Archive for January, 2011
waves of feminism, musing, part deux
Note: the following applies to US feminism specifically; though I’ve seen the results of feminist movements in some other places, I don’t know enough about their history to make any intelligent comments. I still don’t believe in anything so defined and homogeneous as waves of feminism. Well, maybe I do, if you consider it from [...]
Book rec: Shelf Discovery, by Lizzie Skurnick
Some time, i should try waiting until after I’ve read more than a little of a book before I begin to review it. Not today, though. Shelf Discovery is subtitled “Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading”, but that’s not quite right; it begins with a loving essay on A Wrinkle in Time, which actually is [...]
Steam-Powered: comment after buying but before reading
Yesterday, because it sounds like an interesting book and it features stories by a bunch of authors I like, I bought Steam-Powered. I bought it directly from Torquere Press, since it doesn’t seem to be at Amazon yet. I was thinking that “lesbian steampunk stories” seemed like an interesting but oddly specific theme, until I [...]
remembering heroes: NASA’s saddest week
Jan 27, 1967: Apollo 1 launchpad fire Jan 28, 2006, 25 years ago today: Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch Feb 1, 3002: Space Shuttle Columbia destroyed during re-entry Requiescat in pace: Grissom, Chafee, White, Scobee, McNair, Smith, Onizuka, Resnik, Jarvis, McAuliffe, Husband, McCool, Anderson, Chawla, Brown, Clark, and Ramon. I state again [...]
the Romany boy and the rescue
Odd. I don’t usually have dreams with muc hnarrative detail, and it seems like the ones I do get tend to be a little disturbing. I was a girl at a boarding school, right before break; I’d just begun a relationship with a very large guy or thought I had, but he’d had to leave [...]
book rec: Slow Fat Triathlete, by Jayne Williams
I am really liking this book, despite having very little interest in triathlons. I will probably never use any of her sport-specific advice (on gear or tri training or transitions from swim to bike for instance). On the other hand, as someone who’s been a slow short rower for over twenty years now, I can [...]
some things I haven’t written about yet and
A happy thing: my first anthology (I mean, the first anthology to include writing of mine) is out: The Best of Everyday Poets, Vol. 1. A sad thing: the other day while driving home from work, I was thinking about our second cat – given the health issues his new person was telling me about [...]
last time I wrote this much about one book it was Deathly Hallows, and that had a whole series behind it
Jo Walton has an “Ask me questions about Among Others” post up. The question I’m not asking there is “How real (i.e. based on a real person) is Sam?” I want him to be based on a real person (or a concatenation thereof) because I love him. He reminds me in some ways of my [...]
one disagreement so far
Oops. I found one thing that I think Jo Walton Mori got completely wrong. There is no way Harriet Vane – the woman who spent all of Gaudy Night pondering intellectual honesty, who nearly ruined her life earlier (in society’s eyes) because of it, would have felt like *that* about the end of Silver on [...]
here’s what you need to read
… if you either can’t get hold of Among Others yet, or if you’ve cruised through it at Mori speed and are feeling bereft. Or if your book is at home and you aren’t. Natalie Luhrs’ excellent interview with Jo Walton. (Side note: Natalie has been an online friend of mine for probably a decade [...]