Saturday, March 31, 2018

Março


  1. Carmen (2003)
  2. Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick
    • Hmm... I enjoyed reading about the five women, but I was looking much more for the history part of spinsterhood, and it was this point of interest that was covered in two paragraphs or thereabouts in the last chapter.
  3. Idomeneus by Soulpepper
    • What is the true story? What actually happened? The Truth is so slippery; all we get are versions of events and different perspectives, sometimes wildly different, until after we have combined all that we have heard, we are left ever more confused than before.
    • I was confused about the costumes, as they didn't reference ancient Greece at all, yet everything just worked. From the costumes to the voices speaking out, one after the other, to the dance at the very end, it all came together incredibly well.
  4. The Imaginary by A.F. Harrold, illustrated by Emily Gravett
    • You really grow to pity Mr. Bunting at the end, when he slurps up his own imaginary. The description of how it had felt to him - like eating his own hand, then his wrist, and so on till he swallowed himself - was so cold and so sad. I would've liked to see Amanda conjure up an imagination strong enough to defeat Mr. Bunting with her own power and wit, but I suppose good timing will just have to do. The reunion between Friday and Amanda's mother was a nice touch, how he, too, disappears in the end.
  5. You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein
    • Hilarious! And very relatable, as someone who spent much of my life avoiding what fell into my thinking as "stereotypically feminine". I kind of wish I listened to the audiobook version of this.
  6. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders, illustrated by Jill Enders
    • This is a fascinating subject, and I don't get why we don't talk about intestine-aches rather than stomachaches, or why it's so incredibly taboo to talk about what goes on in our gut, because that silence makes it so we don't even know how our stool is supposed to look! The section on the stool scale was delightful, as was the explanation of the bacteria that live in our guts. I kind of wish it was a bit more detailed, but this is a great introduction to the subject. Next on the list: Gulp: Adventures On the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach.
    • "Women's large intestines are generally slightly more lethargic than men's. Medical researchers have not yet discovered why this is so, but the greatest likelihood is that it has a hormonal cause" (p.92).
      • Does this have anything to do with how girls are socialized as well? Because earlier in the book, Enders says "If we suppress our need to go [sic] the toilet too often or for too long, our internal sphincter begins to feel browbeaten. In fact, we are able to reeducate it completely. That means the sphincter and the surrounding muscles have been disciplined so often by the external sphincter that they become cowed. If communication between the two sphincters breaks down completely, constipation can result" (pp.14-15).
    • Spoon theory in hormone format?
      • "Under normal circumstances, we synthesize the stress-response hormone CRF (corticotropin-releasing factor) in the morning, creating a supply to help face the challenges of the day. CRF helps us tap into energy reserves, prevents the immune system from overreacting, and helps our skin tan as a protective response to stress from sunlight. The brain can also inject an extra portion of CRF into the bloodstream if we find ourselves in a particularly upsetting situation" (p.103).
    • I just read this Quanta article, Why Don't Patients Get Sick in Sync?, a day or two before reading this passage in Gut, which reminded me of it, especially the image halfway through the article illustrating How Chance Shapes an Invasion
      • "This effect is known as colonization resistance. The majority of the microbes in our gut protect us simply by occupying spaces that would otherwise be free for harmful bacteria to colonize" (p.157).
  7. So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder
    • Maybe I should be worried that I connect with so many of these essays on a rather disturbingly deep level, by which I mean to say: I guess whatever pervasive sadness is in my life and whatever depressing thoughts I have no reason in particular to be thinking don't even belong to me. In a way, perhaps the situation is even worse than it once was: my constantly berating myself for not being perfect, whatever insecurities and flaws and foibles I have that I once thought were something that were mine, turned out to be much more in the line of me absorbing the zeitgeist around me - even in the most depressing version of myself I'm outed to be much more boring and mundane than I ever could have hoped! Is this something to be happy over? To mourn? I'm not too sure, but I suppose statistically speaking, chances were that I wasn't special.
  8. Love Warrior: A Memoir by Glennon Doyle Melton
    • I'm reading this and So Sad Today around the same time, and everything's sort of blurring together, but I relate to both of these authors' insecurities to a degree that makes me worry. And I don't think I'm particularly alone in this either; it's not like it's a special niche or anything where people are just super insecure and get panic attacks and don't feel like they can be a proper human being in this world at a given time - it kind of feels like it might be a huge number of people (millenials?).
  9. Wonder (2017)
    • There were a couple scenes where I almost cried, and while my tear ducts are significantly easier to persuade to overflow nowadays, that's still something. I was actually pretty taken with Jack's character and his development throughout the movie, especially the very real moments where he chooses to say callous things about Auggie in order to fit in with Julian's group. On the other hand, while I'm sympathetic to Auggie's self-centered personality in which everything revolves around him, and obviously his physical differences are the reason for literally everything, I kind of had to wonder whether I lived in much the same kind of bubble when I was 10.
  10. Black Panther (2018) x 2
  11. Animal Farm (Soulpepper)
    • The overall effect I got was that the play was funny and delivered on the message, but that Orwell's novel did a much better job. I was looking forward to the whole thing with Snowball, but that wasn't covered in as much detail in the play, and it felt at times that they focused too much on trying to be funny and getting the audience to laugh. I suppose part of that is because it's a satire and they wanted it to be a bit over the top in order to make sure that was obvious, but you get less a sense of the slow horror over the slippery slope down which Napolean & the farm went.
  12. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? by Alan Alda
    • This connects a lot with the rest of the self-help and Eastern philosophy area of our collections that tell you to be present in your surroundings, to fully let yourself be affected by what is going on around you and react to what is rather than blindly pushing forward based on what you would will it to be instead - to improv rather than follow the script mindlessly.
    • Nothing particularly life-changing in these pages for myself personally.
  13. Naoko by Keigo Higashino, translated by Kerim Yasar
    • This is such a bizarre premise: Heisuke's wife & daughter end up in an accident, and his wife dies, his daughter in a coma. Shortly after his wife dies, his daughter wakes up, but it's not his daughter's consciousness inside of her body - it's his wife, Naoko.
    • That ending really throws you for a loop! And throughout the entire novel, I feel as though the reader sympathizes with Naoko more than Heisuke overall, seeing where Heisuke's jealousy takes him. That being said, he does mature a bit at the absolute end, I guess? Kind of?
    • And I love that Heisuke basically brings it upon himself by doing the whole investigation thing and following up in his earnestness to get the full story.
  14. Paprika (2006)
    • Interesting concept - using technology to enter dreams and having the barrier between those who are awake and those who are asleep break down - and beautifully rendered. I'm not too sure how I feel about the resolution, to be honest, but I did enjoy watching it. Ibara no Ou (2009) also had a similar thing happen, where dreams or at least the imagination could have real impact on the real world, though they are very different movies.
    • For a moment, Tokita's vision about the beauty of sharing a dream came to life, though with a completely different outcome than he might have expected or wanted.
  15. Gulp: Adventures On the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
    • While there was quite a bit of overlap between Gulp & Gut, I do think the two should be read together and that they complement each other rather than render the other redundant. Roach's humour here is used to much better effect than in Stiff, in my opinion, probably aided by the 9 years that separate the two publications. Interestingly enough, Gulp came out in 2013 and Roach notes in the introduction that the disgust associated with talking about what goes on in the gut & the taboo surrounding talk about is byproducts "has worked in my favor. The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined. Authors have profiled the brain, the heart, the eyes, the skin, the penis and the female geography, event he hair, but never the gut. The pie hole and the feed chute are mine" (p.18). Two years later, in 2015, The Gut is published. Again, there's information in Gut that's not in Gulp and vice versa, so I'd say it's well worth reading both. Having done so in pretty quick succession, I can safely declare I wasn't bored reading Gulp even though I already knew a lot of the material from having read The Gut. And besides, the authors' enthusiasm over the gut is both palpable and infectious.
    • OMG. The possible origin of the fire-breathing dragon myths? Yes please! Find this on pps. 229-230, where Secor explains how the hydrogen buildup resulting from prey decomposition within the snake's stomach can exit through the mouth of a dead snake if someone, for example, steps on it, and if they further happen to be close to a campfire, this "breath" of hydrogen comes right out of the snake and bursts immediately into flame. Even better, "[t]he oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China: where the giant snakes are" (p.230).
  16. Una Mujer Fantastica (2017)
  17. Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure by Jeanette Angell
    • So... I was really hoping for something with a bit more substance than this. I guess less an "this is how I'm different from others who were working in the sex industry" (even aside from the streetwalker v.s. escort demarcation) and more something that actually took a look at what exactly the stereotypes are concerning prostitutes, exploring why they're problematic and debunking them (or not!) through the author's experiences. What we actually get with Callgirl is the feeling that Angell is probably a bit infatuated with herself and that she thinks she's smarter than all men (and probably you, dear reader) - there are quite a number of generalized comments about men as a whole that I really, really didn't care for. On the whole, completely disappointed. Maybe taking her class would've been a better alternative to reading her book?
    • Can we also talk about the spelling mistakes in here? As well as the poor flow throughout? Well I mean, that's about as much as I have to say on the topic, but it could really have used several rewrites.
  18. Nise: O Coracao da Loucura (2015)
  19. The Constant Gardener (2005)

Maybe saying that I'm "working on" these books isn't quite as true as saying I've opened them and I've started reading them, but some just aren't going to get done anytime soon.
  1. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt
    • Am I the only one who found the titular essay kind of halting and awkward?
  2. All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

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