Wednesday has been vaccinated, and got the sticker
What I read
The Sex, Love and Letters volume on de Beauvoir and her correspondents took up a lot of my reading time for some reason - there was perhaps rather more Simone and less of her correspondents than I might have liked, i.e. how they were using her to think with, and how they were not necessarily just following her line but both inspired by/wrangling with her. What I did not manage to get quite clear in my mind was whether there was not a feminist tradition in France for de B to engage with or whether she was disdainful of it. On the other hand, I do not, somehow, get the impression that there was the same tradition of women's political and social activism that I am familiar with in the British context, quite aside from Heroic Narrative of the Suffrage Struggle all the other campaigns. French women did not get the vote until 1945, married women could not have their own bank accounts until 1960-something, birth control was illegal until a similar date, and abortion until even later, etc etc. This all rather makes me go, let's hear it for the prudish prim and puritanical Brits...
For a break in the midst of that I re-read Robert B Parker, Cold Service (2005). This is the one with the Ukrainian mob.
I also finished Aliette de Bodard, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight - these short stories are very good, but not entirely aligning with my mood over the past months, which is why it has taken me so long to get through this.
On the go
I definitely hit a patch of not knowing what to read and not sure what I wanted to read and not feeling it for anything in particular.
However I am now re-reading Lara Elena Donnelly Amberlough (The Amberlough Dossier #1) (2017) - stands up better, I think, on a second reading, when one is a little more familiar with the various players and setting.
Up next
Well, there is Ursula K Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations; plus I have just discovered, by way of this very minimalist interview with her, a new collection of Joan Didion essays, Let Me Tell you What I mean, just out.
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