What I've been reading lately
Litfic:
May Sinclair, The Divine Fire (1904) and The Romantic (1920). The Divine Fire was remarkably compelling reading, even while I was thinking that it was perhaps a bit too long and would have benefitted from her later, sparer, style. But who cannot like a novel in which a private library plays a significant plot part and one of the leads is the person hired to produce a catalogue? The Romantic is much shorter - more of a novella - and demonstrates both the impact of her experience in an ambulance unit in Belgium during the War and her exposure to psychoanalysis, in a study of cowardice. I have a couple more Sinclairs currently in the tbr pile.
Doris Lessing, The Cleft (2007). Lessing in fable mode, and a curiously convoluted narrative structure, writing about a primeval all-female culture in which 'monsters' (i.e. males) suddenly begin to be born. It was readable, but the general effect was to wonder why she bothered (whereas when I re-read The Fifth Child I could see what she was getting at in a way that I'd missed the first time round). It didn't seem to be playing to her strengths. Though I suppose at her age she's entitled to write what she likes.
Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk. This was very good indeed. It was a little hard to get into at first, as the first section is from the viewpoint of a prenaturally thoughtful and analytic five-year-old, but once in this really grabbed. It's the continuing story of Patrick from Some Hope, now married and with children but finding that although he has managed not to replicate his own father's appalling defects as husband and parent, he's still in a state of misery, anger and near-alcoholism, as well as facing serious issues with his dying mother. It gains from having read the preceding volumes, but I think it would also stand on its own.
Charlotte Yonge, More Bywords (1890) - short pieces and poems, of which I have only read the ones set in her contemporary world. They have that late Yonge bewilderment at the brash and disrespectful ways of the modern young, even though it may eventually turn out that at core they are good, dutiful and well-meaning.
History:
M J D Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787-1886 (2004): very good, very solid, very well-argued, full of interesting stuff, but rather dense and slow-going, I've had it on the go for months.
Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, Plats du Jour (1957, recently reissued by Persephone). I put this here because the interest is as much social historical as strictly culinary - how much has changed.
Criticism:
Teya Rosenberg, Martha P. Hixon, Sharon M. Scapple, and Donna R. White, Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom (2002), a collection of critical essays that I found a bit disappointing. Some of them seemed less about DWJ than showing off the particular writer's theoretical chops, some were really weak, and none of them had that highest critical merit of sending one rushing back to the book or books that was so definitely a product of reading Farah Mendlesohn's Diana Wynne Jones: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition.
Sff:
James D Owens, Here, There Be Dragons (2006). Picked up as a rec either via someone's lj or a link in someone's lj, and v disappointing. Has a classic instance of 'Spatchcocked Woman' who has no major part in the plot and no sense of having a story of her own, only there as Token Woman - although she is the captain of a magic ship, at a couple of points in the plot they are only saved from disaster by some off-the-wall stratagem thought up on the fly by one of Our Heroes. Hardly any other (living and present) women in the book at all, except for 3 weird oracular hags. Owens is (presumably, given their introduction as characters) influenced by the work of 3 writers, one of whom I haven't read, but the other two of whom have female characters playing a significant part in their plots and having their own stories - even stories that aren't The Romance Plot: even if they were Men of Their Time. Not that we could tell from the use of language or any other clues such as ingrained social attitudes that they were Men of Their Time (1917). Also, the plot was pretty much All-Time Good Versus Evil Cricket Match, with the mcguffin being the Wisden of Dooooom. (Possibly I'm being unfair. Maybe there are things there that I was just missing or not picking up, and perhaps I'm prejudiced by the whole startling absence of women thing.)
Karen Traviss, Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines (2006). Even though this is working within what I suspect are fairly stringently drawn lines of character and longer plot arcs, it was still a good read, the characters were not cardboard, and the sliding of one character towards the Dark Side was plausible and not all about 'whee! I'm villainous and evil, me!'
Lucy Sussex, A Tour Guide in Utopia (2005). Short stories. I was very impressed by her novel The Scarlet Rider (1996) - these stories were okay, but didn't quite have the same impact on me. This may be because I tend to prefer novels to short stories.
Also, re-read Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, which remain wonderful engaging reads even if one knows about the plot twists. Does anyone know if these constitute a completed trilogy, or might we hope for more in this setting? I noticed a few trailing loose ends that might be going somewhere...