dorouu
(she/her/ella) ABC abroad. Lived 🇨🇳🇺🇸🇵🇭🇯🇵🇪🇸🇪🇨 Pretty OK Polyglot ✨De-colonial Feminist Killjoy ✨ Honorary brownbanded bamboo shark
12691 points
dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Hello PB family 🧚🏼♀️, I'm putting together a world tour itinerary inspired by books from every country. 🌸 I have a passion for reading translated literature and often find myself noticing various aspects of the languages that shift my understanding, especially when I think about how different it might be to read them in their original form. One significant distinction for me is how languages handle gender. For instance, Turkish pronouns are gender-neutral, so when I read translations, things can sometimes get a bit confusing regarding who is speaking. 😁 I'm curious to hear about the differences you notice while reading based on your own language. Do you have a specific book that you found particularly different in translation? Please share, that'd be fun! Also, if you have recommendations for the list, I'd much appreciate it!
23
dorouu made progress on...
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
0dorouu started reading...
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
0dorouu commented on violet.booklover's review of Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle
Pretentious, boring. Sorry. I don’t care about crossword maker corporations (NYT etc) and their finances and status. I like words and people and wanted more of that vibe.
6dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I’m about to say what I believe is a deeply unpopular opinion, but bear with me until the end: I love the miscommunication trope. I know, I know. Some of you are probably gasping and clutching your pearls right now, but hear me out.
I love a good angst moment. That blue, heart-aching, lip-quivering feeling you get when reading something irreconcilably sad. But here’s the thing: I don’t actually like the consequences of it.
Let’s say we’re reading a romance novel. The couple is vibing, they have insane chemistry, we got the meet-cute, the first kisses, the whole shebang, and now we’re approaching one of my favorite parts: the third-act breakup. A staple of the genre. But we need a reason for them to break up, right?
So let’s say one of them cheats. I know. Horrific. But the angst of it all? The heartbreak of the person who got cheated on? The longing and regret of the one who did the cheating? Chef’s kiss.
Except... this is a romance novel. We need the HEA. They have to get back together. But someone CHEATED!!! I hate cheating. I genuinely cannot deal with it. I would never forgive the cheater, even if their partner does. At that point, the novel is probably ruined for me.
Now compare that to miscommunication. No one actually betrayed anyone. There’s just a misunderstanding that spirals because these two idiots refuse to communicate properly. And I know what people think: “Ugh, this is so frustrating. If they would just TALK, everything would be solved.” And that’s true. But that’s exactly why I like it.
We still get the angst, the heartbreak, the longing, the yearning... but without any irredeemable damage. None of the emotional rot that permanently changes the relationship. Everything is still fixable.
That’s what the miscommunication trope is to me: flirting with pain without actually committing to it. I get all the delicious sadness with none of the lingering devastation. Tragedy, but with guardrails. We are talking "safe angst", baby.
Does anyone else feel this way, or am I alone in this?
30dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I am a certifiable mood reader 😅 However with the approach of summer next week (I’m a teacher) I would love to plan out my reading for the next couple months.
So how did you get started planning your reading? How do you account for how long you think it will take you to get through a book? How do you stay flexible?
Any help is appreciated! 😉🥰 Thanks!
44dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I wish I could get paid to simply read books (just sulking at the fact I gotta work this holiday and wanna QUIT to pursue my passion ((grandma energy and reading for hours on end))
41dorouu commented on jordynreads's update
jordynreads finished a book
Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)
Tamsyn Muir
11dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Okay, so I made a post yesterday about my favourite love stories from my culture and asked you guys about yours. The response was so positive — I learned so much, and you can check that post out here. Our stories deserve to be celebrated.
But you will not believe this coincidence. I regularly check YouTube for book drama because, you know, girl's gotta get her tea. And guys. Guys. I am crying because this is ridiculous. A Brazilian author named Carolina Silva wrote a monster romance with Shiva as the MMC, as in, HE is the "monster". A smutty monster romance. Y'all, I genuinely do not know if I should be pissed or if I should find this funny, because she's an indie author, so there was clearly no oversight here. She is not even from India. And this is not a retelling. This is not even a romance story in any meaningful sense. It is a smutty monster romance.
I don't want to be the one to censor anyone, but where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line? Because you are using one of our gods as an MMC in this. If you were writing a retelling, something like Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Menon where it's actually a retelling with love and beauty and sensitivity, I would fully support that regardless of where you're from. But this? Look, I am an atheist. But I have always loved the stories from my culture. They are full of philosophy, desire, devotion, and a really fascinating play on gender and sexuality. I talked about this in my last two posts, and I have learned so much from you guys about your cultures too. So this is not about gatekeeping mythology. This is about the fact that the author didn't even get the source material right. Shiva had two wives his entire life, Sati and then Parvati, who was the reincarnation of Sati. He was devoted to both of them. BRO WAS LOCKED IN OKAY. And this book makes his love interest someone other than Parvati and treats an active, living tradition as just set dressing for monster smut.
I genuinely do not know whether to be angry or just baffled. Maybe both. But I do want to know your thoughts: where do you think authors should draw the line?
Y'all I'm trying to be nice here I swear. But this is pissing me off. Like I get it. Smut is not a bad thing and I'm really not trying to play into purity culture. I'm from a country that literally produced Kamasutra but even that was way more about just JUST sex and dug deep into the philosophy surrounding the art of love making, being attractive for your partner, grooming yourself, kissing, foreplay, BDSM and sex.
But THIS is just violence against the philosophies my culture is set in where desire and devotion and sex are looked at in a very particular way which isn't different from meditating. Yes. Kama or desire and sex is a way to attain liberation or nirvana in some parts of my culture. So to write smut with a GOD from an ACTIVE tradition who's LOCKED IN?? HE ISN'T ZEUS OR HADES. GIVE ME A BREAK.
Edit: she threatened her critique with lawsuits. I'm crying.
Edit: ya'all she's a white brazilian. And of course she is 😭😭😭😭 and she wrote shiva as a "blue god". HE IS NOT BLUE Y'ALL. He is either a pale ass schmuck with a blue throat or incredibly dark with a blue throat. But he's not fully blue I can't- He's just REPRESENTED as blue to represent the vastness of the sky.
Edit: it gets worse. The fmc becomes involved with Shiva because she reads an inscription on Taj Mahal without knowing she's offering her soul to Shiva. Yes. Taj Mahal. A famously MUSLIM TOMB built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal.
50dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Hi Boundlings 🪄
Its me Moonchild, How are you all? Hope you are fine😇
Just wanted to know if you have controversial opinions about books or authors 😅👀??!!
174dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
hi 🫛🐝s!!! what is a dealbreaker in a book that will make you dnf (or make you enter a hate-read for those who refuse to dnf 😉)? is there a trope or word or situation or writing style that just overwhelms you with ick?
for me a big ick is all of the euphemisms for vulva or vagina (lady cave, SHEATH 🤢) or even miscommunication trope sets me off too 🤣
104dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I don’t mean “I stayed up late and regretted it” unhinged. I mean question-your-life-choices, why-am-I-like-this??? unhinged.
For example: I’ve been reading Yellowface as of last night and I’ve fully developed a habit of muttering the most unfiltered, rude commentary under my breath while I read. Like I’m in a private roast battle with the book itself. The problem? I’m reading it on my phone in public. So now I’m just sitting there looking calm while apparently saying things that are earning me concerned side-eyes from strangers. Whoops.
So I need to know I’m not alone in this chaos. Drop your stories. Join me so I know we’re all a little unwell in the same way. 😵💫🙂↕️🫣
67dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
For my final act of credits on Book of the Month (a book subscription service) I am trying to choose between getting The God of The Woods or The Everlasting. I can’t really decide, and I know both of them are very well liked- though on BOTM god of the woods is an award winner so it may possibly be special edition? I was thinking Yesteryear as well, but thought it may not be as versatile as the others. Any thoughts? Or other BOTM suggestions?
11dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
is there any way to track progress in the app for a book that isn’t published? my best friend wrote a 350 page novel (inspired by me, yes she’s the best) but it’s nothing official or published. i’m guessing there’s no way to add it and track it as progress towards goals?
6dorouu commented on dorouu's update
dorouu wrote a review...
Through no fault of the author, information on the three mothers Alberta King, Emma Berdis Jones, and Louise Little, is quite limited. As such, a lot of the stories being told are conjectures and can't fully be based in truth. We only know about these mothers from the stories being told about their sons. At most, we have some letters they wrote, or public records from their doctors or other officials. There is a huge gap in what we know about these three women, so I often felt uncomfortable when the author would write in third person omniscient and in her words describe how the mothers would feel and what they would say and do.
The book felt like a historical retelling of the ancestry of the three men, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and James Baldwin. Essentially, the author seeks to show how these three famous activists were built brick by brick by their mothers. However, much is said, not only of the mothers, but the fathers and grandparents as well. Outside of this information, there was a lot of basic introductory content that I was already familiar with. Though it is important, I don't think it needed repeating in this book that was supposed to be focused on the mothers.
Additionally, I felt that there was some bias in that the author clearly preferred MLK. More was said about his mother (probably because more information was available), but also the way the author would phrase or describe his non-violence tactics were very positive- while little was said about Malcom X's ever-evolving views- including a complete washing of what the Nation of Islam actually believes (i.e. how are you going to mention they believe racism to be the 'work of devils' and not mention that the devils= white people 😅).
1dorouu commented on crybabybea's review of The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
Ambitious and intriguing in concept, but doesn't quite stick the landing.
The information about the three women -- Alberta King, Emma Berdis Jones, and Louise Little -- is so valuable just by nature of its existence. This history is so intentionally fractured and destroyed, that discovering any new knowledge about them is noteworthy. Unfortunately, the lack of information means that Tubbs had to do a lot of speculation, a lot of inferring on the interior lives of these women. The narrative relies on "could have", "should have", "might have", which is a flimsy structure to build an argument upon.
In some ways, this lack of information and reliance on speculation is exactly the point; we have to imagine these stories because they have been erased. Devalued, dismissed, forgotten. At the same time, it had the side effect of flattening the women into symbols. Rather than complex human beings with flaws, mistakes, triumphs, and strengths, they become stand-ins for something much larger, which means that the book easily veers from historical recovery, to moral allegory.
That's not to say that these women weren't remarkable, that their actions didn't reverberate into the civil rights movement in unseen ways. However, there was a missed opportunity to really examine and pull apart the systems influencing the choices of these women. Without a deeper critique pulling apart the difference between extraordinary resistance and ordinary survival under extraordinary violence, it risks valorizing the exact perspective that should be denormalized.
There's power in recognizing the actions they took under violent systems, but Tubbs doesn't interrogate the domicile. She gestures towards it, but doesn't fully ground it in critique. The actions of these mothers were radical because of the violent system forced upon them, and being forced into domesticity was part of that system. Turning their enforced role inside the home into a site of care, of radical imagination; turning their acts of love, care, and community into acts of political resistance, is such a powerful feminist analysis that sadly only gets briefly touched upon.
Instead, the book includes pretty surface-level recounting of civil rights history, which intertwines back into the issue with speculation and projection. The most glaring issue is the heavy focus on Martin Luther King, Jr. in a way that misremembers his political stance. Martin Luther King, Jr. was staunchly anti-capitalist, and his insistence on nonviolence was not out of benevolence or moral superiority. Tubbs' analysis of his mother, Alberta, relies heavily upon the fact that Alberta and Martin Luther King, Sr. passed down his "Christian values". Which is, of course, true to a degree, but flattens his actual political strategy.
Alberta, and tangentially, Martin Luther King, Jr., take up a large portion of this book. Some of this is due to the fact that Alberta has the most well-documented information available, but it also serves the book's more liberal ideological comfort zone. I respect that Tubbs tried to leave room for all viewpoints, but it's clear, intentionally or not, which view she thinks is the correct choice. She never denounces Malcolm X, but she leaves out many of his more radical views. She never blatantly positions Martin Luther King, Jr. as "better" than other activists, but her bias still shows via the information she chooses to center, and the information she chooses to exclude.
The conclusion Tubbs comes to reframes the entirety of the book in an unsavory way. Tubbs gestures toward women like Kamala Harris and Beyonce as examples of "what happens when we let Black women succeed". Naturally, this is pretty insulting given the entire book talked about some of the most radical anti-capitalist (while notably leaving out that they were anti-capitalist) figures of their time. Placing Kamala Harris next to Louise Little, who was a staunch Garveyist, borders on politically illiterate.
The Three Mothers wants to recover radical history, but it's too afraid to let that history make radical demands of the present. While Tubbs had great intention with this book, and her research is commendable, its political backbone is ultimately too flimsy to stand.
13
