What are you reading right now?

[shovetheholly]

Me: some old feminist stuff. Bubeck's 'Care Gender and Justice' Sara Ruddick's 'Maternal Thinking'. I wouldn't necessarily recommend either of them - but Ruddick in particular was important in opening up the idea that women didn't just mother on autopilot, but thought about their practice.

I'm also reading Dickens's Bleak House for the third or fourth time. I am a bit at how vicious and misogynistic his portrait of Mrs Jellyby is - she's the 'telescopic reformer' whose house and family are a mess while she focuses her attention on the fortunes of Africa.

A God a that Hates, by Wada Sultan.
A superb read by a truly inspiring woman.
You can catch her talks on YouTube.

I got to about page 50 of Ancillary Justice and wanted to hurl it across the room. Really hated it.

Chris Beckett's Dark Eden and the follow up Mother of Eden are interesting. The premise is that 2 people , a man and a woman, are stranded alone on a habitable planet. They come to the conclusion that they can live out their lives alone or they can try to populate the planet. They do the latter , which creates a matriarchal society as women, due to the need to bear children, are more important than men. Obviously there are issues re incest/ genetic deformities. The back story of how they came to be there is in a separate short story.

I enjoyed Dark Eden & plan to read the sequel. His book The Holy Machine was also interesting.

"Tana French is good too (crime but not slasher type stuff). She often gets compared with Donna Tartt"

Maybe in her dreams

I read In The Woods because it was recommended by a friend and thought it was the single most pretentious and pointless crime novel I have ever read. I was going to give its 1st sentence as an example, but I've deleted it from my Kindle - a rare honor I reserve for books I never ever want to see again.

I'm reading one of Mary Renault's books from her Alexander the Great trilogy - 'Fire From Heaven'. Its great, but not as fabulous as 'The Persian Boy' (am reading them in the wrong order - don't ask ). Not sure about her female characters, though. Olympias is written as a bit of an hysterical witch-woman thus far (I really like her ).

Also reading The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Informative, but dry, although that may be because I am reading it off the back of reading Michelle Moran's historical fiction, which is much more fun...lots of fabulous imaginings of Nefertiti.

Trying to finish 'A Peoples History of The United States' by Howard Zinn. He dealt brilliantly with chapters on the decimation of American Indian tribes, but his chapters on women's rights in early US history have been a bit thin so far...

Germaine Greer - Women, Aging and the Menopause.

I particularly like reading it on the bus - so effective in stopping annoying men from chatting to me

YesCote What on earth was the point of In the Woods ? It's gone from my Kindle too.

I have never read anything by Tana French but have seen her recommended on MN and as a lover of detective fiction, I had her on my to-read list. I just scanned the prologue of In the Woods and I am thinking, maybe not.

There is a series of detective novels that are still a bit obscure I think, but that definitely have a feminist vibe, by A.D. Scott. The first in the series is A Small Death in the Great Glen. The books are set in Inverness (never identified by name but clearly Inverness) in the 1950s and the sleuth is a young woman who works for a newspaper and is trying to leave an abusive marriage. They are easy reading but well done and entertaining.

I'm reading the second to latest Robin Hobb right now, they're good (and plenty more in the same world from different aspects if you like her style).

There was a recent dragon one, where it was the first and only time I've had people consider the risks of having sex, and therefore risking pregnancy in a wilderness situation with risk of mutation (don't want to spoiler). Generally in these things the women and men just don't think through how wise it is to breed, but she brutally demonstrated, and then had a character speak about the dangers a female character was opening herself to.

Good thread!

Cote, DD & I fought over Dark Eden (she swiped it while I was cooking tea ) & bought the sequel straight away, but I wasn't anywhere near so taken with it, so it's currently sitting half read. DD liked it, though.

I've got a few things properly on the go atm. Half way through Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (post-apocalyptic. It was a birthday present, not something I'd necessarily have picked out, but I'm actually really enjoying it now I've got into it.

I'd just started 'Do it Like a Woman' by Caroline Criado Perez when I was given Station 11, looks like it'll be good & I like the fact that she's grappling with the issue of how we avoid devaluing traits associated with stereotypical femininity whilst not being limited by them. Will see how far she gets . . .

DH gave me the bio of Joss Whedon as an extra birthday present, but not particularly enthralled (he wants to read it though )

In my 'to read' pile I've got 'Binary' by Stephanie Saulter - just read and very much liked the first one in the series, Gemsigns - another SF novel, set in a world with many genetically modified humans.

Also just ordered Ancillary Mercy today! (Why am I on MN, I ask myself . . .?)

Station Eleven was exactly why I avoid books (especially sci-fi) written by women. It was disjointed, devoid of a real plot (let alone an engaging and/or clever one), improbable, and with complete lack of worldbuilding. A viral flu kills off most of the world's population and the the ones left alive somehow manage to find food, shelter, and clean water very easily which leaves them free to procrastinate and whine all day long.

None of it made much sense. A viral infection that becomes symptomatic in several hours and kills in a day is the easiest disease in the world to contain, since it would burn itself off very quickly. Just broadcast everyone to stay indoors for a few days - what seems to be the problem?

The post-apocalyptic world rings completely false, as well. All of it falls apart too quickly, and the author has given no thought to what such a world of few survivors would actually be like. "Schools" where kids are taught about the lost world and its comforts made me laugh. Surely, you would try to preserve knowledge of math, chemistry, physics, biology etc rather than stories of past comforts like indoor plumbing and air conditioning.

There is a glut of post-apocalyptic fiction. Station Eleven was so-so.

I enjoyed Adam Baker's "Outpost" series. All of them have very resourceful female characters.

I'm a bookworm with a scifi habit, but military space battles, not particularly uplifting or intellectual.

I normally read a few books per week, but I've got flu, so have been gorging on 3 long series, each with kickass female leads:

. J D Robb: Lt Eve Dallas
. David Weber: Honor Harrington
. Evan Currie: On Silver Wings

I also like these series:
. Tanya Huff': Valor
. Elizabeth Moon: Paksenarrion and also Paladin

The first Donna Tartt was brilliant; the second wittered on and petered out without an ending. The third was awful, particularly the comedy Russian villains. Goodness that was a book which needed an editor.

Cote, I agree with a lot of your criticisms, hence why I wasn't impressed to start with (and as you say, a virus that killed so quickly and comprehensively wouldn't survive long as I understand it), but I warmed to it after a while.

Not at all sure about your dislike of SF written by women in general though. I'd start with Ursula le Guin as exhibit A, and go on from there . . .

I'm reading Life in a Cold Climate, a biography of Nancy Mitford. I guess it has a feminist slant to it, in that Nancy Mitford and her five sisters were such unusual women.

I'm currently reading about the period of her life in which, although she is still married in name, both she and her husband are conducting blatant affairs but don't seem to mind about each other's indiscretions. The biographer makes an interesting point that, since then, people's behaviour has become more "modern" (i.e. anything goes) while our view of marriage has become more "traditional" (i.e. we expect fidelity). Except she phrased it much better than me

I was going to suggest Ursula Le Guin and Earthsea but I assumed Cote would be familiar with her.

I do have some sympathy with Cote's issues with women writers. At its most simplistic it's why Dickens is one of my favourite writers and Austen isn't.

Dickens presents a panoply of characters from all levels of society. Love stories and family issues are there but as incidental to the plot , not the main concern.

Of course I get Austen was a woman of her time and its constraints but she operates in such a narrow field (and it's basically the same story in every book)

To me Austen has almost nothing to do with love stories, though for sure the family issues are there.

Cote, have you read Stasiland by Anna Funder, The Prospect Before Her by Olwen Hufton or any Barbara Tuchman? I generally find nonfiction easier to read than fiction and enjoyed all of those. I have to say I don't really read scifi. I attempted one of Doris Lessing's scifi books and fell back defeated, but I guess that's rather like trying CS Lewis for a feminist love story.

Austen's work is largely social commentary, isn't it? For example, the whole 'sensibility' thing had just come into fashion, the notion that diseases of the nervous system made all the very best people sensitive, fluttery and faint, thus giving life to more modern notions of romance. Sense and Sensibility is essentially about that, and she still marries the women off to rich men (so they were not that frivolous). And in Pride & Prejudice Mrs Bennett embodies fashionable sensibility perfectly, Wickham too in a caddish sort of way.

There's a lot more to Austen than love stories, but you do have to have some quite specific knowledge of the period to get all the jokes and references. I'm not so up on Dickens (never much cared for him) but presume the same applies.

I think there's a real rash of mediocre SF (and probably other genres too) where self-publishing has led to people doing the equivalent of hotel room paintings in book form - formulaic, ill thought out etc.

It has brought some quite good stuff about too though - I've been working my way through a load of stuff by Edward W. Robertson (post plague ones, a Sci-fi opera, and some fantasy too) which are pretty good and whilst they often have a leading man, they have other characters too.

And of course Wool was good (Post-apocalyptic, silos, technocracy - so all themes I've read before, but still quite well done)

There's a lot more to Austen than love stories, but you do have to have some quite specific knowledge of the period to get all the jokes and references. I'm not so up on Dickens (never much cared for him) but presume the same applies.

Austen just seems so anaemic compared to say Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Fielding. I appreciate those encompass a large time period. I don't think I have a particular knowledge of the time periods concerned beyond what any reasonably educated person will pick up.

Chunky I made my book group read Wool. I loved it but they all hated it!

The Martian was self-published but possibly it is an exception. My group all enjoyed it.