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Wednesday reading round-up
Mar. 15th, 2023 11:27 amA Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
In which a group of libertarians attempt to take over a small town in New Hampshire and turn it into a low-government paradise. The result? Bears.
Only not really, because the bears were a problem before the libertarians turned up, and in fact, the resident who most encouraged the bears (by feeding them grain and doughnuts) doesn't seem to have had any political affiliation at all.
I've been keen to read this since it came out in 2020, and thank goodness for the Queens Public Library saving me from spending actual money on it. Hongotz-Hetling writes with a sarcastic, cynical tone, like he's been listening to a lot of Behind the Bastards. Unfortunately, a tone which works in a podcast is less effective in a book, and honestly he comes across as a bit of an arsehole who is determined to make the facts fit his hypothesis, but who also doesn't seem capable or willing to look at how the issues he's writing about can be applied to a wider situation, ie, the entire United States under Trump.
The main thing I took away is that, when the state government did finally acknowledge that there was a bit of a bear issue happening -- after a woman was mauled in her own home -- they framed it like a police shooting. "Bear-involved attack". Soooooooo ... it's not just the libertarian incomers who were the problem, eh?
If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang
I recently said that I was done with American YA, but then I immediately had to make exceptions for "Australian author published in the US" and "my friends".
Not that Liang is my friend, but she is Chinese-Australian and I am sending her GOOD VIBES and also ordering everything else she has written, because I loved this book -- a YA fantasy set in an elite Beijing boarding school. Alice learns that her parents cannot afford the fees for her final semester, and then turns invisible. Which is a problem, except maybe she can ... monetise it? With the help of her worst enemy, her unreasonably hot and attractive classmate Henry?
Alice is a fairly delightful heroine, which is to say she's unapologetically ambitious and not entirely certain of her moral centre. She's Team Macbeth Did Nothing Wrong, and her new venture takes her from the small-scale -- deleting nudes off a boy's phone -- to the outright criminal. And she's okay with that. Right?
A friend of mine complained that the invisibility goes unexplained (which I think is a trope of Chinese fantasy?) and that there's more romance than ethical quandary, but I felt like there was sufficient quandary, and also a very relatable arc as Alice slowly realises that many of her classmates are actually likeable people who could have been her friends if she hadn't spent all her school years studying and resenting them. (You don't need to be a scholarship student at an elite boarding school to go through this experience!)
And I liked the romance, which Alice thinks is enemies-to-lovers, whereas Henry is like, "Wait, are we not friends? You don't like me? You hate me? Oh. Well, now my feelings are hurt."
It's very Americanised (I do not think Alice needed to specify for the reader that a "southern accent" means "southern China" not "the Deep South"), but the privileges of private school students and the gap in opportunity between private and public schools felt very familiar to me as an Australian.
Liang's other book (so far) is a fake dating story, also set at an elite Beijing school. I am super into this milieu and cannot wait to read it.
In which a group of libertarians attempt to take over a small town in New Hampshire and turn it into a low-government paradise. The result? Bears.
Only not really, because the bears were a problem before the libertarians turned up, and in fact, the resident who most encouraged the bears (by feeding them grain and doughnuts) doesn't seem to have had any political affiliation at all.
I've been keen to read this since it came out in 2020, and thank goodness for the Queens Public Library saving me from spending actual money on it. Hongotz-Hetling writes with a sarcastic, cynical tone, like he's been listening to a lot of Behind the Bastards. Unfortunately, a tone which works in a podcast is less effective in a book, and honestly he comes across as a bit of an arsehole who is determined to make the facts fit his hypothesis, but who also doesn't seem capable or willing to look at how the issues he's writing about can be applied to a wider situation, ie, the entire United States under Trump.
The main thing I took away is that, when the state government did finally acknowledge that there was a bit of a bear issue happening -- after a woman was mauled in her own home -- they framed it like a police shooting. "Bear-involved attack". Soooooooo ... it's not just the libertarian incomers who were the problem, eh?
If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang
I recently said that I was done with American YA, but then I immediately had to make exceptions for "Australian author published in the US" and "my friends".
Not that Liang is my friend, but she is Chinese-Australian and I am sending her GOOD VIBES and also ordering everything else she has written, because I loved this book -- a YA fantasy set in an elite Beijing boarding school. Alice learns that her parents cannot afford the fees for her final semester, and then turns invisible. Which is a problem, except maybe she can ... monetise it? With the help of her worst enemy, her unreasonably hot and attractive classmate Henry?
Alice is a fairly delightful heroine, which is to say she's unapologetically ambitious and not entirely certain of her moral centre. She's Team Macbeth Did Nothing Wrong, and her new venture takes her from the small-scale -- deleting nudes off a boy's phone -- to the outright criminal. And she's okay with that. Right?
A friend of mine complained that the invisibility goes unexplained (which I think is a trope of Chinese fantasy?) and that there's more romance than ethical quandary, but I felt like there was sufficient quandary, and also a very relatable arc as Alice slowly realises that many of her classmates are actually likeable people who could have been her friends if she hadn't spent all her school years studying and resenting them. (You don't need to be a scholarship student at an elite boarding school to go through this experience!)
And I liked the romance, which Alice thinks is enemies-to-lovers, whereas Henry is like, "Wait, are we not friends? You don't like me? You hate me? Oh. Well, now my feelings are hurt."
It's very Americanised (I do not think Alice needed to specify for the reader that a "southern accent" means "southern China" not "the Deep South"), but the privileges of private school students and the gap in opportunity between private and public schools felt very familiar to me as an Australian.
Liang's other book (so far) is a fake dating story, also set at an elite Beijing school. I am super into this milieu and cannot wait to read it.
