Reading on an nsday
Apr. 16th, 2022 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaMy insurance woes are nearly done, it looks like - finally - after roping in someone higher up and several emails. I even got my prescription moved over after only three phone calls! (I still need to make another because the number of days the refills cover is wrong.) Anyway, on to things I've been reading recently:
One was Wake, a graphic novel I got from the library. It's a good thing I read the inside of the dustjacket, because the subtitle (The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Rebellions) does not super accurately describe the contents (memoir of a historian working on her dissertation about women in slave rebellions). The first rebellion mentioned doesn't even seem to have any indication that it was women-led, just that women were involved in it. Which is still historically important! Just not what I would have expected from the cover.
The later stories fit the title theme better, particularly the section where she describes rebellions during the Middle Passage, why women played such a large role in them (they weren't chained down and had easier access to weapons), and historical misogyny from historians (huh, sure is weird that rebellions happened more often on ships with more women slaves, wonder why!). There are also a lot of interesting little scenes about the difficulty of doing historical research - struggling to access archives, incomplete documentation, insurance companies that got their start insuring slave ships don't want historians accessing those records for some reason... and that's before the emotional difficulty the project obviously had on her.
I did find it engaging for the most part, though there's a couple of imaginary sequences expanding approximately one sentence's worth of historical documentation into a little story that didn't quite seem to fit to me, especially the second one. The art is a bit rough, but in a way that I thought added to the storytelling; it's black and white only, and the historical African/slave characters especially are drawn with rough cross-hatch shading that gives them a sort of skeletal look, which I thought emphasized their emotions. The artist also did a great job of mixing time and space - as the historian walks through NYC, scenes of slavery are reflected in the skyscrapers and cop car windows; when she goes to London and has tea, the pot and cups are filled with slaves laboring over the tea and sugar.
One other thing that bothered me a bit is that in the section where she is discussing the history of slave trading on the African side, something about it rubbed me as trying to downplay the actions of those in Africa who sold their enemies and criminals to the Europeans. Which did get me looking up how some of those countries are trying to grapple with that history now and the lingering effects within their own communities (turns out being slave-raided for centuries leaves trauma in its wake even if your direct ancestors were lucky enough to escape that particular fate and that people who are successful because their ancestors made a fortune selling human beings into a horrific fate kind of don't want anyone to think too much about that).
I also read Paper Towns, a copy of which I bought secondhand ages ago and thought would make a good offering to the Little Free Library. It was okay? It was neither as amazing as fans would have you believe nor as bad as the detractors I've seen said it was. I can definitely see how the heightened YA quirkiness would annoy people - though to me, it reminded me of my early college years and also how adventurousness probably would've felt like to me then - but I was a little surprised when I was paging through some of the reviews and found people missing the point of the book. Which, bless Green, is very, very explicitly spelled out on page. I'm pretty sure we were also supposed to think that the MPDG deconstruction character is pretentious and somewhat high on her own quirkiness and self-perceived cleverness; I mean, she's just turned 18, that's a good age for feeling that you are finally getting Deep Truths that others don't as your brain develops and your sense of empathy and social skills start to kick in properly.
And I also also read, in Japanese, the first volume of 藏 b/c free and historical Taishou setting, though I found the Niigata dialect hard to understand, and 見えない子どもたち (Unseen Children), an obscure little manga about two families each dealing with a child coming out as trans. It's nothing groundbreaking and leans towards melodrama, and it's definitely meant to teach readers what transgender means, but sometimes it's just nice to read something affirming that desperately wants to teach the reader that 'minority' doesn't mean 'bad' and that too many kids in Japan are still 'unseen' and suffering because society doesn't want to recognize LGBT people.
One was Wake, a graphic novel I got from the library. It's a good thing I read the inside of the dustjacket, because the subtitle (The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Rebellions) does not super accurately describe the contents (memoir of a historian working on her dissertation about women in slave rebellions). The first rebellion mentioned doesn't even seem to have any indication that it was women-led, just that women were involved in it. Which is still historically important! Just not what I would have expected from the cover.
The later stories fit the title theme better, particularly the section where she describes rebellions during the Middle Passage, why women played such a large role in them (they weren't chained down and had easier access to weapons), and historical misogyny from historians (huh, sure is weird that rebellions happened more often on ships with more women slaves, wonder why!). There are also a lot of interesting little scenes about the difficulty of doing historical research - struggling to access archives, incomplete documentation, insurance companies that got their start insuring slave ships don't want historians accessing those records for some reason... and that's before the emotional difficulty the project obviously had on her.
I did find it engaging for the most part, though there's a couple of imaginary sequences expanding approximately one sentence's worth of historical documentation into a little story that didn't quite seem to fit to me, especially the second one. The art is a bit rough, but in a way that I thought added to the storytelling; it's black and white only, and the historical African/slave characters especially are drawn with rough cross-hatch shading that gives them a sort of skeletal look, which I thought emphasized their emotions. The artist also did a great job of mixing time and space - as the historian walks through NYC, scenes of slavery are reflected in the skyscrapers and cop car windows; when she goes to London and has tea, the pot and cups are filled with slaves laboring over the tea and sugar.
One other thing that bothered me a bit is that in the section where she is discussing the history of slave trading on the African side, something about it rubbed me as trying to downplay the actions of those in Africa who sold their enemies and criminals to the Europeans. Which did get me looking up how some of those countries are trying to grapple with that history now and the lingering effects within their own communities (turns out being slave-raided for centuries leaves trauma in its wake even if your direct ancestors were lucky enough to escape that particular fate and that people who are successful because their ancestors made a fortune selling human beings into a horrific fate kind of don't want anyone to think too much about that).
I also read Paper Towns, a copy of which I bought secondhand ages ago and thought would make a good offering to the Little Free Library. It was okay? It was neither as amazing as fans would have you believe nor as bad as the detractors I've seen said it was. I can definitely see how the heightened YA quirkiness would annoy people - though to me, it reminded me of my early college years and also how adventurousness probably would've felt like to me then - but I was a little surprised when I was paging through some of the reviews and found people missing the point of the book. Which, bless Green, is very, very explicitly spelled out on page. I'm pretty sure we were also supposed to think that the MPDG deconstruction character is pretentious and somewhat high on her own quirkiness and self-perceived cleverness; I mean, she's just turned 18, that's a good age for feeling that you are finally getting Deep Truths that others don't as your brain develops and your sense of empathy and social skills start to kick in properly.
And I also also read, in Japanese, the first volume of 藏 b/c free and historical Taishou setting, though I found the Niigata dialect hard to understand, and 見えない子どもたち (Unseen Children), an obscure little manga about two families each dealing with a child coming out as trans. It's nothing groundbreaking and leans towards melodrama, and it's definitely meant to teach readers what transgender means, but sometimes it's just nice to read something affirming that desperately wants to teach the reader that 'minority' doesn't mean 'bad' and that too many kids in Japan are still 'unseen' and suffering because society doesn't want to recognize LGBT people.
