Recent reading
Non-Fiction
Alison Oram, Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing and twentieth century British popular culture (2007). This is very highly recommended. Wonderful stuff on men who turned out to be women, married to women, with children, working in manly jobs etc, press reporting of same, performative male impersonation, the very slow assimilation of sexological categories except among a restricted groups of intellectuals, ideas of 'upperclass decadence', the emergence of transgender as something that could be physically accomplished via hormones and surgery, etc etc. (I read substantial swathes of this in draft, but this is the first time I'd read the finished product end to end.)
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (2008) - also good, although not quite such radically new territory - ground that has been covered to some extent by other historians.
Litfic
Jane Smiley, Private Life (2010). Smiley is always good, but this was a bit of a grim read about a woman of the first half of the C20th married to someone who is a bit of a Casaubon figure but a) doesn't die b) does actually publish things (he's a scientist) which are either ignored, identified as plagiarism, or mocked. And does indeed expect the Dorothea role from her - endless typing, etc.
Kathleen Norris, Martie - The Unconquered (1917)was a rather more optimistic take on the possibilities for a woman in the early C20th even if there was a fair amount of misery and suffering along the way to her self-realisation.
Ditto, really, for Kate O'Brien's The Flower of May (1953). Perhaps a slightly too long and self-indulgent sequence when the heroine is visiting Venice with her posh Belgian friends, but otherwise, very good.
Susan Lanigan, A Trifle (2010). Ebook from Smashwords. Set in Ireland at a much more recent epoch than that O'Brien describes and in a very different milieu. Good, intense, disturbing - I still find myself ruminating upon it.
Charlotte Yonge, Sewing and Sowing: A Sexagesima Story (1882). One of the slighter Yonges, set in a humbler social milieu and presumably aimed at that group, but still agreeable.
Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945). This book seems like the answer to some questions about women's lives early on in WWII which someone was asking me some weeks ago - women with child whose husband is posted somewhere in the UK with the forces, she has to set up house in lodgings. Rather good. I tried reading Taylor some considerable while ago and rather bounced off, but I am giving her another try and it seems to be paying off.
Left off from the last post of this nature, Miss Read, News from Thrush Green (1970), which might be because it was a bit forgettable. Maybe one needs to have read one's way into this series?
Sarah Dessen. Dreamland (2001). What is the term for 'writers I really find annoying to a significant degree yet can't stop reading'? Dessen comes into this category for me, though at least in this one salvation did not come through Another Nicer Guy.
Mystery, crime, etc.
Several more Marjorie Allinghams (also in the category 'writers I really find annoying to a significant degree yet can't stop reading'), including one that I had actually read in the not very distant past but which nonetheless it took me quite some while to realise I had read. Also one (Black Plumes, 1940)which did not feature Albert Campion, although it still had one of her spooky built environments, weird family, etc.
Two interwar detective novels by Molly Thynne, The Red Dwarf. A Murder Mystery (1928) and The crime at the 'Noah's Ark' (1933). There are reasons why Thynne is not up there with the grandes dames of the Golden Age... that said, while I wouldn't go out of my way to acquire her other works, I would probably pick them up if I found them for a couple of quid in a charity shop (which is how I obtained these two).
J D Robb, Big Jack (2010). Set in the future world of the 'In Death' series and featuring Eve Dallas & Co, but I think expanded from a novella or something? (Anyway there is a linked novel written by Nora Roberts under that byline as well as the Robb one.) This was just what one wanted when tediously hanging around O'Hare waiting for one's flight, srsly.
Sff
Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not A Game (2009). Wow, this was really excellent. What I was saying about morally ambiguous female protags? Check. Along with a completely gripping narrative, even though I am so not into the world of gaming.
It does need more than checking boxes for me, I realise. There have been a number of works recently that have done things that yes, we should so like more of in our sff, but still haven't really worked for me at the level of wowness. Also, I am a very, very hard sell, I realise, on urban fantasy/paranormal romance. So, alas, not as blown away as some people by Malinda Lo's Ash (2009), or Alaya Johnson's Moonshine (2010) - and, for whoever was asking me for thoughts on the period feel of the latter, didn't quite get it right for my taste, though will concede that I know a good less about US in the 20s than the UK equivalent.
However, step up for the U GOTZ IT RITE award, Eleanor Arnason with Mammoths of the Great Plains (2010), a brilliant novella, which seemed to me to pretty much go point by point through the various objections to The Thirteenth Child and produce a compelling narrative which turned those issues around.
And for the, sometimes I do surprise myself when reading something I didn't think I got on with, entry of the month, I have been greatly enjoying Fumi Yoshinaga's manga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers (2009-10), which was joint winner of the Tiptree. Maybe this was somehow more accessible? I really like the subtlety of the way it deals with the gender reversals.
Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1921) - okay, moments of occasional twee-ery, but just the thing to have on one's ebook reader to read in snippets while waiting for things, because it's so episodic itself.
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