Reading not-Wednessday 18/08
Aug. 18th, 2022 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read Well, recently-ish, last couple of months, anyway.
The Orchard by Yochi Brandes. (c) 2011 Yochi Brandes, translated Daniel Libenson, Pub Gefen Publishing House 2017, ISBN 978-965-229-930-7. This was recommended by ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
TheRaDR whose online Torah seminar I've been following. I gave it to cjwatson for chanukah and after he read it he wanted to talk about it, which is always a good sign, so I borrowed it back.
The Orchard is a novelized biography of R' Akiva. It has some very interesting positions on the creation of post-Temple rabbinic Judaism, it's not perfect but it's cool that it exists.
Definitely The Orchard is a nerd book for nerds, it was lots of fun playing spot the famous Talmud story and seeing the famous sages on the page. Brandes attempts to make the various important sages of the Mishnaic era into vivid characters with personalities as in a modern psychological novel; I think she's only partially successful in this but I definitely enjoyed the attempt.
The story is narrated not directly from Akiva's viewpoint but from that of his wife Rachel. Rachel is portrayed as very bitter about being disowned by her father for marrying for love, and then abandoned by Akiva so that he can focus on Torah study. Which is fine, I don't mind an unsympathetic narrator, and it seems all too plausible that Rachel's life was actually pretty grim as opposed to the usual romantic notions about the starcrossed match between the beautiful rich girl and the illiterate shepherd who turns out to be a great Torah scholar. But by the end, Rachel's defeatist attitude of, who cares, life is misery and pain anyway, made it harder for the reader to care either. That only underlined the usual problem with historical novels that the ending is already known.
The Orchard is very strong on the literally existential crisis of needing to reinvent Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, and establishing that Torah study can be a solid foundation for religion but also needing to decide what approaches to the text are valid. Very cool portrayals of the real generational conflict between the school of Shammai and the Hillel faction which eventually dominated, as well as the tension between intellectualism and mysticism exemplified by the famous story of Akhnai's oven. And all of this going on against the background of the Roman occupation. My favourite part was a description of the first post-Temple Passover Seder, based heavily on the midrash quoted in the Haggadah but with a really clever spin on it.
Now, you might or might not believe that the parallel development of Pauline Christianity was important to the development of rabbinic Judaism. Brandes takes an awkward compromise, which is that she introduces Paul as a character, claiming that he is a relative of R' Eliezer, and has a big chunk about Christianity about a third of the way through the book. But then all mention of Paul and the early Christians is dropped, such that the Bar Kochba revolt is portrayed as purely a conflict between Jews and occupying pagan Romans, with the cross-connections to Christianity completely vanished.
The famous mystical journey into the Orchard by R' Akiva and his three unfortunate companions is of course the title of the book, but it's handled in a really strange way, looking at the effects on female relatives rather than the actual encounter. This is perhaps a way to dodge the question of whether Akiva really directly met God, but it makes the episode seem somehow weirdly detached from the rest of the story.
Basically The Orchard is patchy. It does some things very well and misses the mark in some ways, so I would probably cautiously recommend it if you are interested in first century rabbinic Judaism.
your blue-eyed boys by ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
lalaietha. I read this because I was away for a week during the extreme heatwave, and I hadn't brought many books with me because I intended to do fun tourist things but then it turned out it was too hot to do anything except sit on the beach and read. Thanks to sfred for reminding me about this series.
YBEB is basically fic of Captain America: The Winter Solider written by someone who knows quite a lot about trauma recovery. Lots of my friends are huge fans of the series, and I procrastinated on reading it because although I admire Feather's writing a lot, I am really uninterested in MCU. Anyway, yes, this is just as good as everybody says it is, I really love the characterization, and the commitment to taking the 'hurt' part of hurt/comfort seriously, and there's great snark and banter and it's really pacey and the sex scenes are as well written as the rest of it. I read all the main storyline up to the absolutely brilliant ending of daylight could be so violent. So yes, really glad I did get round to reading this after all.
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. (c) 2021 Xi Ran Zhao, Pub Rock The Boat 2022, ISBN 978-0-86154-209-3. This was a present from ghoti_mhic_uait and I'd heard lots of big hype, and was excited to get to it. It's definitely unputdownable, but in the end I concluded that it's id-fic for someone with a very different id from mine.
I totally love the premise of a young alt-universe rural Chinese woman who turns out to be the greatest mecha pilot ever, and how she defeats the patriarchy to become the Empress. And I very much enjoyed having a love triangle which is actually triangular. I got the impression that Zhao was very, very annoyed with The Hunger Games and I do sympathize on that point.
What didn't work for me was that the portrayal of Zetian as ruthless just goes way too far. I was happy to cheer for her smashing and stabbing her way through mediocre and spoiled young men, but the book starts at a hugely melodramatic pitch and they only way it can go from there is to have Zetian commit increasingly gratuitous and gory acts of violence. Iron Widow breaks my rule about the good guys achieving their aims by torture. I absolutely think there is space in the world for a heroine who seriously is kick-ass and is out for revenge not just against those who have hurt her but against everybody who holds power as a result of patriarchal advantage. And I can imagine many frustrated teenagers struggling with the unfairness of the system would enjoy the power fantasy. But I felt more and more thrown out of the book's failure to make any kind of moral sense; it keeps escalating the awfulness of the acts committed by the many many bad guys in order to justify Zetian's bloodthirsty revenge, and after a while I just stopped caring.
Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. (c) 2017 VanderMeer Creative Inc, Pub 4th Estate 2017, ISBN 978-0-00-815917-7. I received Borne in a book-swap organized by ghoti_mhic_uait a few years ago, and kept being put off reading it because the setting is very crapsack world post-apocalypse. But when I did in fact sit down and read all the way through on a long train journey, I was glad I did, and I feel that the book-swap achieved its aim of bringing something to my attention that I wouldn't have picked up spontaneously.
Borne is yet another book with a heroine called Rachel! It's very imaginative and immersive in its portrayal of the world destroyed by implied climate disaster compounded by runaway "biotech". It is more horror than science fiction; there is absolutely no attempt at an explanation of how the semi-alive, semi-ultratechnological creatures work, and I think that's the right choice because there's a strong sense of numinous and nothing concrete to quibble with. Borne is absolutely brilliantly weird, and that's the real strength of the book.
The setting is indeed very depressing, but it's balanced by Rachel being very human and believable, not in a kind of perfect innocent untouched by the misery around her way, but as someone who is engaged in a constant struggle to survive while just clinging on to whatever humanity she can muster. She certainly does "bad" things but it's also very clear that she has no good moral options. And there is a lot of violence, more than I usually enjoy, but the descriptions don't feel voyeuristic.
The epic conflict between Mord and Borne, and the small-scale human relationship between Rachel and Wick, are balanced really well. There's a lot of dramatic stuff that happens but it almost feels more like a collection of incidents than a plot, but rather than being annoyed at the lack of structure, I felt like it was a really good portrayal of the chaotic life of scavengers fighting monsters after the collapse of civilization. I am not sure I would have liked the book better if the ending was downbeat, but the somewhat hopeful ending didn't really seem to be very connected to the rest.
cjwatson for chanukah and after he read it he wanted to talk about it, which is always a good sign, so I borrowed it back. The Orchard is a novelized biography of R' Akiva. It has some very interesting positions on the creation of post-Temple rabbinic Judaism, it's not perfect but it's cool that it exists.
Definitely The Orchard is a nerd book for nerds, it was lots of fun playing spot the famous Talmud story and seeing the famous sages on the page. Brandes attempts to make the various important sages of the Mishnaic era into vivid characters with personalities as in a modern psychological novel; I think she's only partially successful in this but I definitely enjoyed the attempt.
The story is narrated not directly from Akiva's viewpoint but from that of his wife Rachel. Rachel is portrayed as very bitter about being disowned by her father for marrying for love, and then abandoned by Akiva so that he can focus on Torah study. Which is fine, I don't mind an unsympathetic narrator, and it seems all too plausible that Rachel's life was actually pretty grim as opposed to the usual romantic notions about the starcrossed match between the beautiful rich girl and the illiterate shepherd who turns out to be a great Torah scholar. But by the end, Rachel's defeatist attitude of, who cares, life is misery and pain anyway, made it harder for the reader to care either. That only underlined the usual problem with historical novels that the ending is already known.
The Orchard is very strong on the literally existential crisis of needing to reinvent Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, and establishing that Torah study can be a solid foundation for religion but also needing to decide what approaches to the text are valid. Very cool portrayals of the real generational conflict between the school of Shammai and the Hillel faction which eventually dominated, as well as the tension between intellectualism and mysticism exemplified by the famous story of Akhnai's oven. And all of this going on against the background of the Roman occupation. My favourite part was a description of the first post-Temple Passover Seder, based heavily on the midrash quoted in the Haggadah but with a really clever spin on it.
Now, you might or might not believe that the parallel development of Pauline Christianity was important to the development of rabbinic Judaism. Brandes takes an awkward compromise, which is that she introduces Paul as a character, claiming that he is a relative of R' Eliezer, and has a big chunk about Christianity about a third of the way through the book. But then all mention of Paul and the early Christians is dropped, such that the Bar Kochba revolt is portrayed as purely a conflict between Jews and occupying pagan Romans, with the cross-connections to Christianity completely vanished.
The famous mystical journey into the Orchard by R' Akiva and his three unfortunate companions is of course the title of the book, but it's handled in a really strange way, looking at the effects on female relatives rather than the actual encounter. This is perhaps a way to dodge the question of whether Akiva really directly met God, but it makes the episode seem somehow weirdly detached from the rest of the story.
Basically The Orchard is patchy. It does some things very well and misses the mark in some ways, so I would probably cautiously recommend it if you are interested in first century rabbinic Judaism.
sfred for reminding me about this series.YBEB is basically fic of Captain America: The Winter Solider written by someone who knows quite a lot about trauma recovery. Lots of my friends are huge fans of the series, and I procrastinated on reading it because although I admire Feather's writing a lot, I am really uninterested in MCU. Anyway, yes, this is just as good as everybody says it is, I really love the characterization, and the commitment to taking the 'hurt' part of hurt/comfort seriously, and there's great snark and banter and it's really pacey and the sex scenes are as well written as the rest of it. I read all the main storyline up to the absolutely brilliant ending of daylight could be so violent. So yes, really glad I did get round to reading this after all.
ghoti_mhic_uait and I'd heard lots of big hype, and was excited to get to it. It's definitely unputdownable, but in the end I concluded that it's id-fic for someone with a very different id from mine. I totally love the premise of a young alt-universe rural Chinese woman who turns out to be the greatest mecha pilot ever, and how she defeats the patriarchy to become the Empress. And I very much enjoyed having a love triangle which is actually triangular. I got the impression that Zhao was very, very annoyed with The Hunger Games and I do sympathize on that point.
What didn't work for me was that the portrayal of Zetian as ruthless just goes way too far. I was happy to cheer for her smashing and stabbing her way through mediocre and spoiled young men, but the book starts at a hugely melodramatic pitch and they only way it can go from there is to have Zetian commit increasingly gratuitous and gory acts of violence. Iron Widow breaks my rule about the good guys achieving their aims by torture. I absolutely think there is space in the world for a heroine who seriously is kick-ass and is out for revenge not just against those who have hurt her but against everybody who holds power as a result of patriarchal advantage. And I can imagine many frustrated teenagers struggling with the unfairness of the system would enjoy the power fantasy. But I felt more and more thrown out of the book's failure to make any kind of moral sense; it keeps escalating the awfulness of the acts committed by the many many bad guys in order to justify Zetian's bloodthirsty revenge, and after a while I just stopped caring.
ghoti_mhic_uait a few years ago, and kept being put off reading it because the setting is very crapsack world post-apocalypse. But when I did in fact sit down and read all the way through on a long train journey, I was glad I did, and I feel that the book-swap achieved its aim of bringing something to my attention that I wouldn't have picked up spontaneously.Borne is yet another book with a heroine called Rachel! It's very imaginative and immersive in its portrayal of the world destroyed by implied climate disaster compounded by runaway "biotech". It is more horror than science fiction; there is absolutely no attempt at an explanation of how the semi-alive, semi-ultratechnological creatures work, and I think that's the right choice because there's a strong sense of numinous and nothing concrete to quibble with. Borne is absolutely brilliantly weird, and that's the real strength of the book.
The setting is indeed very depressing, but it's balanced by Rachel being very human and believable, not in a kind of perfect innocent untouched by the misery around her way, but as someone who is engaged in a constant struggle to survive while just clinging on to whatever humanity she can muster. She certainly does "bad" things but it's also very clear that she has no good moral options. And there is a lot of violence, more than I usually enjoy, but the descriptions don't feel voyeuristic.
The epic conflict between Mord and Borne, and the small-scale human relationship between Rachel and Wick, are balanced really well. There's a lot of dramatic stuff that happens but it almost feels more like a collection of incidents than a plot, but rather than being annoyed at the lack of structure, I felt like it was a really good portrayal of the chaotic life of scavengers fighting monsters after the collapse of civilization. I am not sure I would have liked the book better if the ending was downbeat, but the somewhat hopeful ending didn't really seem to be very connected to the rest.
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Date: 2022-08-18 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-08-19 08:19 am (UTC)