tastes

maybe i just don't know women very well, but i was most surprised that su-lin pulled this off the shelf for me to read. it's a classic, well, boys book, raw, testosterone-charged, even mildly homoerotic. it ends more like an episode of the sopranos than a chapter of the hardy boys, and though i can't say i disliked it...su-lin? whatever happened to sugar and spice and all things nice?

if you recall, i told minz a few months ago that i thought pat mckillip's riddlemaster trilogy was a work that would be appreciated more by guys than girls. that idea was very quickly shot down, so if i get loud protests about my take on cormier, perhaps the conclusion is that i'm a bigot. isn't it true, though, that many children's books are gender-targeted? not just because writers feel they need to fulfil some unspoken social contract to maintain the gender identities of the next generation, but out of commercial necessity as well -- parents like clear-cut choices for their kids, I think: GI Joes and Barbies and all that.

or are Humans people genderless when it comes to taste in literature because we grew up reading everything? i kind of like that notion: transcending the social construct to appreciate something as it is. conveniently 21st century as well: no barriers, no lenses, just the snowy whiteness of objectivity.


i do like being recommended books -- there's a very different pleasure in picking a good book off the shelf and reading one because someone you know passes it off to you. the exercise then is not just 'why did i like it', but 'why did the other person like it', and if (s)he is someone you care about, that can be insight worth having.

Currently reading:
In Babylon - Marcel Moring