Bibliography
Sep. 5th, 2011 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyA Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
This was my big read for when I was in Suffolk, and I have to say that I got into it quite seriously, despite it being a Great Big Doorstop of a book. The blurb on the back said it was like an Indian post-independence-and-partition War and Peace, and actually, that's not a bad parallel - it's a story primarily about private lives in the context of great social, political and legal shifts in a nation's history. So you have the issues of which man the heroine-of-sorts is going to marry, but at the same time you have questions about the zamindari reform laws, Hindu-Muslim relations following partition, local elections, the place of the up-and-coming aspiring Indian male, the life of the Indian intelligensia, and a good dose of Indian academic politics (which, I have to say, I particularly enjoyed).
Of course, I think she marries the wrong one, but that's not the point - you understand it, you get it, even if you think she's completely wrong, because Seth's done such a good job of illustrating the constraints that surround her that you can't blame her. You actually care. Of course, because of the wide picture that Seth is painting, there are dull bits - but War and Peace has some incredibly dull and impervious battle sequences, and at least the impenetrable sections of this are over in a handful of pages as we move on to something else.
Rich, vibrant, enjoyable - and, sadly, something you'll probably need to commit to reading or else you'll give up half-way through.
The Woman of Rome - Alberto Moravia
This was on some kind of 'best books about Rome' list circulated via Twitter a while ago, and I got interested. I've never read any Moravia, apparently one of Italy's most eminent novelists, and I'm not sure this was the right place to start. The book was written in 1947 and was incredibly shocking at the time - the narrator, and chief protagonist, is a fairly uncomplicated girl from Rome who eventually turns to prostitution as her profession. Moravia is pretty upfront about the detail of what this involves, and her path into this profession, but at the same time has some really dreadfully sentimental and... shall we say unreconstructedly romantic notions about the sex trade. On the one hand, yes, it's a significant novel because of the subject matter it covered and the explicitness it used. It also does a really interesting job of portraying the city through the various men who form an important part of the narrator's life. However, the general 'being writting in 1947'-ness occasionally made me want to throw something across the room. I think it's probably alright if you come in prepared, but unfortunately I don't think I quite had the right contextualisation and thus spent most of the book feeling quite ambiguous about the whole thing.
The Black Moth - Georgette Heyer
Another quick and cheesy romantic novel, which ends with an attempt at abduction marriage and I was so cross that the villain got off lightly! There should have been death! Avenging death! With pistols! Or possibly riding off on a horse that could tell its rider was evil and thus threw him over a cliff! GRRR! Especially since there was a lord-pretending-to-be-a-highwayman love interest who was pretty dashing and stopped said abduction marriage despite a wound to his shoulder.
Anyway. I'm probably expecting too much from the genre, but STILL.
Sheconomics – Karen Pine and Simonne Gnessen
Now I heard this discussed on Woman's Hour a while ago, or rather, I heard one of the authors discussing a topic in quite a sensible way, and I thought I'd have a look at them (and indeed they have a nifty website); it has, however, taken me getting back to the UK to get my hands on the actual book.
Let's be honest - it's a bit pink and occasionally a little bit feminine. BUT they have the stats to back them up in pointing out that women are socialised to be less good with money than men are. (See the whole 'comfort shopping' meme that a lot of women really do buy into.) Pine and Gnessen's fundamental point is that for women, money tends to be bound up in a whole unpleasant raft of emotional triggers that we aren't encouraged to unpack - so we perpetuate bad spending habits that have us either living on the debt edge each month and not saving for the future, or hoarding and misering our money away in fear of unspoken horrors we might suffer if we dare spend any of it. I live in the second of those categories; Pine and Gnessen are mainly speaking to women in the first of those categories, but they do acknowledge that money fears make themselves apparent in many different ways, and all of them need to be acknowledged and dealt with.
Now, I have to say that I read through this and actually felt pretty good about the way I'm dealing with things - but also learnt a bit and started to think about some other issues that I should be having a think about. So if you can stomach the packaging, it's definitely worth a flick through.
51 - Where Three Roads Meet – Salley Vickers - reviewed elsewhere.
This was my big read for when I was in Suffolk, and I have to say that I got into it quite seriously, despite it being a Great Big Doorstop of a book. The blurb on the back said it was like an Indian post-independence-and-partition War and Peace, and actually, that's not a bad parallel - it's a story primarily about private lives in the context of great social, political and legal shifts in a nation's history. So you have the issues of which man the heroine-of-sorts is going to marry, but at the same time you have questions about the zamindari reform laws, Hindu-Muslim relations following partition, local elections, the place of the up-and-coming aspiring Indian male, the life of the Indian intelligensia, and a good dose of Indian academic politics (which, I have to say, I particularly enjoyed).
Of course, I think she marries the wrong one, but that's not the point - you understand it, you get it, even if you think she's completely wrong, because Seth's done such a good job of illustrating the constraints that surround her that you can't blame her. You actually care. Of course, because of the wide picture that Seth is painting, there are dull bits - but War and Peace has some incredibly dull and impervious battle sequences, and at least the impenetrable sections of this are over in a handful of pages as we move on to something else.
Rich, vibrant, enjoyable - and, sadly, something you'll probably need to commit to reading or else you'll give up half-way through.
The Woman of Rome - Alberto Moravia
This was on some kind of 'best books about Rome' list circulated via Twitter a while ago, and I got interested. I've never read any Moravia, apparently one of Italy's most eminent novelists, and I'm not sure this was the right place to start. The book was written in 1947 and was incredibly shocking at the time - the narrator, and chief protagonist, is a fairly uncomplicated girl from Rome who eventually turns to prostitution as her profession. Moravia is pretty upfront about the detail of what this involves, and her path into this profession, but at the same time has some really dreadfully sentimental and... shall we say unreconstructedly romantic notions about the sex trade. On the one hand, yes, it's a significant novel because of the subject matter it covered and the explicitness it used. It also does a really interesting job of portraying the city through the various men who form an important part of the narrator's life. However, the general 'being writting in 1947'-ness occasionally made me want to throw something across the room. I think it's probably alright if you come in prepared, but unfortunately I don't think I quite had the right contextualisation and thus spent most of the book feeling quite ambiguous about the whole thing.
The Black Moth - Georgette Heyer
Another quick and cheesy romantic novel, which ends with an attempt at abduction marriage and I was so cross that the villain got off lightly! There should have been death! Avenging death! With pistols! Or possibly riding off on a horse that could tell its rider was evil and thus threw him over a cliff! GRRR! Especially since there was a lord-pretending-to-be-a-highwayman love interest who was pretty dashing and stopped said abduction marriage despite a wound to his shoulder.
Anyway. I'm probably expecting too much from the genre, but STILL.
Sheconomics – Karen Pine and Simonne Gnessen
Now I heard this discussed on Woman's Hour a while ago, or rather, I heard one of the authors discussing a topic in quite a sensible way, and I thought I'd have a look at them (and indeed they have a nifty website); it has, however, taken me getting back to the UK to get my hands on the actual book.
Let's be honest - it's a bit pink and occasionally a little bit feminine. BUT they have the stats to back them up in pointing out that women are socialised to be less good with money than men are. (See the whole 'comfort shopping' meme that a lot of women really do buy into.) Pine and Gnessen's fundamental point is that for women, money tends to be bound up in a whole unpleasant raft of emotional triggers that we aren't encouraged to unpack - so we perpetuate bad spending habits that have us either living on the debt edge each month and not saving for the future, or hoarding and misering our money away in fear of unspoken horrors we might suffer if we dare spend any of it. I live in the second of those categories; Pine and Gnessen are mainly speaking to women in the first of those categories, but they do acknowledge that money fears make themselves apparent in many different ways, and all of them need to be acknowledged and dealt with.
Now, I have to say that I read through this and actually felt pretty good about the way I'm dealing with things - but also learnt a bit and started to think about some other issues that I should be having a think about. So if you can stomach the packaging, it's definitely worth a flick through.
51 - Where Three Roads Meet – Salley Vickers - reviewed elsewhere.
