(Because of the famous line about 'girls who wear glasses'.)
Can this really be true? Japan 'glasses ban' for women at work sparks backlash?
I mean, what are the women supposed to do? Blunder around in a near-sighted/astigmatic fog, with various knock-on consequences for business efficiency?
Am trying to remember in what novel - I think it was a ( Read more... )

Okay, I can't actually find my copy of Gidget, but I remember it as a jolly good read and one that did not succumb to Ro-mance at the end, ending with Our Heroine shooting the perfect curl rather than smooching one of the surfer dudes who formed the amorous interest.
It was, we may say, a good deal better than the movie, however nostalgic people ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Pauline Kael biography: not sure if it's just that somebody whose career was basically sitting in darkened cinemas watching movies and then writing about them is not going to be wildly exciting, and it's by its nature going to be mostly about her critical opinions and spats with other critics, directors she dissed, etc, or ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Give Me Your Hand, which was good but grim (and also has led to my being recced large nos of 'psychological thrillers', which, as a general thing, are on my do.not.want list).
And then sunk into one of those reading troughs when I could not think of anything I particularly wanted to read next, either from the massive tbr piles ( Read more... )

Interview with Jenny Runacre: “I didn’t want Hollywood upending my life - or the humiliations that Maria was exposed to.”, who in fact had a significant film career of her own, just didn't, it seems, want all the hype and hassle, more power to her.
So Stuart Jeffries has her talking about working with Jack Nicholson, Derek Jarman and John ( Read more... )

Engaged workers might be busy - pretending, research finds. Study warns that teams can appear productive in the workplace but actually behave in Machiavellian ways.
And I was, like, why should they be engaged and bright-eyed bushy-tailed little peons of capitalism? I liked my job more than most people like their job, probably, and even so there was ( Read more... )

I think Ryan Gilbey is a bit point thahr misst when he goes moaning about certain movies not being Feminist Enuff For His Woke Self - because, sometimes, and in historical context, sometimes it's a big fat Yay Yes! to a film that foregrounds the women characters and has them win and is FUN. (You will pry my fluff from my cold dead hands.)
It does ( Read more... )

What I read
JE Smyth, Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood: discussed in its own post here.
Elizabeth Bear and Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette), The Cobbler's Boy (2018): mystery, high-level Elizabethan political intrigue, tense family dynamics, the young Christopher Marlowe - very good.
Jane Haddam, Festival of Deaths (1994) re-read ( Read more... )

Well, that was interesting/inspiring/depressing. All those great women doing amazing things and so many of them overlooked by history and only recoverable by really dedicated trawling through contemporary sources. (She's really looking at the 30s and 40s and a bit about how things went to pot after that.)
It was clearly A Moment when things were ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, about which I was slightly meh, or at least, not moved to read the rest of the series.
Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe, Reappraising Jane Duncan: Sexuality, Race and Colonialism in the My Friends Novels (2017), picked up via a mention from
( Read more... )