“But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz

I got this book ages ago and just never had the chance to pick it up. But then very conveniently, I read it while I was on vacation right before heading to the Motown Museum in Detroit! So I’ll throw in a few thoughts on that as well.

The book is formatted in a really interesting way. The authors conducted oral interviews with many people involved in the Motown girl groups that were all the rage in the 50s and 60s. The book then consists of quotes from all of these interviews put together thematically and chronologically. There are a few author’s notes here and there but it is primarily just quotes. The result is that it can feel a little disconnected, I mean the quotes all go together but there are some sections I had to reread to figure out who we are all talking about and things like that. It is cool though that you get multiple perspectives from a single passage.

I know a few things about the girl groups, I really like the Shirelles and the Marvelettes, but largely I was a novice coming in. I certainly didn’t know the names of the girls! So I thought it was really cool to get a peak behind the music at the individuals involved. I also know vaguely that Motown was exploitative of its artists, but it is wild to read about how the girls didn’t get paid and rarely even had the rights to their names.

I would say that this is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in these groups, whether you are knowledgeable or not. It’s a cool intro to these groups, and I bet even people who know a lot can learn things from the interviews.

Now I mentioned visiting the Motown Museum and I was really surprised by that experience. Of course it’s very pro-Motown as a company and it doesn’t mention any of the issues with artists getting paid or anything like that. But I was shocked that the Shirelles aren’t anywhere in the museum that I could find. They were Motown’s biggest girl group, they should have been celebrated there! And after reading this book, I think that’s because they were one of the few groups that fought to keep the rights to their name. So it’s a little bit of a fuck you to them. And seeing the physical location of the recording studio was cool, but honestly? I liked the experience of reading the book better. I felt I got more out of it.

So you heard it here, I preferred this book to the physical location talked about. It was super cool to pair them together, but reading the book felt so much more comprehensive and accurate to what the performers were experiencing then.

This Is Beautiful: Community

 Alright so I've been back at work for a week and a half and it has not been great because I keep thinking about how I could be at home watching tv and doing nothing. It is nice to see people again though, a lot of things have been having back-to-the-semester events and that's fun. It helps coming back to feel like I do have something to come back to that I like, and seeing people that I haven't interacted with in a while does do the trick with that.

“Book of Enchantments” by Patricia A. Wrede

My partner and I went through Wrede’s whole Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and after that he started reading this book of short stories to me as well. It’s a fun collection, and since each chapter is different it made for a fun experience reading it aloud.

The stories are pretty diverse, but most of them involve retelling some fairy tale in an unusual or surprising way. There are some that are in funky fantasy lands, and also some set in the modern day and age. Plenty are from a new or untraditional perspective, such as from a sister or someone observing the main action.

There are two stories that intersect with the Enchanted Forest Chronicles of course. One of them is about a unicorn living in the Enchanted Forest itself, so while the characters of the story are new the setting certainly is not. I didn’t realize until I read the afterword, but there are not any unicorns in the main story, and this was written for a collection specifically including unicorns. The other story is the last one, and this is the only story written specifically for this collection. It follows our favorite Queen Cimorene and how she organizes a whole competition just to figure out the warrior meant to wield the Frying Pan of Doom. It is quite fun.

I really liked this collection of stories! Not all of them are my favorite, but they all bring something new to the table, and the vast majority have an excellent sense of humor. I would recommend all of Wrede’s writing, but perhaps if you are unsure this would make for a pretty good place to start.

This Is Beautiful: The Dragon Prince

 While I was on vacation, I rewatched all of "The Dragon Prince" to catch myself up before watching the new season 6. It has been really great to revisit it! I forgot how bad the animation was for the first season, and how many silly meme references there were throughout.

I am just getting to the new season now, but I am excited! I love this show, I'm so glad we keep getting new content even if it's sporadic.

“The Immaculate Conception of Data” by Kelly Bronson

So I decided to pursue a certificate in science, technology, and society (STS) as well as my PhD, because I simply did not have enough to do apparently. The group of STS students decided to invest in a bunch of books, and this happened to be the one that I picked up as it looked most relevant to my interests in how we perceive science and what we do with it. It was definitely an academic read, but pretty cool to go through.

The immaculate conception of data is the idea that tech bros and the like subscribe to, it is immaculate because it believes that data comes straight from the universe without human intervention, and that the data will only improve people’s lives and productivity. There is a lot in the book about environmental benefits as well, but those are seen as a side result and as such do not play into the immaculate conception of data concretely.

This framework is built on through the use of big data in agriculture. Bronson has interviewed farmers, engineers, and others that collect this data and market it to farmers for their use in growing crops. Quite a lot of the book consists of quotes from these interviews, as well as Bronson putting her ideas into the context of STS thinkers. (It is really cool to see writers I read about in class cited in an actual book.) She talks about the promises as well as the pitfalls of this technology. This includes how farmers become more efficient, but also there can be issues with programming the smart tractors and things like that.

It is an interesting look into the idea of “big data” and how it gets used in an industry that we do not typically associate with “big data.” I can say that I knew agriculture was big and competitive, but I didn’t realize how much data was being collected and marketed to farmers in need of a leg up on the competition. It is pretty academic so it would not make for great light reading, but was still cool to read about!

This Is Beautiful: The Mask of the Rose

 So while I'm taking some time off I really wanted to play through a video game. I ended up picking "The Mask of the Rose" which is a visual novel. It has a really cool aesthetic, London of the Victorian Age has fallen through the crust of the Earth. You're trying to solve the first murder down there, and maybe finding love while you're at it.

I've only done one playthrough, but I'm really intrigued. The murder mystery is cool and not at all easy to figure out, but it's possible. And there seems to be a ridiculous amount to explore, you can't do it all in one go so replays are necessary. I'm excited to be exploring it!

One thing I hope gets explored more is that there's a character who is a writer of stories, and there's a mechanism in the game where you create stories to ask questions or propose ideas. I hope there's more about the importance of stories, and how stories can influence the world around them. That'd be cool. But we'll see, there wasn't much in my first play through so I'm mostly hoping that develops.

“Muneera and the Moon” by Sonia Sulaiman

This book I ordered and read primarily because it is written by a Palestinian asexual author, which is really cool, and also because I listened to a podcast where they read one of her stories and the writing was just beautiful. So a win-win situation!

There’s a wide range of short stories in this collection, but the vast majority have to do with Palestinian culture and the diaspora. For example, there’s a beautiful one about Palestinian clothing and how it feels to try on a part of your culture. There is also a Palestinian retelling of Snow White that I was very amused by as it calls itself out, and Orpheus and Eurydice make an appearance.

To be honest, some were just too short for me to really get into them (which is also part of why short stories aren’t typically for me) but the longer ones are just beautiful. “Handala. The Olive, the Storm, and the Sea” is the story I heard through the podcast and being able to revisit it written down was just stunning. The words just flow off of the page.

There’s also a lot of great ace rep, in particular some ace male representation. There’s a prince who just wants companionship and the opening story involves the titular Muneera loving the Moon. It is really cool to see diverse representation and also representation that isn’t aimed to just educate the audience. There are probably people reading this who do not know the exact terms “asexual spectrum” but still get the sense that to not want sex is normal and fine.

I really enjoyed this read and getting deeper in Sulaiman’s works. She has another anthology and a book and other exciting things coming up, so I can’t wait to get my hands on those as well!

This Is Beautiful: Vacation Finally

 Last week was really rough, I had two days that racked up to at least 10 hours in lab each (one was closer to 12 for sure) and combined with some dread over just getting the go ahead for these experiments, it made for a now so fun couple of weeks. But we got the go ahead, and we did it, and that's great. The better part of this is that I had been planning a little staycation for a while, even before I knew these experiments were last week, so going from intense stress to time off was really nice.

I'm so glad I didn't plan much, I'm finally getting to just laze around, watch some tv, play some games, and do the things I really wanted to do.

“The Promise” by Gene Luen Yang

I am pretty sure that I read this previously, but in the wait for my next book I decided to revisit it since it was available at my library. The story follows the events of the animated show.

The main story has to do with the fire nation colonies in the earth nation. The leaders start a Harmony Restoration Movement to pull the fire nation citizens out. However they run into trouble, one of the colonies is about 100 years old and the fire nation citizens there have started families and turned the city into a mix of both fire and earth nations. Zuko separately gets Aang to promise that Aang will kill Zuko if Zuko starts to act like his father. After spending time at the colony, Zuko pulls out of the Harmony Restoration Movement and the others get worried about him. The earth king moves to send his army against the fire nations. (Meanwhile Toph has started a metal bending school.) In the end, Aang comes around to Zuko and does not want to keep the elements separate. Next though, Zuko wants to focus on finding his mother.

This is a really cool story because it deals with the really real issues with resolving the conflict from the tv show. Yeah they got rid of the bad guy, but there’s still a lot of ordinary people that have to deal with the consequences. You get to see how people in the earth kingdom want the fire nation out and the people in the fire nation colony want to defend their way of life.

It also leads pretty smoothly into the events of Korra. You see Aang start up his acolytes and the start of the city that incorporates all of the elements together. It’s a nice way to bridge the two together because making a tv show is just so darn expensive. But it shows that the writers had a place in mind for where to take the story and what they wanted to accomplish along the way to make it all make sense. It definitely flows naturally too, you see Aang struggle with his fan clubs and how they treat his culture before he turns them into acolytes.

I should really read the rest of the graphic novels, and I probably will eventually, but this was a nice revisit!