Reading catch-up
I have been in a heck of a reading funk lately!
Still reading: Hild by Nicola Griffith. This is historical fiction for people who like a lot of history in their historical fiction, rather than spunky second-wave feminists in pretty dresses. I do have a single semester of Old English under my belt, but that's as much as I know of pre-Norman England. I have to admit that, beautifully written as it is, the names and the liberal Old English vocabulary and the complicated tangles of power can be a bit of a slog to get through. (And it's a long book). But I try to just let go of what goes over my head and float along on the words, (and supplement a little of my history with Wikipedia.)
Just finished: Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang. OH THIS IS GOOD. China at the turn of the last century, where western imperialism and Christian missionaries are changing China rapidly for better and worse; in this graphic novel in two volumes, Little Bao and Four-Girl both get caught up on different sides of the conflict that becomes the Boxer Rebellion, both of them touched by the divine, neither of them powerful enough to transcend fate. Both of the main characters are strong and weak and noble and petty, and both sides are treated with both sympathy and scorn, but the message of the graphic novel isn't anything so simplistic as "both sides are sort of in the right" or "war is terrible for everybody." Stark and sad and beautiful, and maybe even better than American-Born Chinese in its explorations and complications of Chinese folklore?
Still reading: Hild by Nicola Griffith. This is historical fiction for people who like a lot of history in their historical fiction, rather than spunky second-wave feminists in pretty dresses. I do have a single semester of Old English under my belt, but that's as much as I know of pre-Norman England. I have to admit that, beautifully written as it is, the names and the liberal Old English vocabulary and the complicated tangles of power can be a bit of a slog to get through. (And it's a long book). But I try to just let go of what goes over my head and float along on the words, (and supplement a little of my history with Wikipedia.)
Just finished: Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang. OH THIS IS GOOD. China at the turn of the last century, where western imperialism and Christian missionaries are changing China rapidly for better and worse; in this graphic novel in two volumes, Little Bao and Four-Girl both get caught up on different sides of the conflict that becomes the Boxer Rebellion, both of them touched by the divine, neither of them powerful enough to transcend fate. Both of the main characters are strong and weak and noble and petty, and both sides are treated with both sympathy and scorn, but the message of the graphic novel isn't anything so simplistic as "both sides are sort of in the right" or "war is terrible for everybody." Stark and sad and beautiful, and maybe even better than American-Born Chinese in its explorations and complications of Chinese folklore?