What I've been reading

[sarahmichigan]

"Ash" by Malinda Lo, a retelling of the Cinderella story. When Ash's mother, who is a believer in magic and may have consorted with fairies, dies, her father remarries and then also dies shortly afterward, leaving her with a cruel stepmother who forces her to be a lady's maid for her two daughters. Ash is torn between the love of a fairy prince who once courted Ash's mother and the love of the king's huntress, who treats her as an equal. The prose is absolutely gorgeous in this novel. Highly recommended, and I'm interested in reading more by Lo now.

and

"The Female Man" by Joanna Russ. I tried to read this back in 2009 or 2010 and was so disgusted with the clunky prose by the third page that I put it down and decided I wasn't going to read it. After Russ died in 2011, I decided maybe I would give it another try, since it's well respected both by people I know and other authors I respect (Dorothy Allison has a blurb on the cover saying she wishes everyone would read it). I found myself infuriated with the book the second time around as well, but perhaps that was Russ's intent. The book follows 4 women in different timelines: Joanna, who lives in our timeline in 1969; Jeannine, who lives in 1969 in a parallel timeline when the Great Depression never ended; Janet, who lives in an utopian all-female world; and Jael, a warrior woman from a timeline where men and women form two tribes at war with one another. When Russ is doing straightforward narrative, I mostly enjoyed it, though it still felt somewhat didactic. I got frustrated with her literary experiments and injection of her politics. It's really a treatise on gender and feminism disguised as a science-fiction novel. I felt intensely angry through much of the book because I felt like Russ was holding the reader in contempt, and treating science-fiction and the form of the novel with contempt. I LOATHE it when an author seems to feel they are "above" a certain genre but enjoy using the tropes from it for their own agenda, and anti-novelists anger me something fierce, like who are YOU you pissant to think you're above writing a conventional narrative? FUCK YOU!!!! So, I guess I'm glad I read this book, but I would only recommend it if you're up for reading experimental fiction or you just find her politics interesting enough to read it. If you're looking for a science fiction novel with a conventional structure, this would not be the book for you.

My full comments on both books here.

Comments

[yarram.livejournal.com]

"The Female Man" is also deeply anti-gay-male and irredeemably transphobic.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I noticed a bit of anti-gay-male sentiment but thought that was from the character where women and men are opposing tribes, so not necessarily the author's viewpoint, same with the trans issues. She doesn't say a lot about trans people or gay men outside Jael's timeline, as I recall.

[yarram.livejournal.com]

I was so disgusted by the portrayal of Anna that I nearly stopped reading the book.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

I bounced off this novel several times. Some of classics I've read are awesome, this one, blah. I'd much rather read a essay by Joanna Russ on feminism than this so called classic.

[wednes.livejournal.com]

Wow, I've never seen you angry at a book before. That was kind of awesome!!

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I didn't get notifications that I had comments on this post! I'd guess you feel the same way about people who look down on horror as a genre but feel free to pillage horror tropes for their own purposes.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can totally see how the passages about the "half changed" and so on in Jael's timeline would be offensive to trans folks. However, I think it makes a difference that in their timeline, people who are AMAB are *forced* to go through a sex change operation, they aren't choosing it.

[wednes.livejournal.com]

I do indeed. In fact, even if they say they're doing an "homage," I still find myself annoyed at trope-stealing chumps. Cabin in the Woods? I haaaaate it.

So yeah, I totally get that vibe.