Sylvia Chi
A fascinating read on raising, preparing, and eating turkeys, rabbits and pigs on an “urban farm” in Oakland.
I got this book hoping there would be more about the more vegetarian-friendly aspects of urban farming. There wasn't very much said about raising chickens for eggs or growing vegetables generally. It also did not change my mind about not eating animals. It did, however, convince me that I am not up for raising bees after all.
My two biggest problems with the book: (1) it's just generally badly written. Carpenter throws in quotes from other books like she's writing a college term paper and has to meet a word count requirement. She writes sentences like this: “Inside, cradled by white plastic, lay a liver the size of a placenta.” The size of what? Oh, a placenta! Thanks, that helps.
(2) She does that thing white people do where other white people are described without physical description, but with the underlying default assumption that they are white; non-white people are conspicuously the only ones who ever get a physical description. One notable exception is Sheila, the butcher, who is uncharitably described as looking like a “prostitute.” That just rubbed me the wrong way.
Otherwise, it is interesting to read about what goes into raising, killing, and preparing animals to be eaten.
Pacing is ridiculous, especially the ending. Could make a great movie but I don't trust Gary Ross et al to do it competently.
Cybernetics, geodesic domes, the WELL, the start of Wired, and everything else awesome. This book made me briefly consider going to grad school to write its sequel as a dissertation.
Environmental politics were so different back in the '70s. I wish there was some kind of contemporary version of this.
So good! I was amazed how well it matches the tone and spirit of the animated show. It seems to fit in, plot-wise, after Season 2.
I felt like this was the opposite of a thriller. It was a total slog to get through and very little happened plot-wise. I did not pick up a Tana French book looking for paragraphs of meditations on woodworking or what the Irish countryside looks like (it does sound very lovely). On the plus side, there were some interesting themes about morality and small town life.
If Goodreads allowed it, I'd rate this as like a 3.8/5 stars.
The ideas were really fascinating and quite deeply thought out, and will be stuck in my mind for a long time, like the best episodes of Black Mirror. Chiang is really good at imagining how people would interact with speculative technologies in an networked society. However, a few of the stories were much longer than necessary, and not well paced. Characters generally felt pretty flat, as if they were present just to support the story's central conceit.
That bit about Taiwanese immigrants loving to sing John Denver for karaoke is A+ authenticity.
Somewhat uneven. I had read a couple of these stories in the New Yorker and Zoetrope, and on re-reading them, those are still as brilliant as I originally thought. The titular story is also brilliant. But some of the other stories are a little disappointing, if only because I had such high expectations. Overall a great read though, and I'm excited to read more from this author.
Everyone should read this. And there needs to be a popular education campaign for this targeted at politicians.
There were many parts of this book that I found problematic (the absurdly flat, semi-misogynistically-written female characters; the incoherent critique of television) but could have chalked up to interesting ambiguities until I read the Afterword and Coda by the author, who turns out to have written this polemic/parable as an ill-considered response to criticism (you know, censorship by women's-libbers and homosexuals) and new media.
Otherwise, Bradbury is clearly a virtuosic writer in a showoffy way, but the story pacing and structure is pretty strained. Although Captain Beatty is a pretty terrifically villainous bad guy.
It was very interesting to read this right after Transcendent Kingdom. Both novels deal with diasporic narratives, mother-daughter relationships, and (folk) religion. Curiously, they both recounted an anecdote based on the apparent myth that a mother bird will abandon her baby bird if she smells the scent of a strange human on it.
Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of a neuroscientist who strikes me as particularly cerebral and less attuned to her heart and spirit (perhaps at the root of her conflicts) - a perspective I appreciate and resonate with, although I think that could have been drawn out more in the story. I read a couple articles and interviews with K-Ming Chang, the author of Bestiary, who talks about how her stories are “completely embodied.” This contrast between embodiment and cerebral-ness is really interesting to me.
Bestiary is unusual in its angle on magical realism; the characters take the magic that manifests in their lives and is the main propelling force in the narrative for granted, even when it's bizarre or grisly, and often disgusting. I feel like this is a way of showing how they integrate their folk religious beliefs, which for me is a refreshing change from more commonly represented perspectives and experiences of religion or spiritual beliefs. At the same time, this focus made it challenging for me (a more cerebral type) to really understand the characters in Bestiary. A lot of the embodiment - the physicality, bodily functions, and sexual desire - was off-putting, and not relatable or even very recognizable to me.
Like the author, I am Taiwanese on my mother's side and mainland Chinese on my father's, so I very much appreciate reading a Taiwanese narrative that provides an Indigenous perspective and is not centered on the mainland.
I really thought this book was going to discuss the question in the title. Instead, it's mostly about how U.S. policy and culture aren't ideal with regard to parenting, which was not news to me.
This book is great to read as a companion to your 1L property and contracts classes. Unfortunately, my property class skipped the section on fee tail so I was a bit confused about the whole entailment fiasco. Aside from law, I also learned that perhaps the only thing more refreshing than taking a turn around the room is taking a turn in the shrubbery.
Terribly written on every level. Characters and plot were unbelievable, one note, and tiresome. Extremely contrived composition shtick (“before” and “after”) that did not serve any purpose in telling the story. Not a plot twist or suspenseful moment in the whole damn thing, nor an interesting or likable character to root for.
Sentences and paragraphs were clobbered together. The author does not know the meaning of several words that she chose to use anyway, especially when they sound hoity-toity (e.g., “The doctor and I decided amongst ourselves that we would increase her sessions to two times per week.” You mean “between,” there are only two people involved, and P.S., you're not British.) The writing was distractingly bad throughout.
