What I'm Reading Wednesday
Sep. 26th, 2012 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_lucy21My major accomplishments for today consist of getting my sinuses to drain like they're supposed to, as opposed to through my ears or whatever (I don't know if they actually drain through my ears. I would not be surprised. They are, as one might say, Not Right) and remembering to do this post. As one might surmise, I'm not the happiest camper in the campground today. Anyway.
What am I reading now?: I am still chugging along on From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism by Patricia Hill Collins. It's very interesting, but it's also very chewy, so it's slow going. I also started Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience by Lawson Fusao Inada. I'm not very deep into it yet, but learning more about the Japanese Internment Camps during WWII has been on my list for a long time.
What have I just finished reading?: I just finished reading Both Sides Now by Dhillon Khosla, which is a memoir of a man's transition from being born female to becoming physically male. I learned more about some of the clinical details of transition, which is not something I knew very much about. The emotional details are, of course, pretty unique to each individual, although there were similar themes to other accounts of transitioning that I'd read (mostly non-scholarly articles- I think this is the first full length book I've read on the subject). There was something kind of off-putting about his personality, though, although it's certainly not a requirement for me to like every person whose memoir/autobiography I read.
I also recently finished The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling by Quinn Cummings. Homeschooling is one of those topics that I'm kind of fascinated by. Part of it is that some of my cousins were homeschooled, back when it was less acceptable, and it was always one of those head-tilting things about their family. Part of it is that I want to be well informed on the topic because I suspect, that if any of my potential offspring are anything like their mother and if the current educational climate continues to be highly geared towards standardized testing, well, my family might be exploring homeschooling as an option. This book is hilarious, although sometimes in a cringe-worthy type of way. Quinn very clearly cares about doing the best job she can for her daughter, even if she's not really sure how to accomplish that (I'm sure that's a familiar feeling to every parent). So, she sets out to not only homeschool her daughter for a year (they tried several different schools for her and discovered none of them was a good fit for their daughter) but to learn about different kinds of homeschooling simultaneously to figure out which would be the best for her family. In the end, they find a path that works for them, but you get the sense of it being a long and never complete journey. It was entertaining, if nothing else.
What will I be reading next?: *Shrugs* I still have some nonprofit programming books and a couple of queer history books on the shelf. I think I'm done with accounting for the time being. I'm getting close to finishing the current crop of library books, so probably next week I'll do a round of reserves and that will likely lead to a better answer to this question. But seriously, do people actually have a plan about exactly what book they're going to read next? I rarely do, even though I do have a 150+ book to read list (it fluctuates, but I don't think I've ever gotten it below 130).
So, that's What I'm Reading Wednesday.
What am I reading now?: I am still chugging along on From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism by Patricia Hill Collins. It's very interesting, but it's also very chewy, so it's slow going. I also started Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience by Lawson Fusao Inada. I'm not very deep into it yet, but learning more about the Japanese Internment Camps during WWII has been on my list for a long time.
What have I just finished reading?: I just finished reading Both Sides Now by Dhillon Khosla, which is a memoir of a man's transition from being born female to becoming physically male. I learned more about some of the clinical details of transition, which is not something I knew very much about. The emotional details are, of course, pretty unique to each individual, although there were similar themes to other accounts of transitioning that I'd read (mostly non-scholarly articles- I think this is the first full length book I've read on the subject). There was something kind of off-putting about his personality, though, although it's certainly not a requirement for me to like every person whose memoir/autobiography I read.
I also recently finished The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling by Quinn Cummings. Homeschooling is one of those topics that I'm kind of fascinated by. Part of it is that some of my cousins were homeschooled, back when it was less acceptable, and it was always one of those head-tilting things about their family. Part of it is that I want to be well informed on the topic because I suspect, that if any of my potential offspring are anything like their mother and if the current educational climate continues to be highly geared towards standardized testing, well, my family might be exploring homeschooling as an option. This book is hilarious, although sometimes in a cringe-worthy type of way. Quinn very clearly cares about doing the best job she can for her daughter, even if she's not really sure how to accomplish that (I'm sure that's a familiar feeling to every parent). So, she sets out to not only homeschool her daughter for a year (they tried several different schools for her and discovered none of them was a good fit for their daughter) but to learn about different kinds of homeschooling simultaneously to figure out which would be the best for her family. In the end, they find a path that works for them, but you get the sense of it being a long and never complete journey. It was entertaining, if nothing else.
What will I be reading next?: *Shrugs* I still have some nonprofit programming books and a couple of queer history books on the shelf. I think I'm done with accounting for the time being. I'm getting close to finishing the current crop of library books, so probably next week I'll do a round of reserves and that will likely lead to a better answer to this question. But seriously, do people actually have a plan about exactly what book they're going to read next? I rarely do, even though I do have a 150+ book to read list (it fluctuates, but I don't think I've ever gotten it below 130).
So, that's What I'm Reading Wednesday.