It's Always More Complicated

Because I don't seem to have done a Recent Reading post since mid-July - for some while it didn't seem like enough to make a post and then it was completely out of hand, so this is probably going to be very selective.

Also, there was quite a bit of re-reading during the period.

Thrillers and mysteries

Gillian Bradshaw, Dangerous Notes (2001). On previous form, I do not get along with Bradshaw's thrillers/futuristic works anything like as well as her historicals, and this I didn't even finish.

Fred Vargas, Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (2007). I did finish this even though at points it felt interminable. However, that may be because, I think, it is several books into a series? I spotted the villain early on, but that was perhaps because one of Margaret Maron's earlier works used a similar device.

Sff

Sherwood Smith, Treason's Shore (2009) - this wove together all the various strands into a really great conclusion. (Though, really, now all the volumes are out I do think an end-to-end reread is in order in due course.)

Rebecca Ore, Centuries Ago and Very Fast (2009) - Ore is one of those writers where I can see and admire what she's doing while seldom warming up to the specific books. This was pretty much that.

Octavia Butler, Fledgling (2005), which somehow I had never got round to reading until now. Butler is never less than wonderful, but I did feel that this was perhaps using the vampire trope (in admittedly a pleasingly fresh rescension of that tired old motif) to reiterate themes she'd explored before.

Amanda Downum, The Drowning City (2009). Wonderful world creation: however, I'm not sure that reading this on the train, in the interstices of a conference, and on the train again was entirely the best way to keep hold of the complexities of the plot.

Judith Tarr, Bring Down the Sun (2008). I am sure Tarr did her best to make Olympias a figure of woman-power and so on, but let's face it: she's another of the women who are famous for the sons they bore. And at the very least one would like to see her influence Alexander's upbringing rather than ending at the birth.

Mike Carey, The Naming of the Beasts (2009). Standard keeping well up, and total props for not succumbing to certain obvious tropisms.

Anne Aguirre, Blue Diablo (2009). An author whose sf I've found moderately worth reading, doing urban fantasy. Reader, I gave up on it. I am sure there are gems to be found in this genre, but so far I have not found them.

Anne Billson Stiff Lips (1996). I like her film criticism, and as I picked this up for 50p in a charity shop, thought I would give her fiction another go. I liked this - ghost story, everybody is pretty nasty, worked well - enough to take another look at Suckers (1993), her vampire novel: which actually, was better than I remembered until it failed to pay off adequately at the end, where it rather flopped.

YA

Sharon Shinn, General Winston's Daughter (2007). Props for writing a YA fantasy romancey type thing that is about colonialism (though I think making it all about trade/strategic necessity with no issues of religion/belief systems perhaps simplified the situation unduly), and having the heroine sexually/romantically interested in two men, even while engaged to one of them. Also, points for the unexpected subversion of gratitude-trope. Even so - and it was a pleasant read - feel everything turned out just a bit too easily.

Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby (2002) (the one with the guy who came over to me as creepy-stalkery rather than free spirit untrammelled by convention), Someone Like You (1998) and Last Chance (2002): compellingly readable yet somehow annoying. The protags are always comfortably placed in a socio-economic sense and there's a whole tying up the ends with a little take-home message thing going on (and conventional morality) that makes me feel that Charlotte Yonge had a bleaker vision.

Litfict

Karen Joy Fowler, The Case of the Imaginary Detective (2008) - because I read a v positive review somewhere. Liked it better than the Jane Austen Reading Group but found it a touch twee in places.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels (1990). I thought this was wonderful and exquisite while I was reading it, but the actual details have rather faded.

Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices (1941) - about an Englishwoman (brought up in Belgium), who is the Reverend Mother of a convent school in Ireland, pre WWI, and a pupil in whom she takes an interest. Query: I can think of several novels by women about nuns (some of them not Rumer Godden) - are there any novels by men about monks/monasteries (relatively contemporary ones, not historical)? This was excellent.

Non-fiction

Ginger S Frost, Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (2009). Read for review. V good - matches up well to her Promises Broken.

Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory (2007/2009). I like a good ranty feminist polemic as much as anyone, but as I was commenting on someone else's lj recently, an awful lot of it is been there and done that when you've been reading feminist theory as long as I have, and I'm not sure Despentes was saying anything that struck me as terribly new. However that doesn't mean these things don't still need saying over and over again and discovered by new generations and the debates had yet again.

Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (2009). This was a remarkable effort at digging up information on someone who seems not to have wanted to be found. I wasn't quite sure whether it was entirely reasonable to blame the literary non-productiveness of her later life on the fact that she didn't need the money, because I can think of other women writers of about the same time who also had long blocked periods or failure to complete projects (cf Joan Eason/Who was Sophie, discussed here). (But, true, also writers who thought that they might have written better if they'd written less, but they needed the money.)

Louise Foxcroft, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (2009). Read for review. Good on the whole, but has a couple of bloopers (Freud was something like 12 when Isaac Baker Brown died, rly) and also what looks like a non-citation to something I wrote about Stella.

Robertson Davies, Happy Alchemy: On the Pleasures of Music and the Theatre (1996). A posthumous collection of talks, prefaces, reviews etc. For the completist, I think.

Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (eds) Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009) - what it is to have friends who will put one on the free list for a comp copy. As with any collection of interdisciplinary essays, a bit of a mixed bag, but some really excellent stuff in there on this ever-interesting topic.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007). While some of this was going over ground (e.g. the constructionist vs essentialist debates on sexuality) which was a bit too familiar to me, there was a lot in there that was enlightening and thought-provoking.

An excellent way of making me think without having to crank up the process myself. So, five stimulants to cogitation from dichroic

1. You list Barbara Hambly as an interest - for her fantasy, her historical books, or both?
I must have been reading Hambly since Time of the Dark first came out - early 80s. I remember picking it off the new books shelf in Forbidden Planet when it was in the v cramped premises in Denmark St, and writing a postcard to someone in my feminist sf reading group recommending her as new author worthy of attention. But I've been very impressed with the Benjamin January series. And whole the more recent women behind the great men of US history books are not entirely my normal kind of thing, I enjoyed them remarkably. She does have a real sense of period and makes real efforts to eschew imposing anachronistic attitudes. I was a bit disappointed with Renfield, but possibly because I thought the story she was riffing off Dracula; was perhaps more engaging than the source material, and there was still quite a bit of the latter necessarily embedded in it.

2. You list quite a few authors I like including but not limited to Hambly, Jones, Duane, Sayers, Parker, Millay, Donne, Bull, O'Brian) but also several I had trouble engaging with - Byatt, Pym, Davies. I got through Possession, which is more than I managed for the latter two, but I doubt I'll ever reread it. Her pompous comments in re Harry Potter didn't help.) What would you say to tempt me back into Pym or Davies? If it helps, I also love Austen and am fond of Miss Read - I don't insist on fast-moving novels.)
I always feel that there is no obligation to like particular books and authors and one should not force oneself. Having said which, I was underwhelmed by the first O'Brian I read, ages ago, somewhere in the middle of the sequence, and then started at the beginning much more recently and could not stop. I kept dashing into bookshops to buy not just the one after the one I was reading but the one after that. There are also books that I once loved that seem to have faded on the vine in recent re-reads.

The book that really did it for me with Byatt (I'd read her earlier books but hadn't really warmed up to them) was The Virgin in the Garden - that was epiphanic. I was - disappointed is perhaps the wrong word - the later volumes after Still Life went in some directions that didn't say much to me, although there was still enough in them of the kind of thing that had got to me in the first place to keep me reading to the end.

With Davies I think it was on the re-reads that I was really grabbed. I've heard more than one person say that it was Fifth Business that got them into Davies. However, for some people the place to start might be the Salterton Trilogy, which is less idiosyncratically Davies-y as he later became and might thus be a good gateway - they are studies of provincial life rather than the complex meditations on art, creation, myth, etc of the later trilogies.

With Pym it would depend on what it was that was not engaging in your reading as to which direction I might point.

3. Since you list both Emma Bull and Dorothy Sayers as favorites, I'll pull out one of my favorite parallels and see what you think. How you think the relationship between Jamie and Susan in Freedom and Necessity compares to the one between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, or not? If you have't read F&N, I highly recommend it, for exactly this parallel.)
I have read F&N but not terribly recently, and not as many times as I have read the Sayers! I'd really have to read it again to answer this question properly, but the parallel had not occurred to me.

4. What is it you like about cooking? I think "liking to cook" can cover a fairly wide range of specific preferences and motivations
I think this changes over time. When I first set out it was largely about following recipes and seeing if they turned out as they were supposed to and if they tasted good. It's now much more about having had enough experience of cooking to try things without recipe in a more creative way, and it's very satisfying when it turns out well. There is also the aspect of what goes with what and what make good combinations. There is a certain magic about cooking, and possibly even more so about making bread, in terms of wreaking transformation.

5. Opinions on academia range from glorious ivory tower to hideous eater-of-grad-students. You seem fairly content there. Can you talk about your experience there a bit?
I have the advantage of being more or less at a tangent to mainstream academia. I'm not in an academic job, I don't do teaching or academic admin, I don't have to spend my time trying to get grants, and I don't have to gear my personal research programme to departmental targets and the requirements of Research Assessment. I did my PhD part-time, with a supervisor who for many people would have been a nightmare of lack of involvement, but who suited me. I didn't want someone breathing down my neck and demanding preliminary drafts, I knew what I wanted to do and had a fair idea of how to do it. I had the advantage of working at that time in a library which was part of an academic institute, so I had lots of access to seminars and symposia and work in progress talks and reading groups, which was for me perhaps more useful than anything more structured. I don't really feel much desire to be part of 'proper academe': unless it was a research post where I could do my own thing. I have a certain amount of cred in my field, which is gratifying. I don't like teaching. I love research. I quite enjoy writing depending what it is). I enjoy scholarly discussion. I find reviewing and refereeing intellectually stimulating. I think my position lets me get a good deal of the bits of the academic life I like, without the downsides. Okay, I have to fit it in around a full-time job as an archivist, but it's worked for me.