Recent reading
Dec. 5th, 2019 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaWe Who Are About To by Joanna Russ (1976)
This book starts off with seven people stranded on an alien planet with little chance of survival. I'm totally with the main character when she doesn't want to be treated like a womb on legs in a colonization attempt that would likely fail. And I respect her choice to kill herself if she wants to. But then she kills the rest of them so she can starve to death in introverted peace?? I guess you could argue that some of the murders are self-defence. But just to make sure that all of them aren't, the book has her travel pretty far to kill off the last two people, one of whom is only twelve. After which I kind of lost interest, because I didn't really care what happened to her after that. Still, I finished the book because it was short.
Also let me just complain about the main character's (or the book's?) linear view of history. There's a scene with a man hitting a woman, and the main character thinks something about them going back in time and the men realizing they can dominate the women. At another point she thinks that first they're regressing to the 19th century, then to the 5th century (or something like that). Which annoys me, because gender roles don't become linearly more and more oppressive the further back you go in history (and they're not the same all over the earth either). Also she seems to dismiss all of human existence that didn't have industrialization as not worthy of living through. Really??
Besides this, I also read a nature guide to the county of Dalsland and noted down places that I would like to go. And read a book for book club that I'll write up after the meeting.
This book starts off with seven people stranded on an alien planet with little chance of survival. I'm totally with the main character when she doesn't want to be treated like a womb on legs in a colonization attempt that would likely fail. And I respect her choice to kill herself if she wants to. But then she kills the rest of them so she can starve to death in introverted peace?? I guess you could argue that some of the murders are self-defence. But just to make sure that all of them aren't, the book has her travel pretty far to kill off the last two people, one of whom is only twelve. After which I kind of lost interest, because I didn't really care what happened to her after that. Still, I finished the book because it was short.
Also let me just complain about the main character's (or the book's?) linear view of history. There's a scene with a man hitting a woman, and the main character thinks something about them going back in time and the men realizing they can dominate the women. At another point she thinks that first they're regressing to the 19th century, then to the 5th century (or something like that). Which annoys me, because gender roles don't become linearly more and more oppressive the further back you go in history (and they're not the same all over the earth either). Also she seems to dismiss all of human existence that didn't have industrialization as not worthy of living through. Really??
Besides this, I also read a nature guide to the county of Dalsland and noted down places that I would like to go. And read a book for book club that I'll write up after the meeting.
