Currently reading
Feb. 7th, 2025 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grrlpup- Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992 by Paula Yoon, 2024. Nonfiction, marketed as YA but reads like adult nonfiction with meticulous detail and sourcing. I remember the Rodney King case and protests, but barely, as I was absorbed with the final semester of college and graduation, no regular TV exposure. The additional context of LA’s Korean community and the Latasha Harlins case was unfamiliar. This book treats every person with respect and explains complex background and contributing factors, with lots of quotes and photos from then and now.
The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, 2025 Edition. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I used to check out the Pushcart Prize volumes from the public library. I don’t think my library carried any of the small-press and literary magazines the poems and stories came from. All I knew was there was some weird shit in there and it wasn’t like reading other books and magazines. Friends, it is still good, and still gives me a feeling of something unfiltered coming from the minds of individual people that is a balm right now. I thought I would skip a lot more than I have.
- The Country of the Blind, by Andrew Leland, 2023, audiobook read by the author. I’m not very far in this one, although I think I previously read an excerpt I haven’t gotten to yet, about his training at Colorado Center for the Blind. Leland has retinitis pigmentosa and learned as a teenager that his sight would deteriorate drastically over the coming decades. I’m sometimes iffy on memoirs that alternate the author’s experience with related instructional anecdotes about people in other times and places, but so far this one’s working for me.
- Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1996. Sanguinity is reading this to me, usually while I’m cooking or preparing to cook. I like this one– mystery is a better genre for me than military SF. I enjoy Ivan, Illyan, and Galeni, and there’s even a few look-ins from Cordelia.
This post originates at everyday though not every day. Comments welcome here or there.
I treasure Andrew Leland's book
Date: 2025-02-07 11:06 pm (UTC)...because I used to be very involved in the blind community (as a sighted contributor to braille/large-print/text-to-speech word processing software), and Leland does an outstanding job of synthesizing history. The instructional anecdotes are on point--and even I learned something from them. His personal experience of the slow slide into blindness is common, and a dramatic counterpoint to the stereotype of the no-vision-at-all blind person which is actually rare. (For extra points, when a blind person appears in cartoons or tv, notice they're using both a dog and a cane, which is highly unusual but probably correctly assesses the sensitivity of your average person to blindness signifiers.)
Yoon's book sounds fascinating! Does she include lessons learned?
Re: I treasure Andrew Leland's book
Date: 2025-02-10 12:51 am (UTC)Rising from the Ashes mostly stuck close to individuals' experiences, which paradoxically made me feel how systemic the underlying problems were, because it was clear what available information and prior experience each person had. In the last chapters I did feel a striving toward lessons learned, mostly more relationships and community ties among all the groups sharing space. Which I felt left out some factors, e.g. gun control, but it was nevertheless a powerful book.
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Date: 2025-02-08 01:09 am (UTC)I took classes here in eyeball school! SO AMAZING! I learned with sleep shades on how to type on the braille typewriter and how to cross the road as a blind person and I'm sure many other things but it was awhile ago.
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Date: 2025-02-10 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-08 04:21 am (UTC)I love that.
You sent me off to put some volumes on hold at the library and I discovered the Pushcart Prize is younger than I thought --- I mean, 1976 is still a longish time ago, but I guess Pushcart made me think of 1920s fruit vendors.
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Date: 2025-02-10 12:55 am (UTC)