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I’ve not done a reading update in a while. Partly this is because I have been reading books for which I now harbour a distinct and flavoursome resentment. But let me tell you of some of the books I have been finding engaging!
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano: which I’d been wanting to read for years! A good primer on trans concerns in feminism as well as anti-femininity.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: is one of those books with a really confusing and engaging narratorial and temporal conceit. It’s about the death and burial of Addie, as told by her family in Mississippi. I was waiting all the way through for the racism, and it emerges towards the end, towards black people, and scathingly.
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: is rather amazing. It’s a lesbian novel set in Victorian England (but written recently), with so much plot it’ll trip you up and make your head spin. It’s about Sue, who plots to steal the fortune of Maud Lilly, but events twist and reverse and turn again. You must read it.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: has a very strong main character in the teenage Cassandra. She chronicles her first adventures in love and writing as her family struggles to scrape together a life in their crumbling castle home.
The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy: I’m a great fan of Piercy’s from her Woman on the Edge of Time, so I was looking forward to this one. I didn’t like it as much, possibly because I didn’t live through its very 1970s sensibilities. It’s about a lesbian, Leslie, who is involved in a kind of love triangle with the straight teenage Honor and troubled gay man Bernie, all of whom are dreaming of a different world.
Presently I am reading Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Madness and Civilisation is a lot easier to read than anything else of Foucault’s I’ve read, so it is probably a good place to start if you want to get into Foucault. I am liking Midnight’s Children so much that I have been dragging it out for weeks – I don’t want it to end!! It’s about a young man born at the exact moment of India’s independence, and whose life is ever intertwined with his nation’s history. It is amazing.
Go on, tell us what you’ve been reading.
I loved Fingersmith. We saw the TV series first, and then I read the book, which I enjoyed enormously. I’ve read Midnight’s Children once, and enjoyed it, but then I tried re-reading it a few years ago, and just couldn’t get into it. I must give it another go. If you are interested in books set in India, then I strongly recommend A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth. It was an absorbing read, and re-read.
Most recently I have re-read Rosemary Sutcliff’s three main Eagle books. We got the movie of The Eagle of the Ninth out on DVD, and were deeply disappointed, so I consoled myself with the books. And I’ve just moved onto a biography of Catherine of Aragorn which I gave to my Mum for Christmas. She read it, and then my Dad read it, and they’ve brought it down for me to read. I did think that sooner or later I would get to read it too, when I bought it for Mum.
I really, really want to see the TV series. I should so like to read A Suitable Boy, but before then there are a bunch of books glaring at me…!
I have finally read Karen Healey’s Guardian Of The Dead and it was lovely. Mythology! Respectfully treated asexual character! Interestingly inhuman nonhumans! Mythology! ^_^
That’s the only thing I’ve read recently that wasn’t a reread. (The vast majority of my reading is rereading. Particularly of Tamora Pierce and Terry Pratchett.)
I’m reading Hammerfall by C.J. Cherryh. I think it would be classified as sci-fi but it’s about some desert people who start having visions, are declared “mad” and get sent across to desert to find out why it’s happening. So far there are some race fails but the setting is unusual at least.
Also slowly making my way through Love in the Time of Cholera.
Ahhh, I Capture the Castle! A forever favorite of mine. Currently re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and awaiting Bitterblue (Kristin Cashore’s newest) from the library.