(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Blood Music by Greg Bear (the novel version)

I... don't know? Maybe I should check out the Hugo-winning novelette version to see if this just got needlessly padded out from something good, but I found a lot of this incredibly interesting but not necessarily enjoyable. It's a twist on Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" where the microcosm is biotech inside its creator rather than an external microcosm, and I think that leads to some interesting speculation about embodiedness as representing our DNA, some mechanistic code that can be interpreted to explicate our entire self, as opposed to embodiedness representing some experiential fact of life that goes beyond what can be calculated. But the characters, with the exception of Vergil who disappears halfway through the book, are dead dull. Also I tried to ignore the fact that it's premised on us not understanding what introns do and now we actually know a lot more about what they do than we did in 1985, but I'm sure I wasn't perfect at that ignoring.


Honey and Me by Meira Drazin

A fascinating middle grade novel about two Modern Orthodox girls struggling with identity and growing up as they become b'not mitzvah. Read on lannamichaels's rec and I think I agree with most of lannamichaels's lengthy review. And honestly I desperately hope it provides a sense of recognition for children living within a culture that really is not represented at all in children's literature.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I'd be curious to know which parts of Honey And Me you disagree with me on. I'm definitely coming into it with a lot of baggage ;)

[seekingferret]

Some of the bat mitzvah details I disagree with- I don't think it took my sister much more than a month to learn to leyn a perek of Rut for her bat mitzvah, and by the time she was set I could probably do half the perek from memory myself just from listening, so I didn't have a problem with Honey learning that quickly. And Megillah must be easier because everyone's closely listened to it a million times. I've never learned megillah trop but I don't think I would struggle too much if I had to learn how to do it quickly.

And I didn't think Milla's speech was too out of the ordinary. I still remember the bar mitzvah boy who delivered a very serious and scholarly speech on Shedim. It had nothing to do with his parsha, it was just the subject that spoke to him, and everyone took that fine.


I feel like there's at most a 10% chance Honey ends up OTD and a 0% chance for Milla. I don't think Honey's frustrations with the way she's treated necessarily translate into rejecting the life she's raised in, because there are lots of role models around of adult women in her community that have power. Her own mother has made the very clear choice to be the master of her domestic sphere and expand that domestic sphere large enough to satisfy her. Milla's mother offers a different path, and I agree with you that she finds it more attractive than her mother's path, but Honey can follow that path without giving up traditional Orthodoxy. And as for Yeshivat Maharat, I think Yoetzet Halacha would be more likely. Honey's not one of the ones the system is failing, she's one of the ones clever enough to make the system work for her.

[cahn]

This all sounds fascinating and I just got the sample from amazon! :)

I'm especially interested in your and lannamichaels' disagreement on what happens to Honey, given my own personal experiences with rejecting/accepting the life one was raised in. I accepted it, eventually; my sister rejected it utterly (and we had, of course, roughly the same upbringing and the same opportunities). But I also haven't read the book yet, so I'll be interested to see what I think when I do.