January reading, 1/1/16-1/14/16
Just finished
Loretta Chase, Dukes Prefer Blondes (2015)
Society beauty meets cantankerous lawyer while trying to rescue a protege's brother from giving up on upward social mobility. I caught up with a bunch of Chase's work at the end of the year, but I think this is going to mark a break from that. Chase returns to a common theme (especially reminiscent of Lord of Scoundrels [1995]), where she mocks gender and genre conventions by emphasizing how the hero's supposed objectivity, detachment, and control are really evidence of the emotions that rule him, despite his denial; but here the hero's intelligence is mainly proven by him asserting it, and his contempt for women's intelligence wears on me. His attitude is not supported by the text; it is clearly supposed to be a subset of his usual misanthropy and ultimately becomes a joke; but I don't have the patience for this type of story anymore.
Georgette Heyer, April Lady (1957), The Convenient Marriage (1934), Sylvester (1957), Devil's Cub (1932), These Old Shades (1926)
Rereads. Have some random Heyer thoughts. Or feelings. Maybe just feelings.
Greg Rucka, The Force Awakens: Before the Awakening (2015)
Tie-in prequel to The Force Awakens; three short stories, one about Finn, one about Rey, one about Poe. The one about Finn doesn't perfectly match the characterization we get in the movie, and I can't even remember what the one about Poe is about, but the one about Rey is heartbreaking.
Gary K. Wolfe, Evaporating Genres (2011)
May do longer write-up later. Sf lit crit. Main response: (1) I wish critics would consider how different their histories of science fiction would look if they included women. (2) The essays on the "new horror" have given me some ways to think about Kai Ashante Wilson's work.
Rose Lerner, Listen to the Moon (2016)
May do longer write-up later. Lerner is one of my favorite romance novelists, and this may be my new favorite of her books. Regency romance about a pair of servants who form a marriage of convenience (and attraction) in order to obtain positions at a Sussex vicarage. As always, Lerner is psychologically acute, as well as interested in aspects of the Regency that don't often show up in romance novels. In this one, obviously, the focus is on class (and, as always, on gender), but you also see the impact of not being Christian and/or white on minor characters whom I hope will get their own books in the future.
Also her characters are lovable and the sex is really hot.
Currently reading
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)
French novel about a woman who seduces both a young poet and (disguised as a man) his mistress. I have wanted to read it ever since learning of it in a Joanna Russ essay twenty-something years ago.
I have just started it, which means I have only completed the preface, which is fifty pages of Gautier ranting about how critics are hypocritical wannabe failed writers. ("Matter enough for fifteen or sixteen folio volumes! But we shall take pity on the reader and restrict ourselves to one or two lines." Then he goes on for another 28 pages.) I hope we will get to the bisexuality soon.
I think I will also reread the first book in Rose Lerner's Lively St. Lemeston series.
Free book-shaped space
Awesome manga news I learned this week:
cups brewed at DW
Loretta Chase, Dukes Prefer Blondes (2015)
Society beauty meets cantankerous lawyer while trying to rescue a protege's brother from giving up on upward social mobility. I caught up with a bunch of Chase's work at the end of the year, but I think this is going to mark a break from that. Chase returns to a common theme (especially reminiscent of Lord of Scoundrels [1995]), where she mocks gender and genre conventions by emphasizing how the hero's supposed objectivity, detachment, and control are really evidence of the emotions that rule him, despite his denial; but here the hero's intelligence is mainly proven by him asserting it, and his contempt for women's intelligence wears on me. His attitude is not supported by the text; it is clearly supposed to be a subset of his usual misanthropy and ultimately becomes a joke; but I don't have the patience for this type of story anymore.
Georgette Heyer, April Lady (1957), The Convenient Marriage (1934), Sylvester (1957), Devil's Cub (1932), These Old Shades (1926)
Rereads. Have some random Heyer thoughts. Or feelings. Maybe just feelings.
- Sylvester is still my favorite Heyer.
- Speaking of Lord of Scoundrels, I'd forgotten just how much of it is a remix of Devil's Cub.
- Leonie's loneliness in These Old Shades hits so terribly hard.
- At the end of last year, I reread a bunch of Regency romances I'd first read in high school, including some I expected would be terrible. They were terrible, and they were sexist, and one in particular had a particularly horrible Other Woman, and yet I know exactly why I loved them in high school, and that is pining. They were full of pining. Mutual pining, which is the very best kind of pining.
- I started off with April Lady because someone reminded me it was a marriage of convenience plot, and I love marriage of convenience plots. Particularly because they so often come with pining.
- Oh my god the age differences are horrifying. (Shockingly, in Devil's Cub, there are only three years between Vidal and Mary. They are actually age-appropriate.)
- I had forgotten that Leonie's maiden name was St. Vire, and its probable influence on the naming of Swordspoint's Richard St. Vier.
- Heyer, the patriarchy, class prejudice, and anti-Semitism: *sigh*
- Despite originating the entire genre of Regency romance, Heyer herself doesn't seem particularly interested in romance. Much more of the books is given over to social comedy.
- I thought this out backwards and sideways, but I will give it to you forwards:
- You start with Fanny Burney's Evelina, which is epistolary fiction, so quite a lot of it is summary; the form is clearly shaped by Burney's diaries and diary-letters (which I read last year). Dialogue's reconstructed or in play form. (She actually does more dialogue reconstruction and less indirect reportage in formal writing she polished years after the fact than she does in letters; there's a lot of dialogue in her account of her masectomy. No anasthetics and no antibiotics! It's harrowing. She lived another twenty-nine years.)
- Then Jane Austen shifts the stories into omniscient, though still with a lot of free indirect discourse, and with relatively little sensual detail; she does all sorts of things that are unusual now, and fails to do all sorts of things that are standard, and it doesn't matter, the sensuality is the sound of the prose.
- Then you get Heyer, who's still working in omniscient, but with a 20th-century sensibility towards action and direct narration, although there's still more indirect reported dialogue than is common now. Partly that's mid-20th-century compared to early 21st century, but partly it's one of the stylistic quirks that makes the books feel more 18th or 19th century. (These Old Shades and Devil's Cub are Georgian, not Regency.)
- And most Regencies written from the 90s or later -- and even many written during the 80s -- ditch all that and do straight-up typical 20th-c. limited third person.
- You start with Fanny Burney's Evelina, which is epistolary fiction, so quite a lot of it is summary; the form is clearly shaped by Burney's diaries and diary-letters (which I read last year). Dialogue's reconstructed or in play form. (She actually does more dialogue reconstruction and less indirect reportage in formal writing she polished years after the fact than she does in letters; there's a lot of dialogue in her account of her masectomy. No anasthetics and no antibiotics! It's harrowing. She lived another twenty-nine years.)
Greg Rucka, The Force Awakens: Before the Awakening (2015)
Tie-in prequel to The Force Awakens; three short stories, one about Finn, one about Rey, one about Poe. The one about Finn doesn't perfectly match the characterization we get in the movie, and I can't even remember what the one about Poe is about, but the one about Rey is heartbreaking.
Gary K. Wolfe, Evaporating Genres (2011)
May do longer write-up later. Sf lit crit. Main response: (1) I wish critics would consider how different their histories of science fiction would look if they included women. (2) The essays on the "new horror" have given me some ways to think about Kai Ashante Wilson's work.
Rose Lerner, Listen to the Moon (2016)
May do longer write-up later. Lerner is one of my favorite romance novelists, and this may be my new favorite of her books. Regency romance about a pair of servants who form a marriage of convenience (and attraction) in order to obtain positions at a Sussex vicarage. As always, Lerner is psychologically acute, as well as interested in aspects of the Regency that don't often show up in romance novels. In this one, obviously, the focus is on class (and, as always, on gender), but you also see the impact of not being Christian and/or white on minor characters whom I hope will get their own books in the future.
Also her characters are lovable and the sex is really hot.
Currently reading
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)
French novel about a woman who seduces both a young poet and (disguised as a man) his mistress. I have wanted to read it ever since learning of it in a Joanna Russ essay twenty-something years ago.
I have just started it, which means I have only completed the preface, which is fifty pages of Gautier ranting about how critics are hypocritical wannabe failed writers. ("Matter enough for fifteen or sixteen folio volumes! But we shall take pity on the reader and restrict ourselves to one or two lines." Then he goes on for another 28 pages.) I hope we will get to the bisexuality soon.
I think I will also reread the first book in Rose Lerner's Lively St. Lemeston series.
Free book-shaped space
Awesome manga news I learned this week:
- There is a Richard III shojo manga. Can it possibly be as awesome as the Cesare Borgia shojo manga? I will soon find out!
- OTHERWORLD BARBARA!!! For those of you who are new and therefore have missed me talking about her at great length, Moto Hagio is a highly influential mangaka known for (re-)inventing the genre of girls' manga in 70s. Not enough of her work is available in English, and most of what is available is from early in her career. Otherworld Barbara (バルバラ異界) is relatively recent (2002-2005), science fiction, and has a female protagonist, all of which make it particularly exciting to me. (I often think of Hagio's early work in the context of Ursula Le Guin's statement that she had to learn how to write as a woman.) It is coming out in August and I have already pre-ordered it.
cups brewed at DW