![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reading post
Oct. 16th, 2015 01:49 pmJust finished:
One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson. I stalled on this for quite some time when I was halfway through the second month with Babe Ruth (first month, Charles Lindbergh) and realised from the portraits on the back that I had Calvin Coolidge & Al Capone to go, which induced in me a sudden intolerance of yet more of the Straight Cis White Male model of history. I did end up finishing it, skimming; it is entertaining and there are more complicated stories at the edges, with the Mississippi floods causing significant black migration, and bits about the Ku Klux Klan, various anti-Semites (mainly Henry Ford) and anarchist bombings. I would describe it however as exceedingly weak on women. There is, for example, a mention of Margaret Sanger, in the eugenics bit, but nothing really about her work on birth control, which was ongoing during the period of this book.
The first two of Jacqueline Carey's Agent of Hel urban fantasy books - Dark Currents and Autumn Bones (each book is a season). I have had erratic experiences with Carey's stuff but these are endearing and although they tick a lot of the expected urban fantasy boxes (heroine has magic powers which are also source of angst; heroine describes her own clothing in unnecessary detail; heroine is torn between at least two amazingly attractive nonhuman males with accompanying angst) they also diverge enough or do so with enough charm that I have been won over. This is also the first book I've read in ages where the pop culture references all really work for me.
Also, Janet Lansbury's No Bad Kids: toddler discipline without shame, which I am thinking about.
Ongoing:
I am just under a 100 pages from the end of Hild, by Nicola Griffith, which is excellent. Historical, in Dark Ages Britain, and a story about an exceptional woman who is also, equally, a product of her specific community and times, and not a present day transplant to an unenlightened past. An excellent antidote to the Bryson and to any number of assorted war- and grit- and erasure/objectification of women historical/fantasy books out there.
I am also a hundred pages into Diane Duane's A Wizard of Mars, which I started before I got absorbed by Hild. And about 200 pages into Poison Fruit, the third Agent of Hel book, because it arrived at the library and I got distracted.
Coming up:
All the bits of unfinished book. I also have Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, the last Terry Pratchett, and Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven hanging around.
One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson. I stalled on this for quite some time when I was halfway through the second month with Babe Ruth (first month, Charles Lindbergh) and realised from the portraits on the back that I had Calvin Coolidge & Al Capone to go, which induced in me a sudden intolerance of yet more of the Straight Cis White Male model of history. I did end up finishing it, skimming; it is entertaining and there are more complicated stories at the edges, with the Mississippi floods causing significant black migration, and bits about the Ku Klux Klan, various anti-Semites (mainly Henry Ford) and anarchist bombings. I would describe it however as exceedingly weak on women. There is, for example, a mention of Margaret Sanger, in the eugenics bit, but nothing really about her work on birth control, which was ongoing during the period of this book.
The first two of Jacqueline Carey's Agent of Hel urban fantasy books - Dark Currents and Autumn Bones (each book is a season). I have had erratic experiences with Carey's stuff but these are endearing and although they tick a lot of the expected urban fantasy boxes (heroine has magic powers which are also source of angst; heroine describes her own clothing in unnecessary detail; heroine is torn between at least two amazingly attractive nonhuman males with accompanying angst) they also diverge enough or do so with enough charm that I have been won over. This is also the first book I've read in ages where the pop culture references all really work for me.
Also, Janet Lansbury's No Bad Kids: toddler discipline without shame, which I am thinking about.
Ongoing:
I am just under a 100 pages from the end of Hild, by Nicola Griffith, which is excellent. Historical, in Dark Ages Britain, and a story about an exceptional woman who is also, equally, a product of her specific community and times, and not a present day transplant to an unenlightened past. An excellent antidote to the Bryson and to any number of assorted war- and grit- and erasure/objectification of women historical/fantasy books out there.
I am also a hundred pages into Diane Duane's A Wizard of Mars, which I started before I got absorbed by Hild. And about 200 pages into Poison Fruit, the third Agent of Hel book, because it arrived at the library and I got distracted.
Coming up:
All the bits of unfinished book. I also have Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, the last Terry Pratchett, and Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven hanging around.
