May Book Post
Jun. 1st, 2021 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaRounding up the rest of the books I read last month...
The Cruel Prince + The Wicked King + The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black
This is the most fun I've had reading YA in ages. Like, it's just such a fantastically fun and plotty adventure-plus-hatemance. I'm normally not into "faerie stuff" and thus wouldn't have picked this up on my own—in my experience, stuff that deals with the fey tends to be too twee and pat and cutesy for my tastes? Not so here; the fae are both satisfyingly weird and amoral in various turns, and Jude's struggle and eventual success to rise up through their ranks feels both appropriately fraught and actually-pretty-plausible-even-given-she's-some-mortal-teenage-girl (like, being a mortal teenage girl with some hella grudge-holding capabilities who was raised by a murderous faerie general will get you places! also, is metal as heck, lol).
There's a bit of fridge logic, particularly in the last third of the series (so we're really not gonna find out more about Taryn's deal huh? also idk about how the Bad Dad stuff was resolved? etc), but everything lands satisfyingly at the moment it's happening so who cares. I was also chuckling at how id-y it got in parts—there's a whole bit where she's trapped in a dungeon and half-starved and the bad dude's very creepily coming onto her, and there's a whole other bit where she's fantasizing how badass it'd be to sit on the throne alone with a giant horrifying monster-pet chained next to her, to eat anyone who disagrees with her—and I'm like, damn, I'm into this even now, but also I would've gone absolutely bonkers for this at sixteen.
Also Cardan and Jude are just so fantastically bitchy to each other. I love these fuckers. More couples should yell at each other about politics and then bang and then go back to yelling about politics without any actual discussion of feelings, actually—
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom
I expected this book to be a ruthless excoriation of the most egregiously scammy tactics and practices used by for-profit colleges. Cottom was an admissions officer at two different for-profit colleges, before she became an academic studying them, so she's got plenty of lurid material to draw on. And sure, there's some of that; it's hard not to raise eyebrows at the colleges' obscenely aggressive guilt-trip-y recruitment strategies, or their maniacal propensity for making sure their students show up for class one specifically, but no further (because they get that sweet federal loan money if the student shows up for class one)...
But it's actually far more interesting and broad of a book than I'd assumed. Cottom's less interested in a polemic and more interested in studying the "lower ed" sector (various for-profit programs that provide everything from certificates to master's degrees) as-is, how it came into being and what the students are getting out of it. Basically, her thesis is that the sector's exploded largely due to rising inequality, shifts in how education is (and isn't, mostly isn't) funded, and increasingly precarious (e.g. "gig") work. If employers don't offer on-the-job training, and jobs are increasingly short-term, and you need something to get out of that trap... then a degree is a desperate grasp at something that may provide stability and transferability and such. People know the colleges are risky, but there just aren't that many other welfare options around, yaknow?
Some of this is stuff I was already familiar with. The most interesting bits to me were:
* She interviews a guy who she thinks of as one of the "winners" of lower ed—that is, someone who's not obviously getting exploited or irreparably indebted, and may well be benefiting from for-profit education more than he would from the traditional model. The guy's a Morehouse College graduate, so he's perfectly smart-in-the-stereotypical-sense, and he's familiar with the advantages of traditional education. He has an idea and a plan for a business he wants to start with an old classmate, so he's going to all these networking events and working on business-y things on the side. And he notices, after a while, that he's missing two things: (1) the fancy titles that so many of the panelists at these networking events have, and (2) some damn capital with which to start the business.
The online MBA program can get him the former. The student loan refund check he gets from said program can help with the latter.
The author spends a couple paragraphs explaining that she's not endorsing this dude's behavior, she's a sociologist, she's just describing how rational agents do their thing, so please get off your high horse all you scolds who are all scandalized and aggrieved by this "misuse" of federal funds, okay. I was chuckling, because like—okay, I get that she needs to have that paragraph for all the scandalized/aggrieved/fussy scolds in the world. I, however, being an unfussy hacker type, was like "damn that's a clever trick, makes sense to me."
* There's a kindly, double-Ivy-educated data science guy, right? He left finance because he wanted to apply his talents to helping people, instead of, yaknow, helping rich assholes get richer, and thus, he wound up as the data science guy for one of these for-profit colleges. He reaches out to Cottom because, even though he thinks he's doing good work, all the numbers say they're doing a good thing, he can't help but shake the feeling that they're... not?
He has some good reasons to think he's doing good stuff! This isn't a case of blatant self-delusion. He's got fascinating high-level data on who their students are and what their needs are, and he's used direct interventions based on that data to boost graduation rates, salaries upon graduation, job placements, all that good stuff. (e.g., one insight they got early on was that a lot of their graduates were flunking interviews due to mismatches in "soft" skills (read: class indicators) during the interview process. They started just sitting everyone down with a tutorial on "how not to fuck up the interview" and employment rates leapt. That kind of thing.)
But at the end of the day he kinda sighs and says... yeah, I dunno, the employers we work with keep pushing us to graduate people faster and cheaper. Feels a bit grind-y. This dude can be a benign middleman, or a scummy middleman, but he's stuck in the middle of a pretty brutal landscape either way.
* It's not exactly news, but it's so infuriating to read how many people are forced to drag around, like, under $3k of student debt like a lodestone. I understand loan forgiveness is a, uh, prickly issue in some spheres... But when I read a story like, "this woman's credit is #rekt because she forgot to pay the bill for some random certificate course she was taking, because her husband became terminally ill, and she had hoped to pay it back around tax refund time, but she didn't qualify for the EITC that year because caring for her dying husband didn't count as work"...? Augh! I just want to tear all of my hair out over the sheer and utter waste of it. It's! fuckin'! two thousand dollars! Give the woman a fucking break! also fuck the EITC but that's a whole separate thing
* It is interesting how much more streamlined for-profit college enrollment is versus community college enrollment. Most of the students seeking these for-profit degrees would be much better served but their community colleges, but even community colleges manage to make incorrect assumptions about their prospective students' alacrity with paperwork, bureaucratic nonsense, etc, in a way that the for-profit colleges just don't. The for-profit people will have a dude sit with you to fill the stuff out if that's what it takes. Certainly that's an aspect that community colleges may want to emulate.
I do wish Cottom had fleshed out some of her background assumptions a little more—not necessarily because I disagree with them, but because I wish I had a more solid grasp on "how we got here." She mentions e.g. the change in Congressional funding of higher education that boosted for-profit college growth in the 90s, and why employers are able to offload more training onto individuals, and some high-level stuff about how student loans are structured, but nothing in detail—and yeah, there's a good reason she didn't include all that, now that I type that out, because wow yes that would be a whole book-length topic on its own. Why does everything have to be so complicated, etc :P
Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels by Gwen Hayes
This is more like a lengthy blog post than a book, but eh, I'm including it here because it's damn handy. The author is a writer and editor of romance novels; she wants to help you make your romance novels good; she has a beat sheet and she tells you about how to make it work.
I liked both the author's general vibe (no needless yelling or tedious prattling about how this is the One True Story Structure TM or anything; just a bunch of straightforward and humorous observations on what tends to work and what doesn't), and her relatively pared-down approach (quick enough to blast through when you need emergency manuscript help & don't want to wade through some tome).
I unexpectedly found myself wrestling with something like a romance plot this past month, and got stuck while writing, and this book was damn handy for just debugging the damn thing. Worth it for that alone.
The Cruel Prince + The Wicked King + The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black
This is the most fun I've had reading YA in ages. Like, it's just such a fantastically fun and plotty adventure-plus-hatemance. I'm normally not into "faerie stuff" and thus wouldn't have picked this up on my own—in my experience, stuff that deals with the fey tends to be too twee and pat and cutesy for my tastes? Not so here; the fae are both satisfyingly weird and amoral in various turns, and Jude's struggle and eventual success to rise up through their ranks feels both appropriately fraught and actually-pretty-plausible-even-given-she's-some-mortal-teenage-girl (like, being a mortal teenage girl with some hella grudge-holding capabilities who was raised by a murderous faerie general will get you places! also, is metal as heck, lol).
There's a bit of fridge logic, particularly in the last third of the series (so we're really not gonna find out more about Taryn's deal huh? also idk about how the Bad Dad stuff was resolved? etc), but everything lands satisfyingly at the moment it's happening so who cares. I was also chuckling at how id-y it got in parts—there's a whole bit where she's trapped in a dungeon and half-starved and the bad dude's very creepily coming onto her, and there's a whole other bit where she's fantasizing how badass it'd be to sit on the throne alone with a giant horrifying monster-pet chained next to her, to eat anyone who disagrees with her—and I'm like, damn, I'm into this even now, but also I would've gone absolutely bonkers for this at sixteen.
Also Cardan and Jude are just so fantastically bitchy to each other. I love these fuckers. More couples should yell at each other about politics and then bang and then go back to yelling about politics without any actual discussion of feelings, actually—
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom
I expected this book to be a ruthless excoriation of the most egregiously scammy tactics and practices used by for-profit colleges. Cottom was an admissions officer at two different for-profit colleges, before she became an academic studying them, so she's got plenty of lurid material to draw on. And sure, there's some of that; it's hard not to raise eyebrows at the colleges' obscenely aggressive guilt-trip-y recruitment strategies, or their maniacal propensity for making sure their students show up for class one specifically, but no further (because they get that sweet federal loan money if the student shows up for class one)...
But it's actually far more interesting and broad of a book than I'd assumed. Cottom's less interested in a polemic and more interested in studying the "lower ed" sector (various for-profit programs that provide everything from certificates to master's degrees) as-is, how it came into being and what the students are getting out of it. Basically, her thesis is that the sector's exploded largely due to rising inequality, shifts in how education is (and isn't, mostly isn't) funded, and increasingly precarious (e.g. "gig") work. If employers don't offer on-the-job training, and jobs are increasingly short-term, and you need something to get out of that trap... then a degree is a desperate grasp at something that may provide stability and transferability and such. People know the colleges are risky, but there just aren't that many other welfare options around, yaknow?
Some of this is stuff I was already familiar with. The most interesting bits to me were:
* She interviews a guy who she thinks of as one of the "winners" of lower ed—that is, someone who's not obviously getting exploited or irreparably indebted, and may well be benefiting from for-profit education more than he would from the traditional model. The guy's a Morehouse College graduate, so he's perfectly smart-in-the-stereotypical-sense, and he's familiar with the advantages of traditional education. He has an idea and a plan for a business he wants to start with an old classmate, so he's going to all these networking events and working on business-y things on the side. And he notices, after a while, that he's missing two things: (1) the fancy titles that so many of the panelists at these networking events have, and (2) some damn capital with which to start the business.
The online MBA program can get him the former. The student loan refund check he gets from said program can help with the latter.
The author spends a couple paragraphs explaining that she's not endorsing this dude's behavior, she's a sociologist, she's just describing how rational agents do their thing, so please get off your high horse all you scolds who are all scandalized and aggrieved by this "misuse" of federal funds, okay. I was chuckling, because like—okay, I get that she needs to have that paragraph for all the scandalized/aggrieved/fussy scolds in the world. I, however, being an unfussy hacker type, was like "damn that's a clever trick, makes sense to me."
* There's a kindly, double-Ivy-educated data science guy, right? He left finance because he wanted to apply his talents to helping people, instead of, yaknow, helping rich assholes get richer, and thus, he wound up as the data science guy for one of these for-profit colleges. He reaches out to Cottom because, even though he thinks he's doing good work, all the numbers say they're doing a good thing, he can't help but shake the feeling that they're... not?
He has some good reasons to think he's doing good stuff! This isn't a case of blatant self-delusion. He's got fascinating high-level data on who their students are and what their needs are, and he's used direct interventions based on that data to boost graduation rates, salaries upon graduation, job placements, all that good stuff. (e.g., one insight they got early on was that a lot of their graduates were flunking interviews due to mismatches in "soft" skills (read: class indicators) during the interview process. They started just sitting everyone down with a tutorial on "how not to fuck up the interview" and employment rates leapt. That kind of thing.)
But at the end of the day he kinda sighs and says... yeah, I dunno, the employers we work with keep pushing us to graduate people faster and cheaper. Feels a bit grind-y. This dude can be a benign middleman, or a scummy middleman, but he's stuck in the middle of a pretty brutal landscape either way.
* It's not exactly news, but it's so infuriating to read how many people are forced to drag around, like, under $3k of student debt like a lodestone. I understand loan forgiveness is a, uh, prickly issue in some spheres... But when I read a story like, "this woman's credit is #rekt because she forgot to pay the bill for some random certificate course she was taking, because her husband became terminally ill, and she had hoped to pay it back around tax refund time, but she didn't qualify for the EITC that year because caring for her dying husband didn't count as work"...? Augh! I just want to tear all of my hair out over the sheer and utter waste of it. It's! fuckin'! two thousand dollars! Give the woman a fucking break! also fuck the EITC but that's a whole separate thing
* It is interesting how much more streamlined for-profit college enrollment is versus community college enrollment. Most of the students seeking these for-profit degrees would be much better served but their community colleges, but even community colleges manage to make incorrect assumptions about their prospective students' alacrity with paperwork, bureaucratic nonsense, etc, in a way that the for-profit colleges just don't. The for-profit people will have a dude sit with you to fill the stuff out if that's what it takes. Certainly that's an aspect that community colleges may want to emulate.
I do wish Cottom had fleshed out some of her background assumptions a little more—not necessarily because I disagree with them, but because I wish I had a more solid grasp on "how we got here." She mentions e.g. the change in Congressional funding of higher education that boosted for-profit college growth in the 90s, and why employers are able to offload more training onto individuals, and some high-level stuff about how student loans are structured, but nothing in detail—and yeah, there's a good reason she didn't include all that, now that I type that out, because wow yes that would be a whole book-length topic on its own. Why does everything have to be so complicated, etc :P
Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels by Gwen Hayes
This is more like a lengthy blog post than a book, but eh, I'm including it here because it's damn handy. The author is a writer and editor of romance novels; she wants to help you make your romance novels good; she has a beat sheet and she tells you about how to make it work.
I liked both the author's general vibe (no needless yelling or tedious prattling about how this is the One True Story Structure TM or anything; just a bunch of straightforward and humorous observations on what tends to work and what doesn't), and her relatively pared-down approach (quick enough to blast through when you need emergency manuscript help & don't want to wade through some tome).
I unexpectedly found myself wrestling with something like a romance plot this past month, and got stuck while writing, and this book was damn handy for just debugging the damn thing. Worth it for that alone.
