Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

Think I'm going to hit my goal for the year (20 books) much earlier than I expected - actually making myself read on the subway instead of trying in vain to use the internet seems to be working out for me.

Korea's Place In The Sun: A Modern History by Bruce Cumings

Thorough overview of Korean - both South Korean and North Korean - history and the various factors and movers and shakers that played a role. I wish he'd placed his chapter on South Korea's rapid-fire political changes before the one on it's economic development, because the other way around sure confused me. I did appreciate his occasional interruptions of himself to chime in with a relevant anecdote from one of his various times in Korea. My favorite one was where he was one of many student demonstrators, all of them scattering with the arrival of government forces to break it up, when a female professor there was like "hey, this way, we can just climb over this wall, and that's how they got away.

I also didn't expect but appreciated the chapter on Korean-Americans. It felt fitting, both because of the book being written by an American and because of the very large role the USA played in the shaping of Korean history.

Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, both by Ann Leckie

I didn't enjoy these two as much as I did the first book in the trilogy, Ancillary Justice. Things got rather didactic, especially with Breq almost always being correct - yes, yes we all know that exploiting/ignoring exploiting ethnic differences while colonizing is bad, are you going to remind us of that every 5 seconds or let these interesting characters actually do anything interesting?

The closest I came to emotional investment was when Breq gets injured in the last book, losing a leg. She sobs, uncharacteristically given her ancillary nature, and asks "why couldn't it have been [her] bad leg?". There was a sliver of something there, of Breq being able to have wants of her own instead of still focused on missions and purposes...and then we went right back to the civil war I didn't give a crap about.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

...I guess that happened? I mean, I didn't expect most of it to be taking place in NYC, so I found that aspect of the random wanderings around entertaining. (Where do those ducks go, though)

Severance by Ling Ma

I really liked the prose for this one, it was nice to read, even with the stylistic choice of no dialogue punctuation or tags. The weird collision of several different genres worked for me - young person working in the city, post-apocalyptic group with a dictator-y leader, a child of immigrants reckoning with her dead parents. It had the same problem as Americanah, where I was going "well, I guess the protagonist is now sleeping/dating with this dude and now this other dude, I'm not sure why, and apparently she isn't is either." (They both had the classic "only Americans can afford to be depressed" line directed at their protagonists - no criticism there, just a note that apparently this is a common truism)

The Prince and The Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Very cute, both in story and art. I am a grinch who did not buy that one part of the happy ending, but I'm sure it works much better for its actual target audience (i.e children) and I'm glad they get to have this book.