If it's not that women writing (or at least, publishing bookses) was completely unknown until the advent of one woman in the 1990s who publishes under initials/a male pseudonym and features male protags (according to a person who got their head handed to them and a very comprehensive education in literary history going back to the Sumerians on ( Read more... )

I now have a hair appointment (tomorrow, and one can now book an appointment with one's favoured stylist online), a doctor's appointment (early next month), and dental hygienist session in the fairly distant future, because they are booked solid (but will let me know if there's a cancellation before then).
On my last visit to the dental practice I ( 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... )

Hmmmmm: yes, I do think Mary Francis had significant input, if not more, into her husband's thrillers.

I read the first Dick Francis 'with Felix Francis' and thought, this seems a little more expositionary than we were wont to expect.

Started Silks by the same team last night and was soon feeling bogged down in lumpy exposition (surely if someone ( Read more... )

This icon isn't entirely true: I have some bread baking at the moment (brown wheatgerm) but that's all the cooking I've been doing, what with being away at a conference.

Which, as I have heretofore indicated, was very enjoyable, interesting, and instructive.

It was a nice size (approx 50 or so people?) though a pity that there were some parallel ( Read more... )

Further thoughts to thoughts on negative review and its dissing of subject.

In an extension or corollary of the accepted wisdom that srs litfic =/= happy endings - we must be at least miserable if not gone to hell in a handbasket - there is also a notion around, methinks, that if something is written in a way that is fluent and accessible and a ( Read more... )

And given the amount that I might have read in that time, don't seem to have got through that much, considering. And a lot of it was fairly light travel reading:
J D Robb, Creation in Death (2007) (Robb is perfect for plane reading); Laurel K Hamilton, The Harlequin (2007) (okay, I have a disturbing guilty weakness for the ongoing adventures of ( Read more... )

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 )

You know that thing that only privileged middle-class women are historically supposed to have been interested in feminism, living alternative lifestyles, etc etc?

I give you Nellie Shaw, writing in 1932. Her mother kept a small draper's shop in Penge, a suburb in South London:
Becoming a strong suffragist and also socialist, I hated and abhorred ( Read more... )

Some while ago I posted a link to an article by Margaret Drabble about Amber Blanco White with some comments by myself. She was the original of Ann Veronica in Wells's novel of that name, but in fact married someone else after getting pregnant by him. Anyway, as Drabble points out in this article, she went on to have an interesting, useful and ( Read more... )