OMG not even waiting until Wednesday (actually read a book!)

[dancingsinging]

I actually read a book! I was in the library with kid no. 1 and snagged _Written in Red_ off of the tiny sci-fi shelf (it covers all spec fic, but they label it that way) in the new books section because it looked kind of interesting in the two minutes I had to glance. It was full of problematic stuff, which I mostly ignored so I could damn well enjoy getting lost in a book already. (I also grabbed _The Games_ from the not-new section, but it was awful. By pg 9 it had sexism, fat bigotry, and a horrible stereotyped ineffectual mother who fails to save her kid. I stopped there--I don’t really even have time to read *good* books.)

Just to get it out of the way, the problematic aspects of _Written in Red_ that glared out at me were:

- a protagonist whose superpower is inspiring protectiveness in those around her, ‘cause she just so darned sweet and so ineffective at taking care of herself

- a villain who is mostly characterized by being beautiful, ambitious, and willing to use sex to manipulate dudes

- that’s the only sex in the book, and the only sexual female character

- a semi-love-interest who is so inspired to protectiveness that he just can’t help acting like an aggressive asshole around the protag

- a backstory of enslaved young women and girls that isn’t literally sexual, but has enough sexual overtones to remind me of metaphortunate ’s question, “Why are there so many songs about sex dolls?”

- a little bit of cultural appropriation

But, really, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t totally enjoy reading the book. I think some of the enjoyment was from the problematic thing with the protagonist being all wonderful and cute and roundly loved by everyone around her. Maybe I just need that right now--a little fantasy of being so amazingly delightful that people would crowd around me to help me and bake me cookies (actually happened in the book!) and protect me from hard things in life. And the hard things in life would be, like, single events full of drama and excitement and not the endless, slowly wearing pain of never sleeping much or the sort of personality-numbing tedium of doing a lot of housework and wiping up of baby vomit and rarely seeing another adult. Another aspect of fantasy indulgence that I enjoyed was how, if someone annoys you enough, you can be super powerful and just kill them and you don’t have to stop to consider how they maybe have reasons or whatever. (In a whole other post I’d like to talk about having discovered for myself the useful, constructive aspects of what Buddhism calls “the world of animality” or that desire to dominate/cower in the sorting out of social order. I had this great experience of chanting and fantasizing about literally ripping off someone’s head. It ended up being very helpful in my real life.)

Anyway, other than the sort of teenage wish-fulfillment aspects, there are things that the book does well:

- vampires and werewolves made totally fresh (at least for me) with well-done, thorough worldbuilding

- a neat premise about people who see accurate prophecies when their skin is cut

- aspects of the protagonist that I like--creativity, courage, kindness, a Bilbo Baggins kind of reluctant willingness to venture into the unknown

- some interesting exploration about physical power/the ability to inflict violence and how it influences freedom and social power (although there are some aspects of this that really could have used more delving)

If I were seriously reviewing this book, I’d probably have something smart to say about the slightly wavering pacing, but it wasn’t enough to actually bother me. There are some characters I’d like to see more fully developed, but this book is clearly the start of a series, so that will probably come.

The experience of reading this book made me realize how much happier I would be if I found a way to work reading into my life. (I’ve been finding it rather cute how the whole reading Wednesday thing assumes that people always have something they’re reading, something they just read, and something they’re planning to read next. Obviously not a meme created by a parent of an infant. But now I’m thinking that I just might want to figure something out. I don’t need to read a novel in four days like I just did--even fifteen minutes a day is something.)

I don’t know if I’ll actually write it, but I’ve been wanting to do a post about managing reading time. Something I never learned as a child but that I might want to take on for my kid’s sake--my daughter is clearly as much of a bookaholic as Spouse and I were and it recently occurred to me that I could do something other than the totally-unrestricted-reading-time thing my mom did for me. (Literally. I never had the experience of hiding under covers with a flashlight because my mom didn’t care if I read until 2:00 AM.) (BTW, no, I don’t let my daughter do that. So I guess I’m already doing something different.) Anyway, the whole thing bears thinking about.

Comments

[wild_irises]

I have never experienced being the parent of an infant but, from other long-term stressful times in my life, I can tell you that there would always be something I finished, something I was reading, and something I was about to read, even if it was a month or more before I moved from one thing to the next. They might all be old favorites that I knew by heart, and it might take me a really long time to get through them, but they would be there.

Anyone else's mileage may vary.

[dancingsinging]

I admire your organization! I think it would make me feel better to know what I was going to read next, even if I didn't know when I was going to read it. But I find that meta-life stuff (planning what I'm going to do or organizing it) extremely difficult right now. Like, I know I'd probably be less stressed if I planned a week's worth of dinners ahead of time, but finding those 20 minutes and using it for that as opposed to using it for "OMG I'm starving what am I going to eat now" is a challenge. I guess it's just another area that I need to find some balance in. Enough planning ahead to not be horribly inefficient and enough getting through the moment to, you know, get through the moment.

[wild_irises]

Oh, it's not about organization. I would screw up everything else. It's about lifelong addiction to reading. I'm the girl who stole books from the campus bookstore and returned them when I had read them carefully, because I couldn't live without fiction and there was effectively no fiction in the college library. I lived in fear of being caught returning a book, because it was so much weirder than being caught stealing one.