Wednesday has fingers crossed that phone battery charge thing will continue its positive trend
What I read
Finished A Bite of the Apple: and, okay, I see there did have to be a fair amount in there about the practicalities of publishing and the various decisions that were made and compromises that had to be borne with; and that if it had not been Virago the reporting would not have been heavily leaning on the 'cat-fighting' stereotypes when there were differences of opinion (though one does wonder if Goodings is perhaps therefore underplaying some of the fights that took place?). I was entirely there for her points about women's writing and publishing works by women and being intersectional in thus doing and that there are still massive forces of condescension and gatekeeping and exclusion, and trying to declare that it's all over now, over and over again. That said, I'm not frightfully on board with some of the actual decisions they took on who and what to publish, and cringed every time she mentioned her bezzie boosoom buddie who is one of their best-selling authors, who has been covered in inglory for her most recent travesty of history...
After which I turned to Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God (1994), which still holds up, though possibly Hambly has got even better since then so it slightly fades by contrast?
Read a couple of Robert B Parker's - Chance (Spenser #23) (1996) and Small Vices (Spenser #24) (1997), which are not quite into that late phase if not as good as his early work, but as I may have mentioned, these are on a shelf very convenient for pulling something off late at night.
Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters (1981): something, I forget what, reminded me of this so I went looking for it. Not really Jaffe's wheelhouse: I feel she was a lot happier when she got off the RPG-playing students and into the sad lives of their mothers, really.
DB Borton, Seventh Deadly Sin (Cat Caliban #7) (2004). I managed to find a copy of this at a really reasonable price though then had to wait weeks for it to arrive. Not at all bad, though I got a bit of a feeling that the move to the new publisher possibly came with lack of an editor, or a different editor, and this had a bit of an adverse effect.
Marcia Muller, Ice and Stone (Sharon McCone #34), arrived this week. I thought the setting was very good - McCone investigating the murder of two Indigenous women in a remote area where there are all sorts of jurisdictional issues and racial tensions and people with back-story - though I thought the solution rested a bit on a McGuffiny device.
On the go
As I had an Amazon gift voucher for Doing A Survey, I splashed out on what was not a very over-priced copy of DB Borton's Eight Miles High (Cat Caliban #8) (2007), only to find that vouchers for amazon.co.uk are not fungible to other sites. Still, I could use that voucher for other things I would otherwise have spent actual money on... Am now reading it and Cat Caliban is faced with a mystery deep in the past involving the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WW2.
Also, picked up during the process of looking for other things, Lisa Goldstein, The Uncertain Places (2011), which I see I read when it came out, but don't remember much about.
Up next
Dunno, really.
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