(Actually weather seems to have quietened down a bit, at least temporarily.)

The Last Time the World was Simple. I am sure I have oftimes commented about this: though I think there is this whole issue of seeing elsewhere or elsewhen as Simpler, when in fact it is/was complicated in different ways. Also on the tendency to think there has never been ( Read more... )

Still drowning in Sekkrit Projekt reading.

Also, early in December, my Sony ebook reader, which had been getting crankier, spontaneously reset itself and lost all the bookmarks for things I was reading on it, which was a bit tedious. However, I now have (Xmas prez) a shiny new Kobo Aura. I did a hard reset on the Sony and it seems functional but ( Read more... )

Finished during the week

Stable Strategies - as always, short story collections, a bit mixed, but these were all pretty good.

Tender Morsels: this was good, but although I can see that, somehow I never quite warm up to Lanagan's work, which may not be the point anyway.

Gail Godwin, Flora. Just out. Does her thing of the subtleties and nuances of ( Read more... )

What I'm reading

Due to its early release and expeditious delivery, I am now in the middle of Barbara Hambly's latest Benjamin January mystery, Good Man Friday. How much do I like the v specific times in which these are set: i.e. impact of particular banking crises/international events/etc. Also, ability to introduce Known Historical Character/s ( Read more... )

What I'm Reading

Re-read of Testament of Friendship is being a bit desultory - a few pages here and there (is there a problem that VB is not entirely clear whether she is writing The Biography, or a personal memoir about her Bezzie Buzzie Friend?). Perhaps what I really want to be doing is re-reading some of Holtby's pre-South Riding novels?

Peter ( Read more... )

Two articles in the Guardian 'Family' section today caught my eye as being about very different ways of turning experience into, well, if not capital-A ART at least a saleable narrative.

There are things that I totally cringe at in this interview with Simon Gough, the grand-nephew of Robert Graves who got disastrously involved in the complex ( Read more... )

(Early July, I think.)

( Litfic )

Germaine Greer takes issue with the claim that modern sex began in the late 17th century -
Dabhoiwala ignores the kinds of economic, social and demographic history that were systematised at Cambridge. It is not enough to show that somebody somewhere was thinking thoughts that we might think of as amazingly progressive, without investigating ( Read more... )

Urrggh, aaaargh, eeeeeeeuuuuuuwww, etc to the gospel that Catherine Hakim is preaching in Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Interview with Zoe Williams here, and you get the distinct impression that Zoe wished she'd taken a codfish with here, and review of the noxious thing by Will Self, which is a bit point thahr misst (wot duz e no about ( Read more... )

Because it feels like time to do one of these.

Read for review or research:
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: accounts of Victorian erotic experience (2003): quite good, perhaps not tremendously useful for my particular purposes (too much close reading of rather specific texts, not enough wider context), but was exceedingly good on ( Read more... )