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I am reading an unfamiliar new book aloud to Meesto. I have not read it before, my reading it aloud to Meesto is my first exposure to it, too. So far there have been 50 pages of horse-riding and exposition and so far we both can't stand the POV main character who seems to be a stupid 15 year old whiny boy. Ugh. It has a Newberry Medal and is Young Adult. It had better improve fast and cut the boy-whining.
On the other hand no matter how hard this new book I'm reading sucks, it can't possibly suck as hard as Failingtonia, The 13th (oh, please). So I'm going to go read my new book aloud,
Maybe I should stick to the internet, which has stuff about point of view, science, reactions, choices, and Little House on the Prairie.
May 13 2009, 08:03:21 UTC 3 years ago
Try 'The Lantern Bearers' to see if you like her style.
I can also heartily recommend Rumer Godden's 'An Episode of Sparrows', which isn't really a YA novel, but because it has a couple of children as the main characters its often slotted that way. Brilliant read, though.
May 13 2009, 12:51:43 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 14:02:22 UTC 3 years ago
They were both well acclaimed and prizewinning authors (a few of Rumer Godden's 'grown up' novels were made into movies) in the fifties and sixties, but somewhere in the eighties their works somehow dropped out of sight. I can heartily recommend them, though.
May 13 2009, 09:28:48 UTC 3 years ago
Semi-similarly, the Cassie Edwards "Savage Plagiarism" affair sparked a wildly successful fundraiser for black-footed ferrets-- but not parallel interest in the welfare of the various Native American groups whose traditions Edwards was
writingresearchingcut'n'pasting into an entire series of books mostly entitled Savage Fill-in-the-blank-- including one book with approximately as many pages in paperback as the remaining number of members of the tribe in question (~400: the Chitimacha in Racing Moon).May 13 2009, 12:54:51 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 10:15:57 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 12:47:09 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 13:38:28 UTC 3 years ago
What I saw in what she wrote was an inability to distinguish between her own experience of the world and what was happening for everyone in the world. So she thinks that SF/her own work 1. has more (active?) fans of color since the internet, or maybe 2. has just more (active?) fans, period, including more fans of color?
But really she should be saying, "the internet has provided me with more opportunities to meet POC than before, because racism creates a segregated society and I would have had to try harder to meet you/learn about you than I had even thought about doing."
What do they call that, when you can't tell the difference between your own individual experience and what's true for the whole world? Solipsism? Is privilege generally a species of solipsism?
May 13 2009, 14:20:07 UTC 3 years ago
I will attempt to have faith that more people than not will... try to do better and look at things from a different angle.
I like your rephrasing greatly, BTW.
May 13 2009, 14:54:17 UTC 3 years ago
The only way to do better is to choose to learn about the experience of people of color, both past and present. In a society that dismisses those experiences as unimportant, a person with white skin privilege has to continually choose to learn and pay attention. It's not just any different angle.
May 13 2009, 16:42:53 UTC 3 years ago
And not just any different angle, aye, but... a different one. My own enlightenment about an entirely different subject took a while to manage, and once I got my head around it, it opened up all the branches of... well, everything in that realm of taking responsibility and assigning responsibility for actions. I'm probably explaining this badly, in part because I'm not finding an elegant way to avoid All About My Enlightenment, when all I want to do is draw a parallel I know I've experienced to something I'm still trying to get my head around.
May 13 2009, 11:53:41 UTC 3 years ago
(That said, at least one of the people griping at her, last I looked, completely mischaracterized "it didn't sell well" (a factual truth; if it'd sold well, there'd have been sequels) as "it didn't get the raving adulation of black women." Which annoyed me.)
May 13 2009, 12:48:17 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 14:17:50 UTC 3 years ago
I wish I knew what they thought of Abenaki Captive (I hope I spelled that right), which is what's being read for an after-school enrichment "book club" thing that I'm volunteering with. It doesn't seem to be anywhere on the site (for good or ill), and the foreword looks reasonable, but... we know who writes forewords.
May 13 2009, 15:00:48 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 16:43:05 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 12:12:52 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 12:45:51 UTC 3 years ago
May 13 2009, 16:31:12 UTC 3 years ago
Stasia
May 14 2009, 00:19:21 UTC 3 years ago