reading wednesday
Apr. 1st, 2021 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boxofdelights• What are you reading?
Radical Belonging, by Lindo Bacon.
I am having the same problem with this book that I had with Burnout. They keep saying stuff like, "I can find and create safe environments where I can shed my armor, where I can be seen, and where I can feel love and belonging. This last point is key: It's belonging rather than self-love that helps me live as my authentic self. This is not a solo journey." And I wonder, what if self-love is all I've got? I don't have a partner or a best friend anymore. I haven't been able to create that kind of intimacy, of knowing and being known, and being loved anyway, with anyone else. But I would like to keep on living as my authentic self anyway.
It feels, ironically, like talking to a doctor who insists that my fat has to be solved before any of my other problems can be addressed. Even if you were right that this is the real problem, you don't know how to solve it and neither do I. So can we talk about what else I can do to improve my quality of life?
• What did you recently finish reading?
The Brontes Went to Woolworths, by Rachel Ferguson.
This is a novel about fannishness, published in 1931. Deirdre is a journalist and an aspiring novelist; Katrine is an aspiring actress. Together with their younger sister and their mother, they make up stories about their childhood playthings, their pets, fictional characters, public figures, and interesting-looking strangers. They seem to have been doing it all their lives, and don't see why they should stop just because they are adults now. Some of the reviews on Goodreads describe this as mental illness, or a symptom of grief at the death of their father, but it all sounds like ordinary fannishness to me.
"Three years ago I was proposed to. I couldn't accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes. For Holmes and his personality and his brain I had a force of feeling which, for the time, converted living men to shadows."
It is all there: the obsessive nature of having a crush, and the dullness of not having one. The anguish of seeing the object of one's adoration do something unworthy. The rage fannishness can provoke in people who are not fannish. The extremely odd experience of beginning a real friendship with someone who has figured in your stories.
And then there are ghosts. Because "creations like Saffy don't snuff out, do they? […] They'll never die, old darling. You see, they've made something that's going to go on--for everybody, not only for us."
• What do you think you’ll read next?
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, for Tawanda book group.
Radical Belonging, by Lindo Bacon.
I am having the same problem with this book that I had with Burnout. They keep saying stuff like, "I can find and create safe environments where I can shed my armor, where I can be seen, and where I can feel love and belonging. This last point is key: It's belonging rather than self-love that helps me live as my authentic self. This is not a solo journey." And I wonder, what if self-love is all I've got? I don't have a partner or a best friend anymore. I haven't been able to create that kind of intimacy, of knowing and being known, and being loved anyway, with anyone else. But I would like to keep on living as my authentic self anyway.
It feels, ironically, like talking to a doctor who insists that my fat has to be solved before any of my other problems can be addressed. Even if you were right that this is the real problem, you don't know how to solve it and neither do I. So can we talk about what else I can do to improve my quality of life?
• What did you recently finish reading?
The Brontes Went to Woolworths, by Rachel Ferguson.
This is a novel about fannishness, published in 1931. Deirdre is a journalist and an aspiring novelist; Katrine is an aspiring actress. Together with their younger sister and their mother, they make up stories about their childhood playthings, their pets, fictional characters, public figures, and interesting-looking strangers. They seem to have been doing it all their lives, and don't see why they should stop just because they are adults now. Some of the reviews on Goodreads describe this as mental illness, or a symptom of grief at the death of their father, but it all sounds like ordinary fannishness to me.
"Three years ago I was proposed to. I couldn't accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes. For Holmes and his personality and his brain I had a force of feeling which, for the time, converted living men to shadows."
It is all there: the obsessive nature of having a crush, and the dullness of not having one. The anguish of seeing the object of one's adoration do something unworthy. The rage fannishness can provoke in people who are not fannish. The extremely odd experience of beginning a real friendship with someone who has figured in your stories.
And then there are ghosts. Because "creations like Saffy don't snuff out, do they? […] They'll never die, old darling. You see, they've made something that's going to go on--for everybody, not only for us."
• What do you think you’ll read next?
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, for Tawanda book group.