Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth

The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Late-life memoir recalling the author's youth as a midwife in London's East End in the 1950's.

Picked up for the from-the-trenches view of birth (not that much has changed in 60 years when what you're talking about is midwife-assisted, largely unmedicated delivery). Kept for the other 70%, which turned out to be a rich, compelling, complicated, sometimes uncomfortable personal/social history. And for Worth herself, who was smart, and driven, and talented, occasionally racist, and often struggling to find compassion. This is a memoir of someone who was powerfully compelled into exhausting, difficult work that challenged her social comfort zones for reasons she never fully understood, and that resonated with me. As did her explicit recounting of her repeated struggle to see the person under the most abject degradations of poverty. The book is not so well-observed when it comes to ethnocentrism and, in a few startling instances, gendered violence, but there is something about the strength of Worth's writing that makes it all go down as a capsule, her strength and her charm and her painful blind spots.

I want to watch the TV show now.




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Ball & Chain by Abigail Roux

Ball & Chain by Abigail Roux

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another M/M FBI caper, this time stranded on a tiny Scottish island for a wedding, at least until the bodies start dropping.

Hm. This made me think about series structure and the necessity of releasing tension in order to build it again. Because, I think for the first time in my life, I was hoping for a mystery-of-the-week, and I didn't get it. All the markers were there – last book was over-the-top intense! This book started with hints of whacky hijinks! – and I thought oh good, we can all decompress a bit. And then no. It's like Roux couldn't stop herself from injecting a whole new set of interpersonal dramas, with yet more awkwardly back-filled history.

And, I mean, I don't read M/M just for the porn, okay? For one reason, that would be really fucking sad, considering the abysmal quality of most published LGBT erotica (this series being a pleasant surprise there). I also read it for the personal drama, to wallow in it and – yeah – to mock it a lot. But I'm genuinely in this for people having complicated, difficult feelings at each other.

But seriously. Once in a while? Have a freaking caper. Remember the thing a couple books ago with the tiger and the terrible, terrible puns, and how hard I laughed on a flight home from London? Can't we do that again?



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Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure

Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure by Kathryn Allan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read the day before and the day after a con, so I am reconstructing my thoughts around a gaping pit of distraction and exhaustion. They were super brilliant thoughts at the time, I swear! Anyway, the full ToC is available here and worth looking at, as is this book. Overall, I'm glad I read it, though the only pieces that jump strongly out from my memory now are the ones I feel negatively about. Though Woiak and Karamanos on Samuel R. Delany were eye-opening, and Christy Tidwell on autism in The Speed of Dark and "Movement" was a pleasure. There were some odd editing choices here – Allan prefers "dis/abled" to "disabled," and yet repeatedly used "confined to a wheelchair" or "wheelchair bound," which was confusing and distracting as these language cues tell you a lot about a person's politics, and Allan's language was telling me really inconsistent things. Anyway. Some notes:

"The Metamorphic Body in Science Fiction: From Prosthetic Correction to Utopian Enhancement" -- António Fernando Cascais: One of the worst examples of academese I've seen in years. This provoked me to half an hour of seething rage over dinner about the thin line between critical theory and utter bullshit and, more to the point, the way academic writing, at its worst, is intensely exclusionary, full of meaning only to the tiny be-doctored in-group (and, I would argue, not even to many of them, who won't ever admit they don't know what the fuck he's talking about, either). It's just such a waste – I think he had some interesting things to say about the way science fiction pushes at notions of the singular self as an identity, but he went to extraordinary efforts to make sure I didn't follow exactly why the fuck I'm supposed to care.

"Great Clumsy Dinosaurs -- The Disabled Body in the Posthuman World -- Brent Walter Cline: Interesting. Postulates, among other ideas, that the category of disability will expand to include all embodiment in post human scifi futures because the physical body will limit access to the uploads or the cloud or whatever other ascendant technology we are theoretically climbing toward. I appreciated this as a mental exercise, but I also . . . hm. I balk a little at these "ooh, let's speculate about theoretical expansions of the concept of disability in nearly unimaginable futures!" I mean, Clein should have fun with his bad self, but I have a hard time really taking these exercises seriously. Not when there is so much complexity and unexplored territory in, you know, our actual category of disability. There's something . . . diluting? Misdirecting? Unhelpful? … Something about working to expand the lexical category of disability to include people so far from us, they definitionally aren't human anymore when the construction of that category is so persistently human and contextual. Something. I'm not getting this out right.

"Animal and Alien Bodies as Prostheses: Reframing Disability in Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon" -- Leigha McReynolds: This one bugged me. It's an interesting enough idea, which you can get from the title, but seriously, any essay on Avatar which does not seem to notice all the rampant race and colonialism issues is just not doing its job. And it doesn't do any good to say that's not what she was writing about; it was inherently, because she was using disability theory to talk specifically about the co-optation of an alien culture and an alien body as a kind of prosthetic. I mean, this is how intersectionality works – you really can't separate these things! And yet . . . *crickets*.




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