This isn't a journal, it's a book report

[ursula]

Finished China Mountain Zhang. Didn't find the ending at all depressing; in fact, as my experience with Maureen F. McHugh goes, it's remarkably uplifting, since the main character ends the book with upper-middle-class credentials, a new business in the works, and a cute new boyfriend. (Makes an oddly capitalist summary, for a book in which America is Communist. Oh well. It was the Chinese model of Communism anyway.)

Mostly this proves that I'm more attuned to subtlety than my fourteen-year-old self, which shouldn't surprise anybody except perhaps the fourteen-year-old self, who is luckily not available for comment. And I suppose all the sex must have confused me. But it also proves that my world view is significantly more jaded; I'm taking a suicide and a date rape in stride. Fictionally, of course.

Comments

[eva-c.livejournal.com]

How else are you different from your fourteen-year-old self? :) I used to read the smutty parts in books aloud to my mother because I was so shocked and felt so guilty. *cringes*

[ursula]

I'm not really all that different, honestly, except for obvious things like having had boyfriends and eight years of school in-between, in which I must have occasionally learned something. Oh, and I knit obsessively, and have moved on from vain attempts to get my friends to play complicated games with toy soldiers on invented islands to vain attempts to get my friends to play D&D, Mage, etc., and like epic fantasy much less and literary sf rather more.

My dad reads all the science fiction I bring home. I always sort of wonder what he thought about, say, all of the rape and torture scenes that substitute for "this villain is evil" in your lower grade of girly fantasy novels. But he has never commented, not even when I was eleven or so.

[reasie.livejournal.com]

Don't you just love Maureen?
Do you mind if I show her your lj 'report'?

For myself, I hope my 14-year-old self would find modern me incredibly COOL. Like, totally!

[ursula]

I think she is a very good writer, but I am still making up my mind about whether I like her. You can show her my "report" if you like, though it's only two paragraphs, and probably not that advanced on the meaningful-commentary scale.

I am sure my fourteen-year-old self would have found you stunningly cool :)