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.

I was reading Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Heinlein when I was 13. Not everything teenagers enjoy is YA

By the way, I am now reading Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and it is brilliant. Totally adult, nothing remotely YA about it

Since there seems to be a fair few SF lovers on this thread - has anyone read the anthology 'Sisters of the Revolution'? (Wondering about asking for it as a Christmas present!)

No, I've never heard of it. What is it like?

I like Dickens andAusten . I am reading Martin Chuzzlewit atm, as part of reading all Dickens's works. Pickwick Papers is actually pretty good if you persist with it, the prison section is really fascinating historically. I was interspersing Dickens with Russian novelists, read Dead Souls last (weirdly brilliant) and had planned on War and Peace, but DD2 broke my Kindle .

It's probably not your thing, Cote - it's an anthology of feminist SF, and seems to be well reviewed - but I've not managed to find a contents list (I wonder if it might include a lot of stories I've got in other anthologies).

Not much at the moment as 8 week old baby means when I get to sit down with a book I fall asleep. However I picked her up some books from the charity shop (random picks) and was wonderfully impressed by 'The Day Lewis Got Eaten'.

Wee boy eaten by a series of monsters, saved by his sister. Sister chased them across the land, spanner in backpack fashioning her bike into a boat, submarine and flying machine. It wasn't laboured but was nice to read a children's book with a female action lead who showed resourcefulness and bravery.

I can see that one being re-read as DD grows.

I've just finished Amy Tan's Rules for Virgins. It was an eye opener about courtesan life: quite depressing, definitely mercenary and was all about the possessions of 'the beauty'.

It made me think a lot about status symbols as flaunted by our current celebrated beauties. A lot of careers seem to be based on an early illegally released sex film and dating history with famous, rich men.

Carol Shields' Unless. Wonderful, wonderful, quiet rage.

Just noticed this in today's Kindle deals: Suffragette: My Own Story (Kindle Edition) by Emmeline Pankhurst

I'm reading The Mote in God's Eye, a Germaine Greer short primer on Shakespeare, and The Madwoman in the Attic. An odd combination. The Niven and Pournelle, I've discovered, was heavily blue-pencilled by Heinlein, which might explain why it doesn't take 150 pages for the aliens to turn up and things to start happening, unlike Footfall, which was actually pretty good once it got going.

I am currently reading the "The Books of the Order" series by Philippa Ballantine.

Not particularly feminist, I'm afraid. I will make it my New Year's resolution to only read books by women (because women are woefully underrepresented in fantasy and that has to change), but even so, Ballantine seems to struggle with romantic relationships, or more precisely, consent.

Maybe I am just oversensitive, but I do very much not like it if a woman looks "surprised" after a man kissed her. If he had asked for consent, verbally or nonverbally, then she would have no reason to be surprised! Men shouldn't GUESS whether a woman wants to be kissed! Not even when, by the grace of the author, they always guess right. (Which they did, in this book)

Other than that, the series is very interesting to read, I was never once bored while reading the first book, and the magic system is fascinating. (One could even say it explores some notions of femininity and masculinity, as the protagonist is the fighter while her male partner has a kind of magic that's more subtle.)