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.
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