Reading (Socialist Realism | The Fifth Season | The Comedy Of Errors)

Socialist Realism by Trisha Low

I, uh, might not be sufficiently into Art TM or Artistes TM or Leftism TM for this memoir/book-length essay/stream of consciousness with time-jumping. I mean, I don’t particularly regret reading it, I will give most Singaporean authors a shot.

But somewhere around the “at an S&M workshop about how to safely waterboard your partner or be waterboarded by your partner” or the “being very upset about my mom wanting to buy a $25k handbag she can afford and asking me to pick it up” anecdotes, I was going, “oh, some people live very interesting lives” like a person diplomatically desperate to leave a party conversation. (I wasn’t paying full attention to thematic point of the first anecdote because I kept going...I don’t know that there’s really a safe way to do that...maybe don’t do that...)

Much like party conversations, it can’t have been purely the content of the author’s thoughts that put me off but the presentation. Maybe I could’ve liked if it had been even more stream-of-consciousness, instead of explaining the context for some art piece or Utena or Singapore, because by the end, I was thinking man, I’d take being dunked into your French New Wave thoughts without the prior explanation if it meant I did not have to read your explanation of who One Direction are.

Though perhaps I’d have an uncharitable response regardless. I often found myself thinking that whatever the given topic the author had switched to, I had read more interesting thoughts on it elsewhere. I’d rather read Zeynep Tufecki on protest movements in Turkey, or PJ Thum’s critique of Lee Kuan Yew’s approach to statecraft, or any of a number of online posts on celebrity fame. I’m additionally bored of reading thoughts on ~revolution~ in a modern American political context, I’m much more into the nuts and bolts these days.

So yeah, not for me, would not recommend.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

All I knew I was going into this was that the series won some hugos and the author was one of the people being terrible about Isabel Fall on Twitter. Reasonably I decided to put both out of my mind.

As I began reading the book, I remembered that wait, I’d actually osmosised a third thing about the author, that she’s a big Dragon Age fan who cared a lot about Cullen and the mages vs templars shit. Orogenes and guardians are merely reskinned mages and templars, where magic is replaced with earthbending.

Despite that obviousness, the novel works. Decent fantasy time.

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The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

I don’t think twin-based misunderstandings are my jam. I got bored of the confusion fairly quickly when watching a recent production and when reading the play afterwards. There’s not much else going on here. Enjoyed most the interactions between the Duke and Egeon, of all things.