stapsreads

The most recent book club choice - and goodness knows it's taken long enough to get round to actually getting a meeting together and talking about it (over Dark and Stormys, Espresso Martinis, and Mojitos, and all on a Tuesday night). The choice was announced in May. How, then, did I find myself having to order it off Amazon the preceding Thursday and read it in three days? Sheer incompetence, and other people taking the communal copies on holiday with them.

I wish I'd had longer, because it was very heavy-going in every sense of the word. Three hundred pages, counting the contextual notes at the end, very small print, and harrowing content. It was a frustrating book and, if I'm honest, stylistically a bit of a let-down. In the introduction Janice Boddy, one of Aman's co-authors, enthuses about the Somali tradition of poetry and story-telling, which wasn't borne out in the narrative itself. The style was very same-y all the way through, no matter what was going on. Opinions at book club were divided as to how effective this was - whether it highlighted the horrors of colonialism and misogyny even as it presented them as part of everyday life, or whether it blended everything into a vaguely depressing mush.

Like I said, I read it too quickly.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10125792/

A book about being a geisha written by a geisha - the reality is, it seems a lot more interesting and a lot less titillating than one would imagine from having read the blurbs on books about being a geisha written by people who aren't geishas. For a start, the word 'geisha' (artist) itself isn't used much; Iwasaki prfers 'geiko' (woman of art) or 'maiko' (woman of dance), according to age.

And actually, this is as much about dance as it is about anything, dance and the dancer's passion for her work, her frustration with a rigid system, and a detailed (but not heavy-handed) description of the industry in general. (Because it is an industry, supporting probably thousands of people.) I found it absolutely fascinating. I couldn't help comparing it to Shanghai Tango, which I read a while back; both deal honestly with the tension between innovation and tradition, not to mention the sheer hard work.

Iwasaki addresses with commendable restraint the (erroneous) assumption that geisha are sex workers, highlighting the areas where confusion may arise, but firmly rebuffing the notion that a necessarily equals b. I would likely have been much more vehement about it.

Oh yes, and I was much amused by which member of the British Royal Family evoked the most authorial approval. You wouldn't have thought it, would you?

One minor niggle: I really could have done with a glossary. Iwasaki is very good at defining her terms when they first come up, but I tend to find that once isn't enough for me, and I kept having to flip back to where I thought the term had been introduced, only to find that I'd misremembered.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/10065542

Part autobiography, part introduction to Buddhism, and actually a very useful little book, I found. I began reading it a while back, found the deconstruction of the 'faith=belief' assumption very convincing (not that it was new to me, you understand, but it's nice to see other people thinking the same way in print), put it down for several months, and finished it off the other night. Salzberg is very honest about her own failings, open about what has brought her to where she is, and actually very helpful in illustrating what she means. A lot of this book is anecdotal, but I found it worked very nicely. I still don't know much detail about Buddhism, but I feel that I've now got a better grasp of the fundamental ideas. It also describes a model of spirituality that is relevant to my own experience, and she's not at all One True Way-ist about it. Maybe a little bit American and touchy-feely, but I don't know - it seems to work here.