Recent reading

[luzula]

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2017, audiobook)
Okay, this was an eye-opener. I really didn't know how many bad effects there were of not getting enough sleep. I usually do get enough sleep, but this book convinced me to be more vigilant about it.

Svälten by Magnus Västerbro (2018, The Famine, only in Swedish)
A historian writes about the Swedish famine years 1867-1869. This book won prizes and was reviewed widely, so I picked it up. And it's good--definitely popular science, but in a good way. The writing is sort of like painting, like, it pauses and meanders a bit, filling in more details. Although the subject is heavy, obviously.

I also did not manage to finish Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, which I was reading for my fannish book club. The writing did not engage me, and I rolled my eyes at the approaching YA romance (the main characters are two brother-sister sets! obviously they will pair up in the predictable way!). Maybe YA is just not for me. (I think that, and then I remember Frances Hardinge.)

But I wanted to talk (yet again) about magic and democracy. This book has downtrodden persecuted magic users again, although to be fair it's more realistic here because they don't actually have magic anymore (at least in the beginning). But in general I feel like people who have magic are usually a bad metaphor for downtrodden minorities. It seems more probable to me that people who have magic would become powerful and be the people who are doing the treading down. Magic as a metaphor for the rich and powerful? But there's a reason why it's not written that way: magic is cool, right? You want your heroes to be cool and have magic. But you also want your heroes to be the underdogs.

Comments

[baronjanus]

There are several bits of media where magic is vaguely a metaphor for being queer. It's less about the power, more about being different, no better nor worse than the "mainstream" but hunted down regardless, and unable to stifle the spark within that makes you different. Unlike the comment above, it isn't about magic users who (like vampires) have any real power, let alone misuse said power. It's more about "something you have inside that, if extinguished, will make you less of what you are". That of course doesn't work in more structured worlds where magic users have their own cities or great powers or any of that thing, only where they're a minority often born within non-magic families.

[luzula]

Yeah, okay, that can make sense!

I mean, I've written persecuted werewolves fic myself. But those werewolves didn't have any power other than turning into wolves, and wolves themselves are persecuted as it is, so. It's just when people have powerful magic that it doesn't make much sense to me.