Wednesday is a sunny sunny day
Sekkrit Projekt #ifitoldyouidhavetokillyou isn't actually over, but it is now at the stage where I am no longer contemplating huge piles still to be got through somehow.
What I read
I seem to have picked some winners as freebies from US scholarly press (and although I would have preferred ebooks on principle, will admit that these are rather nice physical objects):
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, I'm Very into You: Correspondence 1995--1996 (2015) which is actually impassioned (mostly about ideas) exchange of emails over the space of a few months and an intriguing read.
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (2008) about male writers whom she has found saying things that she could identify with but who were also problematic in many ways. I suppose I was vaguely aware of Gornick from various collections of 1970s feminist writings, but I am now rather a fangirl and looking out for her other stuff.
Kate Zambreno, Heroines (2012) about which I was ambivalent - it was a compelling read but I found something self-indulgent and unexamined privilegy about it, and although towards the end she was yay female blogosphere she was rather nasty about second wave feminism (which, really, All More Complicated) and getting into that whole dodgy generations-of-feminism and former generation as somehow Bad Mother trope.
Plus several others that I have not yet started.
Elizabeth Moon, Deeds of Honor: Paksenarrion World Chronicles (2014) - pleasant enough but the stories probably don't make much sense if you haven't read the various novel series set in that world.
Susan Palwick, Mending the Moon (2013), which was lovely, in spite of the set-up - much-loved friend and adoptive mother brutally murdered on vacation, the impact on those left behind - beautifully done, and about the redemptive power of popular media.
On the go
Still Run Away Home for trennels readthrough.
Bogging down in The Ariadne Connection, which seems to keep everything dialled up to 11 all the time, there is a significant viewpoint character who embodies a set of tropes I find problematic (I can only hope that they are set up for a redemptive arc, because otherwise, I am a bit ugh), and what it maybe needs are a few more quiet moments - cf Beth Bernobich's lovely post on Quiet Moments in Epic Fantasy. Thrillers could also do with moments when things let up for a moment. Also, it's all so serious - I remember the earlier things by Stamey that I read having a lighter touch?
Started, and dipping in and out, Andrew M Butler, Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (2012), to help clarify my own thoughts on that dismissed decade.
Also, because somebody mentioned it on FaceBook, Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell, The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away (2005) - may have further thoughts, given my interest in women and friendship, once I've finished it.
Up Next
Well, somebody I know has just published (pseudonymously) Bought by the Billionbear, a shapeshifter erotic romance, and at 99p I'm prepared to give it a whirl (also, quite short).
Also, have ordered a couple of Gornick's other works, so those are on the pile as well. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2249103.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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