Recent reading recommendations

Have been posting book reports on my more academic reading over at my blog.

A couple of books I read a while ago and somehow omitted to write up here:

Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (2009): the detailed deconstruction of the Freeman-Mead controversy. Shankman is not uncritically hagiographical about Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa (the focus of Freeman's diatribes), but on the whole, she comes out of this a great deal better.Shankman, whose area is also Samoa, is interesting on changes in Samoan society between the time when Mead was working and when Freeman was, and examines the response of Samoans themselves to both anthropologists. It's additioanlly illuminating about the difference between how work is regarded by people in the field and non-experts and how certain works became popular in specific historical contexts, and in particular the role of the media and being media-savvy.

Sue Shephard, The Surprising Life of Constance Spry (2010). This was delightful: popular biography for a general audience, but I didn't spot any significant bloopers in general historical context. Spry was a fascinating figure: I could have wanted more about her early career as health educator, extension college teacher etc. She was very much about daring in flower-arranging and breaking the existing rules, and devastated when the new trend she had pioneering became about setting rules and having competitions. The book undermines assumptions that a woman writing about 'feminine' topics like flowers and gardens and cookery in the 1950s must have been twee and mimsy. Her private life was pretty amazing too, what with living with a man who couldn't get a divorce but taking his name (so common at that period), and having an affair with the cross-dressing female artist Gluck.

Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (2005). I had been wanting to get round to this for some time, and it was worth the wait. It's very good indeed, with a massive amount of research in a very broad range of material , from working class autobiographies to records of burial boards and cemetaries and poor law unions, very well woven together. The analysis is nuanced and subtle on how people dealt with grief and emotion under harsh conditions and material want, with a lot about the significance of ritual and commemoration. Among other things, it's about the expression of emotions non-verbally and via commemorative and mourning practices.

Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010), partly with a view to background for a future project, and suggested some useful paths to pursue. Full of fascinating stuff, but is the overall thesis just a way for the author to string the beads of things she found intriguing?

Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (2012). A wonderful overview of Rubin's major contributions to thinking about and historicising sexuality, bringing together work from the whole of her career.

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.

***

Fiction (mostly)

Edward St Aubyn's At Last (2011) concludes, probably, the Melrose sequence. It's not perhaps quite as compelling as the earlier episodes, but still pretty good, and falls into that class of things which should be massively depressing yet are rendered quite exhilarating by the execution.

L Timmel Duchamp, Never at Home (2011): short stories and novellas around the theme of change and transformation. Very good, in their rather disturbing way.

Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (2011) - paranormal London is becoming quite a subgenre. This one really worked rather well. And so did the sequel, Moon over Soho (2011)

Recent crime thrillers and fiction enjoyed, all strong new entries in ongoing series: Sara Paretsky, Breakdown (2012); J D Robb, New York to Dallas (2011); Jane Haddam, Blood in the Water (2012)

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. Found Angel (1957), a bit off her usual track, being a historical novel about a Ouida/Marie Corelli-type Victorian novelist of massive self-delusion about her artistic powers, grim but good.

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.

Reviews British Women Writers 1910-60s: the 'middlebrows' Previous Recommended Reading: non fiction Previous Recommended Reading: fiction

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Reviews	British Women Writers 1910-60s: the 'middlebrows'	Previous Recommended Reading


Reviews	British Women Writers 1910-60s: the 'middlebrows'	Previous Recommended Reading: non fiction	Previous Recommended Reading: fiction