Books you're currently reading???

[wolf]

Admittedly, Will plays better than he reads, but there is a longstanding academic tradition of sweating your way through that incomprehensible Elizabethan dialog.

Make sure that you're following along with your printed copy, a lot of the film versions have a tendency to leave out big chunks just to move the action along.

[DanaC]

Also, movies tend to drop the stuff that's less readily accessible to a modern audience. Quite often that involves dropping bits of humour. A classic example is in Othello. The scene where Iago makes a joke about an enema, the terminology is so archaic it tends to get dropped. I've only seen that bit included in old BBC stage productions.



My current reading is mainly around my dissertation... a particularly good one is Equivocal Beings, by Claudia Johnson. Fascinating stuff. Looking at women writers of the 1790s-1830s and how they placed themselves in the national debate. It's quite a difficult text for me to get my head around in places. I am used to reading historians and this is from the lit crit section. I find the lexicon difficult to get to grips with. I hadn't realised how comfortable I'd become in my own field.

For leisure, I am on an audio book. I mainly prefer to read novels myself, but every so often I go through an audio book phase. Right now that's driven by the fact I really like the reader on this series of books. It's the second in the Dexter series: Dearly Devoted Dexter. Makes excellent night time listening. I love Jeff Lindsay's writing style. It is so lyrical and playful. The guy who reads them has really caught that I think.

[Trilby]

both you right and noble ladies are correct in your happy and learned reports.

what grand company mine own corset keeps! (I would have preferred to use 'codpiece keeps' but I don't wear a codpiece except for very special occasions)

[DanaC]

(which you've presumably filmed for our later edification?)

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by DanaC

(which you've presumably filmed for our later edification?)

naturally!

[wolf]

The Barcode Rebellion - Suzanne Weyn

[richlevy]

Just finished the newest Dresden novel, Turn Coat. Wow. Butcher tied up a lot of loose threads, and then set them on fire.

The public library is your friend.

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by richlevy

Just finished the newest Dresden novel, Turn Coat. Wow. Butcher tied up a lot of loose threads, and then set them on fire.

The public library is your friend.

I just started Storm Front on the recommendation of my PC doctor. I'm enjoying it a lot. Love the quirky characters.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Prospects For Conservatives, Russell Kirk. While he has an unabashed reverence for an ancien régime of aristocracy that I do not share, there's a lot that's seminal here.

[Trilby]

hee hee - UG said Seminal.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

...And there was the poor Indian the Florida State Police arrested and grilled all night until towards dawn the policemen got what they wanted...

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...a nocturnal Seminole admission.

[wolf]

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

Weird dialog style, pulls you out of the story, otherwise interesting mystery set in Stalinist Russia.

SPQR I: The King's Gambit - John Maddox Roberts

Who knew there was a police procedural mystery story set in Ancient Rome, and a series of them at that?!

Dogs & Goddesses - Jennifer Crusie, Anne Stuart, Lani Diane Rich

Chicklit at it's zaniest. Talking Dogs, Ancient Mesopotamian Goddesses, Math Professors with limited social skills.

Household Gods - Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove

Quickly became annoying. Too much feminist whining.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Hey, police procedurals set in old times worked for Ellis Peters, Wolf... his Brother Cadfael stuff. Try reading the more recent ones, though; they have a better sense of time and place than the earlier ones, which have from none at all to hardly any.

Feminoxiousness is a killer, isn't it? That's why I'll probably never take up Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon again.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Feminoxiousness is a killer, isn't it? That's why I'll probably never take up Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon again.

I used to love MZB as a teenager. For a young woman growing up, that kind of consciously feminist (or at least feminism aware) sci-fi really helped balance out a lack of positive female characters and heroes in what was a very male dominated genre.

That said... *smiles*... a bit like any backlash or movement forwards, the pendulum overswings. There's less need for the overtly feminist sci-fi, because 'women's issues' are no longer a separate strand and female lead characters no longer speciality fiction.

I find MZB a little difficult to read now. It's a little like being battered over the head with a feminist manifesto. But it was important work at the time. It broke through some boundaries and helped school a lot of young women in a way of thinking that didn't simply accept that 'hero' was a male concept in fantasy and sci-fi.

It doesn't have to be so obvious now. I went looking for books for my niece who is into fantasy and wild rides. The choices open to her are much greater than were open to me in terms of available character templates and stories. There are lots of strong, interesting, complex and still very girly heroes for her to get her teeth into. And the gender question isn't the biggest thing to answer in these books. MZB was writing against a much more overtly gendered setting, when sci-fi was very, very male and when the position of women in society at large was a very immediate issue.

It was only in the 1990s that British law recognised the possibility of rape in marriage. There are still gender questions to look at and find answers to. But when MZB was writing, it was the big issue for a lot of women. Like all movements, the first few waves tend to be a little strident in how it expresses itself. Eventually it settles down and stops being a 'movement' and starts being just another facet of a wider society (much like the 'civil rights' movement, or Gay Pride) and the issues it raised find their way into the broad sweep of fiction along with everything else. But ya need those first few strident voices to push it along and make changes; otherwise it never does make into the mainstream and remains an excluding factor in cultural production.

[Trilby]

Ok, Michael Slade - but which book do you recommend?