Recent reading
For some reason there doesn't seem to be a great deal since I last did one of these posts, feel I may be missing something out.
Thrillers:
Nicola Griffith, Always (2007). Extremely good, as were the other Aud Torvingen thrillers. Highly recommended. Interesting takes on women, violence, physical risk in a complex interweaving of two narrative strands.
S J Rozan, In This Rain (2006). Disappointing. The plot turns on a similar motif to one of the strands in Always on urban development and machinations around property, but I just could not get engaged with the characters. Sometimes that fast chopping between different characters or groups of characters works but (this may have been me) I just found this confusing and alienating here. Gave up partway through.
Sff:
Mike Carey, The Devil You Know (2006) and Dead Men's Boots (2007). I suppose these count as paranormal thrillers/supernatural noir, a genre about which I am often rather sceptical, but these worked very well for me. The London setting is really, really well done. Carey even managed to set one of these in an archive and not have me hurling the book at the wall. I was a bit dubious about one of the archivists undertaking actual physical conservation (I did not see that the Bonington was unable to run to employing a proper professional conservator), but apart from that, given that it was an eccentric sort of organisation, it didn't completely grate. In fact, even before a ghost/poltergeist started manifesting it sounded altogether like the sort of place in which Sara Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth might have spent a professional exchange visit.
Rebecca Ore, Time's Child (2007). I thought this started well, with a woman who had worked beside her artilleryman husband in Renaissance Italy and met Leonard Da Vinci brought forward in time, but then it somehow lost the plot as far as I was concerned with two male viewpoint characters who just didn't interest me and story developments that didn't particularly have me wanting to know what happened next. Another one abandoned half-way (a bit of a motif recently).
Other fic:
Dorothy Whipple, The Closed Door and Other Stories. Recently reissued by Persephone. I really don't see why Carmen Calill had such a hate on for Whipple and considered her not quite our sort dearie for Virago: some of these stories are creepy little gems of quiet domestic horrors, others are about women rescuing themselves or other women from the stultifying hand of family assumptions and suburban respectability. What's wrong with that?
Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever (2006). This was a really engaging read, but I was really annoyed that the solution to the narrator's problems appeared to be a Nicer, Less Upright, and Artistically Gifted Boy. I would quite have liked that to stay as friendship and the situation left more open - or even the possibility of renegotiating the relationship with Uptight Controlling Boy more on her own terms.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Shuttle (1907, just reissued by Persephone) - FHB does Henry James, sorta (possibly more like Mary Borden), or at least, the encounter between the New and the Old World as manifested through the marriage of penurious Brit aristos to US millionaire's daughters. Plus points for highly empowered heroine, but I don't think this intersection of realism/melodrama is really FHB's forte. Her most memorable works, I think, are fairy-tales in apparently realistic settings, and this is not among them.
Joanna Cannan, High Table (1931). Well written and quite readable but rather a downer. I found myself very annoyed at what seemed to me like the author's over-investment in showing the protag as a looooosssseeerrrrrr, who had become an academic because he could not deal with Life, and was only made Warden of his college as a compromise candidate, and was generally Hiding From Real Life. I want to ask, yes, but was he a good scholar? in spite of his cringing self-consciousness, and we're told that there is a shy kind man behind the awkward facade but we never really see it. Assume this is the same J Cannan who not only wrote numerous pony books but brought forth a dynasty of Pullein-Thompson daughters who did likewise. I liked her pony books better, but am not sure how they would stand up now I am no longer eleven years old and mad about ponies.
H G Wells, Christina Alberta's Father (1925). In Folkestone over the Bank Holiday weekend I went into the secondhand bookshop, which always has lots of Wells (local author) and found several marked right down to £1/£2, so got a substantial handful which was then knocked down by the bookseller to £5 for the lot. Started in on this one - the Lunacy Law Reform one, except there's lots more going on in it than that, including what I suspect may be a reflection of Wells' own paternity of a daughter brought up as someone else's. All very readable, and Wells could write, so even the bits where people sit around and talk Ideas are usually bearable, but I noted here (and am also finding in Joan and Peter, which I've just started) a certain rather condescending, 'what fools these mortals be' attitude towards his characters, in particular, the very kinds of people who were his core constituency, i.e. vaguely bohemian, into new ways of life, progressive-thinking, etc etc etc. V odd.
Litcrit:
Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007). I liked the idea of this one, because I am interested in groups and networks and mutual influences and support and so on, but I think this might have worked better for me were I a bit more an Inklings buff than I am. There seemed an awful lot of minutiae of specific ways in which their interactions took place and were reflected in the things they published.
Lisa Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction (2008). Interesting up to a point on the subversive ways women were writing science fiction in the US during, more or less, the Cold War era of the Feminine Mystique in operation. However, did anyone else who read this notice what appear to be the exact same paragraphs on Merrill's Daughters of Earth appearing in different chapters? Also, some of her descriptions of classic post 1970 sf by women (some of them sound like summaries based on not terribly accurate blurbs rather than, you know, actually having read the works in question) are so extremely weird I begin to be a bit dubious about her readings of the early materials. Plus, I can see that the thrust of her work is about subverting the suburban dream, but might it have been nice to have some acknowledgement of women like, well Leigh Brackett? C L Moore? who were doing something rather different in the genre.
Women's history:
Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1939 (2008). Read for review. Really excellent on what we can and can't know about this, and the uses made of prostitution as a debating tool in the Irish context.
Brilliant Women, C18th Bluestockings (2008) - the book of the exhibition. Some good introductory essays on the Bluestockings, their significant, their representation, their influence, and splendid illustrations. Perhaps a little basic if one has already devoured the works of Norma Clarke on the subject, but still worth reading.
Other:
Lisa M Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (2008). Another book which I liked less than I had hoped and which I have rather abandoned. Part of the problem may simply be the style, which I just didn't find engaged me particularly. I'm very sympathetic to the central idea, but I wish that the author had stuck a bit less closely to giving us accounts from her research population sample and perhaps taken a rather wider look at the ways women have moved through other-sex/same-sex desires or combined them at different stages in their lives. I also wondered if this fluidity might also be usefully generalised into areas such as career patterns and changes over the life-cycle.