still wednesday

[vaznetti]

Finished (finally!): Sharon Penman, While Christ and His Saints Slept, which kind of fizzled out. Rather like the War between Stephen and Matilda, or Maude. Henry marries Eleanor and becomes Henry II. Eustace dies from a surfeit of eels. Every book should have a surfeit of eels in it

Comments

[fourteenlines]

The only Stephenson work I've read is Snow Crash which I mainly remember as being pretty rapey. I finished it because I was in a foreign country at the time and my English-language reading options were limited, but otherwise I'd have probably thrown it across the room. Are they not all like that?

[vaznetti]

I've never read Snow Crash; I think Stephenson's early work is a lot rougher than his more recent stuff, especially about sexual politics. I'm about halfway through this book (about 500 pages in) and we've had one rape threat (which was used to establish that Character A was a worse bad guy than Character B, so I kind of rolled my eyes) and one attempted rape, during which the perpetrator was killed by the intended victim. But the A plot is about a woman who is being held captive by a variety of Bad Guys so it didn't seem out of place to have one of them be a rapist. OTOH, I don't think there was any mention of sexual violence in the last book of his I read (Anathem), IIRC because it was an imagined world where that kind of thing just didn't happen.

I don't know -- I do give Stephenson points for trying hard when he's writing about women, even where he doesn't always succeed. But your mileage may vary.

[kerlin]

Kind of too bad that the Penman book didn't end well - I've had it on my list for a while as some of my undergrad research was on Stephen and Matilda, or rather some of the military practices that took place during their war. I've always been fond of the period.