#(source: i work at a public library and our demographic is red county but in a college town | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

july-19th-club · 2 years ago

Text

some desperate glory is so America In Space (derogatory; intentional) that it does sometimes feel, during reading, like it's leaning a little heavy-handedly into the 'this is what american imperialism or american fundamentalism could look like in the rest of the universe. its Bad!'. like it almost seems way too obvious. but then i think about the average sixty-year-old military scifi reader - the kind of guy who would be likely to pick this book up at work and check it out - and i know for a fact that reading the word "enby" in the book would just be another scifi word to him like he's not reading it thinking 'ah, these are common gender terms', he's reading it thinking 'ah, the author has invented a neutral term for genders? maybe? maybe it's a type of alien?' like he doesn't know. and so whenever i as a spec fic reader who's thirty and online a lot and runs in very leftist circles see a review of a book that accuses it of spoonfeeding its readers very basic and obvious concepts i think about xkcd average familiarity. and quartz of course

#im only a chapter into babel but i think it's another quartz of course situation #readers from kuang's general political background/circle will feel like she's babying them with obvious stuff. but most of her readers #are not going to be those people #of course those people are going to read the book. they agree with her #but there will be a far larger number of middle-aged middle-class mostly offline readers who will pick up this book in the public library #and that stuff might be new. for them #(source: i work at a public library and our demographic is red county but in a college town #so we have a really awful genre of people here who THINK they're very progressive because they vote straight democratic tickets #and work at a liberal arts school. but are so completely divorced from the part of town that is NOT the college #that they also think they can fix its problems by reading 'evicted' and having book clubs about it) (this is who is reading babel here)#(these guys NEED to be spoonfed)

4 notes · View notes