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thefourthvine) wrote2010-03-13 05:52 pm
thefourthvine) wrote2010-03-13 05:52 pm
Entry tags:
Books: Gender Blender and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Book I Have Issues With: Gender Blender, by Blake Nelson
Let's just present this as a conversation between me and the book.
Gender Blender: I am YA bodyswap!
Me: Sold.
Gender Blender: So. Let's start off with a spurious Native American legend! Ha ha, those wacky Indians and their crazy gender-swapping gods!
Me: Um.
Gender Blender: And then I think we should explore gender by reinforcing stereotypes! Emma is a sweet little gymnast A-student perfectionist, always eager to please, but also part of an evil bitch cabal! Also, she likes to talk about feelings. Tom is a slacker slobbo thrill-seeking baseball player dude! He likes to spit and punch things.
Me: Oh. Um. Look, since we're talking and all, can I ask you a question?
Gender Blender: Sure!
Me: If you're going to have a scene where Tom-in-Emma's-body looks in a mirror to have his First Real Experience of Boobs, and he's all excited about that, then why does Emma's only exploration of Tom's body consist of thinking Tom's dick is a chipmunk when she wakes up with an erection?
Gender Blender: Because, see, boys like boobs.
Me: But girls don't like cocks?
Gender Blender: Well, not good girls. Also, we prefer to use the term "boy part."
Me: This is my review, and I will call it a tiddlewinkle before I call it a boy part.
Gender Blender: Fine. Clearly you aren't a good girl.
Me: Nope. Also, why is there a whole chapter of Tom checking out the girls in the locker room (where most of them turn out to be ugly and fat!) and the shower, and getting to see the boobs of his crush and so on, but Emma never gets a chance to check out guys in the shower or the bathroom or anywhere?
Gender Blender: It might make boys uncomfortable. Plus, you know, she's a good girl, so obviously she wouldn't want to.
Me: I see.
Gender Blender: But I have many other things to offer! Did I mention that there is embarrassment squick aplenty?
Me: Oh, joy. Remind me why I finished you?
Gender Blender: My chapters are short. And you were desperate.
Me: Right.
Gender Blender: I did avoid the smoochy ending you were fearing. Don't I get credit for that?
Me: Sure, yes, absolutely. In the "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" sense, anyway.
Gender Blender: You know, if you're going to be like this about it, I think maybe you should stick to bodyswap and genderswap in fan fiction.
Me: I will, thanks.
But you'll all be relieved to know that Tom and Emma got good grades on their gender report and learned not to argue so much. There. Now you don't have to read this. (If anyone feels like writing me bodyswap, especially Spock/Kirk or Sam-Teal'c, as a "thank you for saving me from this terrible book" gift, I will not say no. For the record.)
Book I Love: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin
You know, when I used to play AD&D (when I used to have time to play AD&D), I was always welcome in any group I cared to join. Because I was willing to play the cleric. No arguments! No roll-percentiles-loser-has-to-be-the-cleric! No letting one person have two player characters if he'd make one of them the healer! I actually wanted to be on the god squad, giving hit points and taking them away (usually not to the same person). I liked using a mace. I preferred clerical spells to magic-user spells. But most of all, I loved gods. (I could, no lie, spend a whole hour just selecting my character's god. This is an important choice, people!)
So, you know, you give me a really well-thought-out pantheon, I am pretty much your girl. I will cling to you through two thousand pages of dense prose and let you kill off nearly all the awesome characters. I will even forgive you shoddy worldbuilding and cookie-cutter fantasy and women whose entire purpose is to have sex and make babies and then die so the hero can experience manpain. (To a point. Don't test me on this one.)
Which makes me all the more grateful that in this book, I didn't have to forgive anything. There's, yes, a massively awesome pantheon. (Some of the gods are slaves, and some are dead, and one is crazy, which is just so incredibly wonderful I can't even tell you. Um, not for the gods, though. Just the reader.) But it doesn't stop there, because this book is incredible: well-written, set in a world the author clearly actually put thought into, and not a Tolkien knock-off in sight. (I think this book might actually have killed Tolkien, in all honesty, if it somehow managed to travel through time to land in his extremely cultured hands. For one thing, the squat dark-skinned girl isn't actually evil, and the tall skinny white people sort of go beyond evil. We all know how hard he would have taken that.) Plus, it provides a functional education in all the things that can go terribly, terribly wrong with ruling by divine right. (Particularly if the divine right is, shall we say, explicit.) You have to admit that's a handy bonus.
I am supposed to pace myself with new books - otherwise I end up reading things like Gender Blender, which never ends well for anyone - but I couldn't with this one. I didn't so much read it as fall on it like a starving wolf. In the end, my only complaints with this book were 1) it ended and 2) there was not nearly enough of it.
If all fantasy was like this, you would not be able to pry me out of the genre with the jaws of life.
Let's just present this as a conversation between me and the book.
Gender Blender: I am YA bodyswap!
Me: Sold.
Gender Blender: So. Let's start off with a spurious Native American legend! Ha ha, those wacky Indians and their crazy gender-swapping gods!
Me: Um.
Gender Blender: And then I think we should explore gender by reinforcing stereotypes! Emma is a sweet little gymnast A-student perfectionist, always eager to please, but also part of an evil bitch cabal! Also, she likes to talk about feelings. Tom is a slacker slobbo thrill-seeking baseball player dude! He likes to spit and punch things.
Me: Oh. Um. Look, since we're talking and all, can I ask you a question?
Gender Blender: Sure!
Me: If you're going to have a scene where Tom-in-Emma's-body looks in a mirror to have his First Real Experience of Boobs, and he's all excited about that, then why does Emma's only exploration of Tom's body consist of thinking Tom's dick is a chipmunk when she wakes up with an erection?
Gender Blender: Because, see, boys like boobs.
Me: But girls don't like cocks?
Gender Blender: Well, not good girls. Also, we prefer to use the term "boy part."
Me: This is my review, and I will call it a tiddlewinkle before I call it a boy part.
Gender Blender: Fine. Clearly you aren't a good girl.
Me: Nope. Also, why is there a whole chapter of Tom checking out the girls in the locker room (where most of them turn out to be ugly and fat!) and the shower, and getting to see the boobs of his crush and so on, but Emma never gets a chance to check out guys in the shower or the bathroom or anywhere?
Gender Blender: It might make boys uncomfortable. Plus, you know, she's a good girl, so obviously she wouldn't want to.
Me: I see.
Gender Blender: But I have many other things to offer! Did I mention that there is embarrassment squick aplenty?
Me: Oh, joy. Remind me why I finished you?
Gender Blender: My chapters are short. And you were desperate.
Me: Right.
Gender Blender: I did avoid the smoochy ending you were fearing. Don't I get credit for that?
Me: Sure, yes, absolutely. In the "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" sense, anyway.
Gender Blender: You know, if you're going to be like this about it, I think maybe you should stick to bodyswap and genderswap in fan fiction.
Me: I will, thanks.
But you'll all be relieved to know that Tom and Emma got good grades on their gender report and learned not to argue so much. There. Now you don't have to read this. (If anyone feels like writing me bodyswap, especially Spock/Kirk or Sam-Teal'c, as a "thank you for saving me from this terrible book" gift, I will not say no. For the record.)
Book I Love: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin
You know, when I used to play AD&D (when I used to have time to play AD&D), I was always welcome in any group I cared to join. Because I was willing to play the cleric. No arguments! No roll-percentiles-loser-has-to-be-the-cleric! No letting one person have two player characters if he'd make one of them the healer! I actually wanted to be on the god squad, giving hit points and taking them away (usually not to the same person). I liked using a mace. I preferred clerical spells to magic-user spells. But most of all, I loved gods. (I could, no lie, spend a whole hour just selecting my character's god. This is an important choice, people!)
So, you know, you give me a really well-thought-out pantheon, I am pretty much your girl. I will cling to you through two thousand pages of dense prose and let you kill off nearly all the awesome characters. I will even forgive you shoddy worldbuilding and cookie-cutter fantasy and women whose entire purpose is to have sex and make babies and then die so the hero can experience manpain. (To a point. Don't test me on this one.)
Which makes me all the more grateful that in this book, I didn't have to forgive anything. There's, yes, a massively awesome pantheon. (Some of the gods are slaves, and some are dead, and one is crazy, which is just so incredibly wonderful I can't even tell you. Um, not for the gods, though. Just the reader.) But it doesn't stop there, because this book is incredible: well-written, set in a world the author clearly actually put thought into, and not a Tolkien knock-off in sight. (I think this book might actually have killed Tolkien, in all honesty, if it somehow managed to travel through time to land in his extremely cultured hands. For one thing, the squat dark-skinned girl isn't actually evil, and the tall skinny white people sort of go beyond evil. We all know how hard he would have taken that.) Plus, it provides a functional education in all the things that can go terribly, terribly wrong with ruling by divine right. (Particularly if the divine right is, shall we say, explicit.) You have to admit that's a handy bonus.
I am supposed to pace myself with new books - otherwise I end up reading things like Gender Blender, which never ends well for anyone - but I couldn't with this one. I didn't so much read it as fall on it like a starving wolf. In the end, my only complaints with this book were 1) it ended and 2) there was not nearly enough of it.
If all fantasy was like this, you would not be able to pry me out of the genre with the jaws of life.
no subject
She also agrees with me that most adult literary fiction is garbage -- what do you think? I feel like a philistine for thinking that, but I also feel so cheated. I loved fiction so much as a child -- even the bad stuff was at least pretty straightforward -- and 99% of adult fiction is just boring, mistaking verisimilitude for truth, or something. I also keep encountering this neurotic, bleak perspective, that everything sucks and will always suck, and there's nothing you can do about it, which really freaked me about aging as a teen. And, now I've hit my early twenties and discovered that that's NOT AT ALL TRUE, and being a grown-up is awesome, I'm kind of pissed. Anyway: literary fiction -- yay or nay? I'm currently just sticking to fanfic and nonfiction, with the occasional foray into genre stuff.
(And, I'm sure you were on this a long time ago, but just in case: JONATHAN STRANGE. Probably my favorite book of all time.)
no subject
I like that in a person.
*approves of this person greatly*
She also agrees with me that most adult literary fiction is garbage -- what do you think?
I'm just very aware that I am not the audience for 99.5% of modern literary fiction. (Not really a surprise - a lot of the classics I truly love would probably be considered genre fiction now, too.) I had a sort of similar experience to yours; I grew up reading basically everything written for children, and then at least half of the things written for YAs (I avoided things with "babysitter" in the title), and then, when I was around 14, I figured I was ready for adult novels. (Also, I was desperately looking for a new source of books.) I tried fantasy, mystery, and literary fiction. It took me maybe fifty books of that latter to realize it just wasn't for me. I mean, I know lots of people love it! Just. I was born to be a genre and non-fiction and fan fiction reader.
For one thing, I like happy endings. That right there rules out a LOT of literary fiction. Also, I like things to happen, and while I do truly appreciate great writing, it has to be in service of the characters and the plot, not itself. Which, again, is something I'm more likely to find in genre fiction.
But there is that other .5% of literary fiction I really do like, so - maybe it's just that the field, for me, suffers from a more stringent version of Sturgeon's Law? Instead of 90% of everything being crap, it's 99.5%.