meghan rose allen

Another quick poetry read. The poems aren’t densely packed and many of the sentiments expressed within are fairly emo-teen-poetry. They’re a step-up from that, but let’s just say not a huge step. Still, for the most part, I enjoyed reading this. It wasn’t too taxing. I could see giving it to a tween/teenage girl, and said tween/teenage girl swooning at some of the lines (but you left giant / blackberry bruises / all over /
my soul.). As a non-teenager, I occasionally rolled my eyes at a few lines, but then there’d be a clever line or an interesting title (italicized at the end, so the opposite of title I guess, end-tle) and I’d be able to ignore the overwroughtness and keep on going.

I can hope for the growth of Lovelace’s talent. The seeds are there.

the princess saves herself in this one by Amanda Lovelace went on sale February 14, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Comics and poetry are my mental palate-cleanser when I finish a book late at night and don’t want to start anything too taxing before sleep. So I finished The Gene last night at nine, and then turned to Manga Classics: Jane Eyre for my reading-time sorbet. I’ve read the real Jane Eyre, way way back in high school. At the time, I swooned. Now, maybe a bit more world-weary, I recognize that there’s a lot of worrisome bits in Jane Eyre: if a friend were to tell me that her new boyfriend was already married and kept his wife locked in the attic but really really loves her (the friend, not the wife), I would be like Uuuuhhhhh. Even ignoring the more prurient bits, let’s not forget Rochester’s behaviour, like pretending to be in love with someone else to make Jane jealous and fall in love with him, which is not really romantic as much as creepily manipulative. And what exactly is the allure of Rochester? He seems like a mercurial jerk, always bossing Jane about and alternating being friendly with being cold. That and having read Wide Sargasso Sea within the last year has erased any memories of earlier Jane Eyre swooning; likely if Geoff locked me in the attic and then went off to marry a governess, I’d try to burn his house down too. Through a post-modern, feminist lens, Jane Eyre, manga or not, has a lot of problematic bits.

But Manga Classics: Jane Eyre does have this: some of the panels are drawn chibi style and they are sooooooooooo cute. It seems all aspects of my feminist-self can be co-opted by chibi drawings. And then I start to swoon.

No, I tell myself. Don’t do it. Rochester is a dick. Manipulative, lying, and way too tall.

Chibis!

Chibis cannot make up for the warning signs of an abusive partner.

CHIBIS!

I am not going to throw away my principles because of awwww they are so cute so so so so so so cute.

Chibis?

Chibis.

Chibis.

Basically, this is Jane Eyre with a few panels drawn as chibis and my mind ceases to function because chibis and I fail at feminist literary criticism.

Manga Classics: Jane Eyre went on sale November 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

As per the author’s comment, I stand corrected re: the use of comic sans font. It is humour sans font. My bad.

Plus it’s been over a week and I still remember some of the physics so score! I is learning good 🙂

After finishing a book about illegal Israeli settlements, I picked up my iPad and figured Hey, a book about cosmology won’t be too taxing. I have a scientific mind with a math background. I’ll be done this one faster than the inflationary period following the Big Bang.

… a week later …

Physics is hard and my brain hurts! There’s a reason I went into pure rather than applied mathematics. Applied stuff is just so dependent on seemingly arbitrary constants, which, kinda, is what A Fortunate Universe is all about — varying seemingly little things (like slight gravitational things in quarks or how electrons do electrony things), and bam life over. Well, more like life-never-begun since most of the changes happen in the initial conditions of Big Band Land. As long as you’re willing to believe Lewis and Barnes because they are physicists and (likely) you are not, the changes they propose give the consequences they suggest, since the maths (likely long and involving many DEs and renormalizations) are not included. So most of the book reads like “Change the spin of something and then hydrogen can’t combine into heavier elements, so then there is no carbon, and then no us.” And then there are random faux-conversations between Lewis and Barnes (including a fifty page one) to make the book more Socratic I suppose? As well as many supposedly endearing and cutesy footnotes to make sure we know that just because they are physicists, they aren’t robots. Oh, and this:

Jerry Gergich: “Because I think comic sans always screams fun.”

Many of the figures and equations in A Fortunate Universe are written in comic sans to make math more approachable or something. My eyes bleed.

So I learned lots of physics this week. Or I think I did. I realized I may have been mixing up photons and protons in my brain for a while, so that was helpful. And I appreciated how multiverses were presented (even if this was in the fifty page faux conversation): that they could be out there, but at such a distance that we can’t currently see them, and moving away from us (or us from them) so that we will never see them. So all the universes could be out there, but like discrete dots we can never reach or see. I’d never thought of multiverses like that before.

A Fortunate Universe by Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes went on sale November 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really waffled on how to rate this book. Can some books just not have to be rated? Can they exist outside some sort of rating spectrum? For here we have the memoirs of an Austrian, Jewish, man forced to flee to France after the Anschluss, then subjected to more persecutions, first the micro-aggression pas d’histories attitude he encounters in many of his interactions in French, and then further macro-aggressive Nazi awfulness once the Nazis invade France. Through a combination of good fortune and hard work by members of the French Resistance, Scheyer, his wife, and his non-Jewish housekeeper (who chooses to throw her lot in with the Scheyer’s rather than reap the “benefits” of her Aryaness), survive the Nazi regime in France, but not after some close calls and some internments in French concentration camps.

So that’s why I have trouble rating it. I can’t say I enjoyed reading about how awful human beings can be to each other (and possibly, since my last netgalley book was about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, I need to pick some lighter ARC reads), and I can’t say that, either emotionally or stylistically, the memoir made me feel anything, say in the vein of Suite Française, which details some of the same events, such as the occupation and fleeing of Paris. Of course Asylum obviously isn’t a book written with a purpose of giving me the feels or entertaining me or anyone else. It’s not even written with the intent of educating anyone. It’s testimony, but it’s dry and a bit dated, and Scheyer isn’t that likeable, which actually may be the book’s strongest point. When told that he should be suitably grateful, suitably thankful, suitably happy about his release from concentration camps, you can feel his anger and despair burble up to the surface. Why should he be happy, when it’s just a trick of luck and connections that got him free? Why should he be happy most of society did nothing and will likely do nothing again if the Nazis and French sympathizers round him up again? Why should he be happy when the call of the day is it’s only the Jews? That, that anger and displeasure, will be what I take away from this memoir, in a time when there are calls for certain groups not to be so angry, not to be so strident, not to be so other, just to be like “us” and wait your turn and smile at all the atrocities, big and small, perpetrated by the strong against the weak. Sit down, shut up, don’t complain, always smile. Yeah, that worked out so well in the past.

Anger, when we see injustice, is good. Anger is what we need. Thank you Asylum for reminding me of that.

Asylum by Moriz Scheyer went on sale September 27, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind — Edward Gibbon

Don’t read it over the holidays. It’s too grim — Former ACT UP member when I said I was going to read the book over the holidays

And yeah, it is grim. In fact, it is more than a whole thesaurus-entry full of words synonymous with grim. Everyone dies, basically. Needlessly, both in hindsight and also in actual at-the-time fact. It’s almost like bearing witness, reading this book. I lost track of who some of the people were, but that hardly mattered. This document exists now, but it’s hard to say what to do with it. It won’t bring anyone back. It isn’t to offer absolution. Just witness. Like a writing down of an oral history.

France weaves his own story of a gay man in 1970s/80s/90s New York throughout. It’s done deftly, unlike me writing this paragraph, his insertions. Obviously, he didn’t die, as all the others around him did.

Then it ends. With protease inhibitors abruptly. It feels like being dragged through trials of Greek-mythic proportions and then stop. The lack of resolution stings, but not as much as all the senseless deaths.

How to Survive a Plague by David France went on sale November 29, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.