Recent, sort of, reading
Ulp, two months plus or minus since I last did one of these - even if one was a short month and even if I did do some posts on particular books.
Biographies, memoirs, lives, diaries
Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn: A Tale of Spiritual Seduction (2000) - picked up via a recommendation from someone on my flist. A disturbing book about how the desire to lead a more spiritually-meaningful life can lead to all sorts of disasters for individuals and communities. Also touches on the problems arising when a spiritual tradition is imported from somewhere where it has deep cultural roots, to one in which it doesn't, and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that occur. In addition, interesting on a cult-like development around a female spiritual leader.
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008). This was a thick and very readable account of the late Victorian/Edwardian reformer - socialist, pacifist, early environmentalist, and above all, homophile and advocate of reformed intimate relationships. Probably people don't read Carpenter's works much any more (except for academic research perhaps) but he was an enormously influential figure of his times. This is a good solid biography which does a lot of setting in context - my only quibbles are, some weird errors that should have been picked up by someone along the way (Ibsen's little-known heroine 'Dora' - who slams the door - among them), and also, some passages that at first I thought TMI about the convolutions of relationships or political allegiances within Carpenter's circles, and then, I thought, actually not enough I, probably where author had tried to do a bit of trimming and compressed just a bit too much, and that is what makes them a bit 'huh?'
Susan Sontag, Reborn: early diaries 1947-1964 (2009). These were in a way the opposite - elliptical, sporadic, cryptic, needing quite a bit of editorial intervention by David Rieff (Sontag's son) to contextualise, very much not telling a linear story of her progress from intense teenager to public intellectual - reading lists, comments on books, angstiness about relationships - it's hard to get a handle, from what she wrote, on whether she saw her lesbianism itself as A Problem, or whether the problems lay in particular relationships. But surprisingly (perhaps) compelling as a read.
Betty MacDonald, Onions in the Stew (1955). Picked up in the Oxfam shop. I'm sure I read this (many years ago) in a omnibus edition with MacDonald's other autobiographical works, and very likely more than once. Yet very little of it was at all familiar, and the bits I thought I remembered from it weren't there (so maybe that was another book entirely?).
Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A personal history, with jigsaws (2009). Apart from enjoying Drabble's writing (I think I've mentioned before that her writing has a hypnotic, thesp-reads-the-telephone-directory, effect on me even if I'm not particularly into the actual story), I liked this for a number of reasons. One is that it's the nearest thing I've ever come across to my darling G B Stern's 'rag-bag chronicles' in the way it takes random objects and obsessive interests and free associations from these and bits of personal history and anecdote and weaves them together (she doesn't name-check Stern, so maybe she just evolved it herself). It's more self-consciously erudite and scholarly than Stern - even when Drabble is describing her own rather random researches into the history of jigsaws and other games and puzzles. It's also rather less coy about her own life than Stern tended to be, even if Drabble also expresses her concerns about 'using' family material (including mentioning her sister A S Byatt's annoyance over her literary use of a certain teapot). It's got interesting thoughts about the attraction of patterns (though I could perhaps wish that she'd entered into some kind of dialogue with my dear Dame Rebecca's thoughts in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and apparently pointless time-filling activities.
Litfic
There was a small clutch of Persephones (waves at cassandre!):
Ruby Ferguson, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (1937) - rather disappointing. Part of that (post-1918?) tradition of 'the awfulness of upper-class Victorian women's lives on the marriage market', but without the kind of bitter lack of compromise E M Delafield brought to Thank Heaven Fasting (aka A Good Man's Love) and far more fairytale than Delafield about the possibilities of escape - in fact elided several decades with a general indication that they were idyllic. Also, I saw the twist at the end coming a long, long, way off. Barbara Euphan Todd, Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946 was an interesting spin on the 'South-Sea Islander encounters urban civilisation' motif. Miss Ranskill comes back to England after several years shipwrecked on a South Sea island (which has greatly shaken up her previously conventional habits and beliefs) back into the middle of World War II, and it feels as though one thing that Todd was after here was to show how much (over a longer time and slower process than Miss Ranskill experiences) things had changed and what people had come to put up with. D E Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book (1934). I think in my youth I read several of Stevenson's books (the titles elude me...) This was charming and amusing - a spinster in A Typical Literary English Village turns to writing a novel, rather than keeping chickens, when in economic straits. Wackiness ensues...
Sff
This has been a very good couple of months: Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest, Jo Walton's Lifelode and Sarah Monette's Corambis were very different, but all of them I belted through under narrative compulsion and now need to re-read for all the things I missed or the significance of which I missed the first time through, and generally the depth and layering and subtlety. Mike Carey's Thicker Than Water keeps up the standard of the previous Felix Castor novels and ratcheted up the complications and thickened the worldbuilding considerably. Also read Victoria Janssen's The Duchess, Her Maid, the Groom & Their Lover which I enjoyed even though 'erotic romance' is not a genre I normally read: it maybe helped that Janssen was seriously complicating the standard 'masterful aristo male' scenario...
YA
Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key (2008) - Dessen's books could so easily be banal problem novels with self-help manual moral mottoes, but they somehow manage to transcend that while still leaving me with the feeling that there are pills in the jam. Francesca Lia Block's Wasteland (2003) irked me immensely - one can take only so many punk waifs, and I thought that this one in particular had Huge Evasive Copout at the end.
And besides:
Have been gulping my way, in between everything else, through re-reads of Modesty Blaise (am up to Dragon's Claw). Predictable but fun.