My top 10 nonfiction reads of 2023 (the asterisked ones are in French with no translation as of yet) :
Belle Greene, Alexandra Lapierre
The Indomitable Marie-Antoinette, Simone Bertière
Reporter: A Memoir, Seymour Hersh
Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, Erich Schwartzel
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Keefe
Servir les riches, Alizée Delpierre*
La Comtesse Greffulhe : L’ombre des Guermantes, Laure Hillerin*
Le Courage de la nuance, Jean Birnbaum*
The Book Collectors of Daraya, Delphine Minoui
Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement, Hawon Jung
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ive been thinking abt pride related imagry since I finished In Stars and Time bc if canonically no one's seen colors in years then characters can't exactly express themselves with pride flags... would there be different illustrated symbols instead? handsigns? or even more types of symbology still in accounting for different countries and cultures? does siffrin hold the secret key to pride flags locked away in the country of memory hole????
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The thing about Miw's - idk how to put it - very 2010s brand of girl power is that it is such a front and such an epidermic reaction to being constantly sexualized and having no real recourse against that. Of course she's all "I'm not a bitch I'm THE bitch" and "eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man" and "men will be bewitched and hand over their wallets" ! She can't escape any of this shit so might as well spin things to make it about what she can do with it ! She doesn't want to feel or be perceived as powerless ever again.
And on the other side of that feeling is her constant emphasis on sisterhood, either real - with the other girls at the bar - or desperately wished for. That's what she appeals to in order to connect with the hotel manager, even though for this woman Miw is nothing compared to the freedom she's seeking. It's also what allows her to - however briefly - connect with Mae and sincerely apologize for the pain she caused her. Miw, unapologetic as a matter of principle (because Lean In, girl !) recognizes she hurt another woman even though she was only protecting herself and is truly, genuinely empathetic about it.
And even though 3 will be free is a love story, Miw "girls rules !" front partially being a response to her hard life isn't a transparent excuse to heal her with the love of a Good Man (that's the entire point of Luang's character). This is why her non-romantic relationship with Shin is so important ! It was never about a Bad Girl going Good for the love of an honest man, it's about a woman constantly having to deal with objectification - and being scolded and/or punished no matter how she does so - finally being seen as a full person, and loved both for her sharp edges and her soft ones.
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my aroace post got way more attention than I thought so I also just wanted to share that you don’t have to have sex. you don’t have to have romance. we have so much social coding around having The Same Major Experiences and Feelings but in truth, EVERYONE’S journey with love, intimacy, sex, romance, and care is different, and you can have deep, meaningful, beautiful connections with people without having sex or being in romantic love. you don’t have to have those experiences if you don’t want them or don’t feel ready for them. you also don’t have to have yourself Figured Out. If you aren’t sure you’re ace/aro/somewhere in between or outside, that’s cool. you’re on a journey. you’re at the right place in your journey, and the right people will support you and respect the boundaries around how you want to be loved and touched!
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Overall I think we could benefit from learning a distinction between "recognizing that there are genuine patterns of sex negativity and an ignorance of Our History among young people, because we live in an extremely repressive and sex-negative society that does not teach about Our History" and "as an adult, making fun of teenagers for posting online too much about things you think are 'cringey' and not enough about things you think are cool". If I'm being perfectly honest
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i still think that viewing stories as this unchangeable format is both like. the end and also this inevitable progression of narrative analysis btw. like let me try to explain.
on one spectrum, you have the whole. disney marvel movies Clickbait youtube videos "ENDING EXPLAINED" and all that shit. where everything is objective and the story is treated as a malevolent entity that just spawned one day with no explanation or anything. like go on twitter and you'll find a couple thousand guys who will laser-focus on like. something being "unrealistic". that mindset of "that would never happen in real life!" = therefore the story loses all merit. in their world, there is no team behind a story, no person making the decisions that led to each event and character, nobody is purposefully writing each line, and there's no significance to most of it. you take it all at face value, "what someone says is exactly what they mean", but apply that to an entire narrative.
and the other "end" (i dont think this is like. the Hightened Perfect way of engaging with anything. i'm just fond of it) is treating the story, both the base fiction itself and the circumstances around its creation, as a full package. parts of a story that may be narratively unsatisfying, or that may be a result of bad writing or lackluster foresight, are a part of that story. it allows it to be both the original, and both a potential examination and sort of..."secondary" (?) narrative of sorts, that focuses more on a reflection of storytelling as a whole, and how we use the medium + what we can get out of it. or just an unintentional but Always-There Story about Storytelling.
for instance, if something you've been enjoying falls off at the end, if the writer struggles to pull all the pieces together, and what was once a Beloved Tale that you deeply adored just kinda....falls apart, that's still a story. it doesn't really lose the significance it had to you, that significance is turned into frustration; an upset at the lack of a satisfying conclusion. i'm not saying this shit doesn't suck, it fucking does, we all like good endings, or at least satisfying ones. but in providing the reader that frustration, i'd argue that still allows significance. there is still something being told, but maybe that story itself is of a more meta variety. in pulling it apart and viewing it from different angle, i think theres more opportunities to take potentially "passable" works, and grant them more significance. because even if that lack of a perfect ending was an unintentional fault on the writer's side, it still made you feel things, and it was a part of the story, in the end.
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