Kristin Bluemel (ed), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (2011). I am interested in the project of considering early-mid C20th writers who are outside the modernist canon and already among my own favourites.
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Have been posting book reports on my more academic reading over at my blog.
Kristin Bluemel (ed), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (2011). I am interested in the project of considering early-mid C20th writers who are outside the modernist canon and already among my own favourites.
Rodney Bolt, As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil, the impossible life of Mary Benson (2011). A reasonably competent family biography of the Bensons, centring on Mary - picked out to be trained up as a wife by ambitious clergyman Edward White Benson when she was 13, much more responsive (and apparently consciously physically attracted) to women - really could not fail to be compulsive reading.
Laura Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (2007). A valuable deconstruction of myths around prostitution and migration and their implications for various governmental and NGO policies.
Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (2011): really good and readable and extremely fair to a somewhat weird group of people. Such a fascinating story.
Read for review, and recommended: Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (2010); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880-1939 (2010). Am somewhat irked by journals putting reviews up on their own websites that require a subscription or payment to view.
Gratifying to see that a number of Naomi Mitchison's works are being brought back into print by Kennedy and Boyd: so far have read and much enjoyed Anna Comnena (1928) and Vienna Diary (1934), which represent her as (women's) historian and present-day socialist activist.
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Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (2011) - paranormal London is becoming quite a subgenre. This one really worked rather well.
Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (2011) - short stories with a flavour of horror: this is not usually my kind of thing, but this was one of my Best Books of 2011. She writes incredibly well. I also greatly enjoyed her limited edition chapbook of uncollected Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Unnatural Creatures (2011).
Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts (2012) I was fortunate enough to score an advance copy of this - first volume in a new fantasy trilogy - an excitingly fresh setting, intriguing characters. Anxiously awaiting the next installment.
In the wake of reading The Little Women Letters, which I discussed earlier. I have been rediscovering Gabrielle Donnelly: re-read Holy Mother (1987), Faulty Ground (1990) and read two intervening novels of hers I hadn't encountered before, All Done With Mirrors (1991) and The Girl in the Photograph (1997). She is very, very good: women's fiction but far from chicklit - although romance features it's seldom entirely happy or leading to permanence, the leads tend to be initially unsympathetic and maybe a bit too sorted. Excellent on relationships between women.
Am finally getting into Elizabeth Taylor: A Wreath of Roses (1949) and In a Summer Season (1961). Also good on women's friendships.
Marcia Muller, Coming Back (2010). Muller does not keep her series characters static and unchanging (unlike some), though this means putting them through some extreme experiences (Sharon McCone is still recovering from severe neurological damage in this one). Maintains the general standard.
Barbara Hamilton (pseud of Barbara Hambly), Sup with the Devil (2011) There are series of hers I like better but this one will do to be getting along with (and is about a historical time and place - immediately pre-Revolutionary New England - about which I know very little apart from vague recollections of reading Johnny Tremaine in my youth).
Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April (1922) - delightful and charming and somehow manages to avoid being twee (which Elizabeth and Her German Garden didn't, really)
Gabrielle Donnelly, The Little Women Letters (2011) - the invocation of Little Women, plus the incorporation of found letters of the March family, could have been a recipe for disaster, but in fact this was a delight, and the epistolary voice in the letters just about right. I think this is the same Gabrielle Donnelly who published a couple of books about 20 years or so ago that I liked, but doesn't seem to have done much in the interim.
Barbara Hambly, Ran Away (2011) - the latest Benjamin January, as always excellent.
Walter John Williams, Deep State (2011) - 'near-future sf-inflected action thriller' is not usually a genre I go for but this, if perhaps not quite as page-turningly gripping as This Is Not A Game, was still pretty compelling reading.
Gulped down in quick succession, four noir thrillers by Megan Abbott where the focus was very much on female-female relationships, not necessarily benign, but very powerful: Queenpin (2007), Die a Little (2005), Bury Me Deep (2009), and The Song Is You (2007). Was just slightly less taken by her most recent work in somewhat different mode, The End of Everything(2011)
I found Laurie R King's The Language of Bees (2009) uncharacteristically slow and even clunky, but the sequel/second half of long novel split in two, The God of the Hive (2010) was the helter-skelter unwinding of the plot ratcheted up in the first half.
Elizabeth Bear, Seven for a Secret (2009) and The White City (2011) - two linked novellas set in the same alternate world as New Amsterdam (2008), plus the limited edition chapbook The Tricks of London (2009); also enjoyed A Tempering of Men (2011), by Bear and Sarah Monette, the sequel to A Companion to Wolves (2007) and taking the story in a rather different direction
Jo Walton, Among Others (2011), which has been widely and with justice praised to the skies - it seems practically supererogatory to say anything further, but it's really, really good. Walton is very much not one of those authors who writes the same book over and over again - every beginning is a new departure - but the standard never flags. The blend of the fantastic with very specific realism of time and place in this one is admirably judged, and it is also a paean to the value of reading and the bookish life. Also, how few fantasies deal with that aftermath/tidying up/back to reality instead of thinking that the climax of some struggle is the end (I did like that the last line was a shout-out to a book which is more or less about that - damage limitation after epic upheavals. Though, really, it does not matter too much is the reader has not read the actual books that are name-checked throughout).
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