of knowledge on this sort of thing.

The other three books I read are all part of a series by Charlaine Harris.  I read her entire Sookie Stackhouse series last year, the one which became a tv series by the name of True Blood.  In the Grave series, the main character is Harper Connolly.  After being hit by lightening at the age of fifteen, she gained the ability to read corpses, to find out what killed them.  They're basically murder mysteries with a slight supernatural twist.  There are only four books in the series, and the last one was published in 2009.  I'm currently 1/3 of the way through; I'm hoping it really does wrap up the series, rather than just trailing off.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 18/52

Only three books this week; two rereads, one new.

Do You Remember the First Time? is one of my favourite Jenny Colgan novels.  It's strangely beautiful, while also being pretty funny.

Shanghai Girls was the first Lisa See novel I ever read, and I enjoyed rereading it.  I've just finished the sequel, so I'll write more about both in next week's post.

After Dark was a library book.  I've been interested in reading IQ84, but that seemed a bit long.  I'm glad I read After Dark first.  It was strange and interesting, but a little too surreal and lacking in plot for me.  I don't think I'd enjoy his other works; I don't have the patience to understand them.

In Which We Discuss the Dystopian City Pretty Committee

I bought a Kobo just before Christmas. There are a few posts about that on my gaming blog which I'll be importing over later.

Most recently, I've been reading Scott Westerfeld's  Uglies series.  I'm currently halfway through the third book, Specials.  There are a lot of things to talk about here, and I'm basically going to freestyle it.  In other words;

There will be many spoilers for the Uglies series beyond this point.  And probably some for Twilight and Labyrinth as well.

 

No one here who doesn't want to be?  Goodo.

The Uglies Series takes place in a dystopian future where everyone is given cosmetic surgery at the age of sixteen to make them pretty.  In the first book the heroine, Tally, discovers that the operation is not purely cosmetic, and, in fact, inflicts brain damage in order to control the population. A few times, Westerfeld draws attention to the fact that the story is a version of Sleeping Beauty, which I found fascinating.  My personal favourite fairytale archetype is Beauty and the Beast, and if you distil it down to the basic essence of 'powerful boy must make unwilling girl love him back', you see it everywhere.  Alicorn's Twilight rewrite, Luminosity makes it clear that Edward is completely within Bella's control.  Before she becomes a vampire she can choose to leave him; he cannot choose to leave her and forget about her.  Because he wants to make her feel a certain way, without invoking Stockholm Syndrome, he cannot overstep the boundaries of what she will allow.  Disney's Beauty and the Beast is similar; however much the Beast rampages and sulks he cannot step beyond the boundaries of what Belle will accept.  Labyrinth has some elements of this too; Jareth gives Sarah the big adventure that she wants.  To quote;

"Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken; I took him! You cowered before me; I was frightening! I have reordered time, I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me. Isn't that generous?

I ask for so little. Just let me rule you and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave."

Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another story which uses elements of the Sleeping Beauty archetype without being explicitly a retelling or alternate version of Sleeping Beauty.

Tally is constantly being brainwashed and escaping.  At times the narrative specifically draws attention to her trapped and sleeping state.  She is metaphorically awoken by a kiss, on two occasions, and this has attention drawn to it too.  I'm not saying that the blatant signposting is a bad thing; I probably wouldn't have picked up on these elements without it, and it's fascinating to consider.

Another element I've been thinking about is how troubling it is to consider the books from a feminist perspective.  Is Tally a good feminist role model?  She does seem to be governed mostly by love, and she does manage to constantly betray her one female friend, Shay.

(On that note, I love the fact that Shay is seeing a totally different interpretation of efforts than the audience is, and that this is shown to us.  It makes the world feel more rounded and makes Shay seem more alive.  I found the same thing in Lisa See's Shanghai Girls, in the different interpretations and understandings the two sisters had, and I loved it there, too).

Tally manages to think her way out of being brainwashed, but, as mentioned, this process begins with kissing boys, both of whom take the lead in the interaction.  Tally is constantly lead;  she tries to follow Peris to New Pretty Town.  She is forced to follow Shay to the Smoke.  She is forced to come back to New Pretty Town, where Zane leads her in being bubbly.  And so on.

I'm sick of the question.  I'm not sick of feminism, and feminism absolutely is not the thing at fault here.  The fault here lies in the fact that so many heros are male that the few females have to be role models.  They have to represent women in a way that the male hero doesn't have to.  I like that Tally is flawed.  I like that she behaves like the sixteen-year-old girl she is.  I like the interaction between her and Shay, even though it's often negative.  I like the romances she has with David and Zane, I like that the majority of her close friends are male.  I don't want to evaluate her as a feminist role model.  I want there to be so many female heroines, I want it to be so normal for women to go about doing things without men, that we don't have to judge all strong or focused-upon women as representatives of all women.

A note here, about being a feminist; we don't wake up every morning going, "Yay!  We'll get to complain about being oppressed, and the wage gap, and people treating us all as pre-mothers/living incubators, and street harassment today!".  We don't want to deal with all that.  We want it to stop.  But, we can't pretend we don't notice, or that it doesn't happen because it does, and so we have to deal with it and try to change it.  We wish we didn't need to.  We don't enjoy having to fight for equality.

Anyway; another element I wanted to touch upon was the cutting.  In Pretties, some characters begin cutting themselves as a way of escaping their brain damage, as they find the pain makes them think clearly.  This has been highlighted as problematic, as it does seem to encourage cutting.  However, Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy also uses cutting as a way to increase power, and, to my knowledge, has not come under similar criticism.  What's the difference?

In the Black Magician trilogy, the cutting is done so that magicians can pull power out of one another.  There are concrete, measurable effects that we clearly do not observe in our universe.  In the Uglies universe, the cutting results in mental clarity, something which is highly subjective and difficult to measure.  It is also, believably, an effect that someone who cuts themselves in our universe might observe.  So, I think that the cutting in Uglies is a little too close to real, and the fact that it results in positive effects for the characters is a little worrying, when considered from the aforementioned role model perspective.  In short, I'm happy to read it, and accept it as an element of the story, but I know that I've never self-harmed by cutting.  I would be concerned about someone reading it who had self-harmed in that way.

When I write stories, I run into similar problems.  I want to include certain elements or character traits, but I don't want to indicate that I endorse something I don't, or that certain behaviours are positive even if they work for my characters at the time.  I want my characters to be perfect feminist role models and flawed realistic people at the same time.  It's a puzzle.  I don't have a solution.