Not exactly what I would call a fun read after the early years of the covid pandemic. But I'm glad I read it. The story is pretty much worse that I knew, and I knew comparatively quite a bit.
Reviews and Comments
💬 they/them ; iel/lo
🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc. English, French, and many translations.
📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction, de fiction littéraire, de poésie, de classiques, de spéculatif, de réalisme magique, etc. Lecture en anglais et en français, et beaucoup de traductions.
💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande
This link opens in a pop-up window
Gersande La Flèche reviewed Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian Deer
Gersande La Flèche started reading Disney War by James B. Stewart
Material in this book was a major part of the research and context of a Lindsay Ellis video from way back, and I've been meaning to read it but had to wait until I could find a cheap paperback copy, because getting this to work on my Kobo was a fun adventure in futility.
Gersande La Flèche wants to read Domaine Lilium by Michael Blum
J'ai trouvé ce livre à travers la publication de Mauve Renard et j'ai trouvé la description du bouquin super intéressant. J'ajoute à ma pile de trucs à lire!
Gersande La Flèche commented on Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
The first chapter really does hit different if you've been to Saint-Martin-des-Champs and the musée des Arts et métiers.
A word I had never encountered before: sublunar (adjective, more commonly found as sublunarly): of, relating to, or characteristic of the terrestrial world.
Neat.
Gersande La Flèche started reading Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
Gersande La Flèche wants to read Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Gersande La Flèche wants to read La Dernière artiste soviétique by Victoria Lomasko
Vu sur le feed de Liz — ce livre a l'air tellement intéressant!!!
Gersande La Flèche wants to read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Gersande La Flèche wants to read Gaucher.ère contrarié.e by V.S. Goela
Gersande La Flèche finished reading Swan Dive by Georgina Pazcoguin
Pazcoguin's memoir covers the two+ decades of her career (which started when she was a child) at the New York City Ballet. The gothic humour was welcome and familiar around the tougher memories of relentless emotional, sexist, and racist abuse. During the more triumphant parts of the book (and there are some really great ones), your heart soars at Pazcoguin's words. Righteous!
Organized in a series of non-chronological vignettes (some very out of order), there is definitely a method to it, though it requires a bit of work to keep names and places and years straight. It pays off at the end: maybe you're even a little emotionally winded, but in the best of ways.
While the book offers a tantalizing and brutal window into the amazingly dysfunctional, abusive, and hurt/ing art form that is ballet, the book is careful (and wise) to anchor it to Pazcoguin's perspectives and memories. …
Pazcoguin's memoir covers the two+ decades of her career (which started when she was a child) at the New York City Ballet. The gothic humour was welcome and familiar around the tougher memories of relentless emotional, sexist, and racist abuse. During the more triumphant parts of the book (and there are some really great ones), your heart soars at Pazcoguin's words. Righteous!
Organized in a series of non-chronological vignettes (some very out of order), there is definitely a method to it, though it requires a bit of work to keep names and places and years straight. It pays off at the end: maybe you're even a little emotionally winded, but in the best of ways.
While the book offers a tantalizing and brutal window into the amazingly dysfunctional, abusive, and hurt/ing art form that is ballet, the book is careful (and wise) to anchor it to Pazcoguin's perspectives and memories. While there are villains (namely Peter Martins, the disgraced former head of NYCB) the book is firm in placing most of the responsibility at the feet of ballet's culture, audience, and gatekeepers. The issue is systemic; while individual actors can cause atrocious amounts of damage, the solutions have to go beyond holding them personally to account.
Highly entertaining, intensely relatable (despite my never doing anything remotely resembling being a professional dancer at NYCB), and a very hopeful read that I'll definitely revisit again.
Gersande La Flèche commented on Swan Dive by Georgina Pazcoguin
Gersande La Flèche started reading Swan Dive by Georgina Pazcoguin
Finally breaking my scary-long spell of no reading with the memoir of a mixed raced NYCB dancer who battled an enormous amount of mysogyny, racism, and fatphobia to become a force of nature. Am at 44 % of the ebook. Interesting, frank, sometimes convoluted but never in a bad way, and often intensely funny writing.
Gersande La Flèche stopped reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
I've had to return my copy to the library (been a while now actually) and my little "true crime" wonderings has seriously abated (see earlier notes on this book, I think I talked about it). I have some thoughts about the first couple chapters that I don't think I talked about here, but I'll probably eventually get back to Capote. Fluid writing style.
Gersande La Flèche stopped reading Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith
I probably will get back to this one day, but AI/machine learning/algorithm discourse is so demoralizing and discouraging to me that the idea of revisiting this book right now is really too much. But maybe one day.