Eve's Alexandria

Sexism, not science

I posted my electronic records essay this morning - thank the gods - and so have finally gotten around to writing about The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages by Deborah Cameron, as promised many moons ago.  It was very kindly sent to me by Oxford University Press before Christmas and has been rattling round my brain ever since I finished it.  It probably comes as no surprise that a book exposing the erroneous claims about gender difference in popular science and self-help manuals went down well with me.

But let's begin with an excerpt from a different book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain by Simon Baron-Cohen:

People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff... People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers.

If you had to make a guess as to when said book was written, what would you venture? I was shocked to discover that it was published, by an imprint of a major publishing house, as recently as 2003.  Deborah Cameron is shocked too.  She is taken back to her school days when 'the aptitude tests we had to take before being interviewed by a careers advisor were printed on pink or blue paper. In those days we called this sexism, not science.' 

As she points out Baron-Cohen's book is not just a postcard from the nutty fringe. On the contrary, it is just one of a raft of popular science and sociology books that tout a fundamental, biological difference in the way that men and women think and communicate. (A prize for the worst titled goes to Why Men Don't Iron: The Fascinating and Unalterable Differences between Men and Women by Anne and Bill Moir.)  The rich old granddaddy of the genre is, of course, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray.  This book, which has sold millions of copies world-wide, mines a deep seam of sexism in Western culture (directed against both men and women), and taps into popular wisdoms about what men and women are and ever shall be.  It, and all its descendents, suggests that the gender status quo - that men are competitive, creative and emotionally obtuse, while women are co-operative, empathic and caring - is native to human nature and should order our lives and relationships. 

Deborah Cameron is particularly interested in the intimation that men and women 'speak different languages', leading to frequent miscommunication between the sexes and difficulties in heterosexual relationships.  She notes that most books about male/female difference share classic assumptions on this score, namely that:

1. Women talk more than men, because interpersonal communication means more to them.
2. Women are more verbally skilled than men.
3. Men talk about events and facts, whereas women talk about emotional and relational issues.
4. Men's use of language is direct and competitive, designed to acquire and maintain group status; women's use of language is indirect and passive, reflecting their desire to create harmony and equality in their relationships.
5. These differences lead communication breakdown between the sexes.

The Myth of Mars and Venus sets out to demonstrate why (and how) these assumptions are incorrect, why they have such currency and why they are terribly dangerous. 

The evidence for the first proposition is compelling.  Cameron reveals just how few claims about gender difference and communication are based on solid fieldwork.  For example, the much reported statistic claiming that women use 20,000 words per day in comparison to men's 7000 has no basis in fact.  It was taken from a popular science book called The Female Brain, which in turn had taken it from a self-help book, which had plucked the numbers out of thin air.  The author later admitted it was an error to include the information, and has removed it from subsequent editions, but the damage was already done. Our already firm belief that women are incouragible chatters while men only speak when necessary had been reinforced.  The insinuation that this reflected badly on women was generally implicit, if not explicit.  In fact, studies show widely variant word usage in both genders - some women talk more than others, and some men more than other men.  More importantly (and rather obviously), all people talk more or less depending on the context they're in.   No doubt everyone knows this but, as Cameron points out, the power of stereotypes is such that they can appear reasonable without any grounding evidence.   It is common knowledge that women talk all the time and yet say little of substance, isn't it?  Apparently so.

One by one Myths holds the stereotypes up to the light and knocks holes in them.  Men are more assertive speakers than women?  Not so in all cultures, nor in all contexts.  People are more assertive when they feel in a position of superior knowledge and greater power.  Since our culture still accords men more authority and respect in the public sphere it follows that they may often appear more assertive in politics, business and even academia; but those same men may be entirely passive out of their comfort zone.  Women are more co-operative speakers than men?  Well no, not really.  Again, it is the individual in context that matters.  Women can be as linguistically competitive as men, just as men are as capable of verbal negotiation.  The difference, Cameron points out, is that competitive language in women is very rarely interpreted as a positive characteristic. Similarly, co-operative behaviour in men.  Competitive women are uppity and unnatural; co-operative men are weak and immasculated.  She sites a sociological study of office behaviour in Australasia which showed how the assertiveness of female managers was often combined with a self-deprecating humour to mitigate the shock of their authority.  One woman encouraged her colleagues to nick-name her 'The Queen', a title that suggested her role was symbolic rather than functional and that the real governing/managing took place elsewhere.  

The centrepiece of Cameron's book concerns miscommunication between the sexes, and particularly the proposition that men have difficulty understanding indirect requests.   This is the central argument of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which states that women are too passive and indirect in their conversations with men, leading to unnecessary upset.  According to John Gray, when men fail to do things they're asked to it is because they were asked indirectly, or because requests have been framed tentatively.  For example, 'Could you empty the trash?' is merely a question gathering information, while  'Would you empty the trash? is a request.  Women shouldn't blame their menfolk for not taking out the trash in the first instance. It wasn't that they were being lazy or forgetful or unhelpful. They just didn't get it. Women have to make some allowances and communicate more clearly.  Cameron is rightly incredulous:

Gray seems to be suggesting that men hear utterances like 'could you empty the trash?' as purely hypothetical questions about their ability to perform the action mentioned. But that is a patently ridiculous claim... Human languages are not codes in which each word or expression has a single, predetermined meaning.  Rather, human communication relies on the ability of humans to put the words someone utters together with other information about the world, and on that basis infer what the speaker intended to communicate to them.

She points out that the common conception of men's linguistic comprehension is incredibly offensive - it suggests that they are incapable of using subtle cues to communicate and negotiate requests, and that they have a fundamental inability to process all but the most basic instructions. 

There is also a more sinister side to the miscommunication claim, and Cameron writes convincingly about the effect it has on convictions for rape.  If a male defendent can't understand indirect statements or cues, then it follows that the rape victim must have made her 'no' to sex absolutely and irrevocably clearly before it constitutes a crime.  Otherwise the man may have wrongly interpreted her refusals as consent.  Myths uses a seemingly straightforward Canadian case as an example.  A young woman was held down and raped in her apartment by a man she had dated earlier in the evening. The incident had begun consensually with kissing, which had progressed to touching and then to forced sex.  The defendant maintained throughout that the woman had said or done nothing that led him to think she did not want sex, despite the fact that she had repeatedly told him she was tired and pretended to fall asleep.  He said 'she said she was tired, you know, she never said 'no', 'stop', 'don't', you know, 'don't do this'.  He was subsequently acquitted.  Cameron is coruscating: You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn't want to have sex. But nobody criticises the defendent for being so obtuse.  On the contrary, it is the victim who comes under attack from the judge.  She was asked 'Did it not occur to you that your signals were not coming over loud and clear? Did you not think to change your signals?'  Clearly the responsiblity for the rape was being assigned to her - she should have communicated better. The defendent couldn't help it. Like a five year old child, he didn't understand the meaning of 'no'.   Again, this is offensive to men, and puts women in an impossible position.  When Cameron asked the young woman why she hadn't used direct statements to communicate 'no' to her attacker, she said that she had been afraid and hadn't wanted to escalate the situation by appearing overly assertive. She was terrified of being beaten or even killed.

The Myth of Mars and Venus is an entirely necessary book, and has the added benefit of being scholarly, well-written and entertaining to read.  It clearly seperates myth and assumption about gender difference from fact and real-life experience, and demonstrates that sex stereotypes do nobody any good.  They serve neither men (who come out looking like emotionally stunted brutes) or women (who emerge under the burden of their feminine inadequacies).  People do communicate differently, but the differences are only incidentally to do with gender and are just as much to do with age, class, culture and society.  More than anything context impacts on the way we talk and signal to each other.   Many people are susceptible to the argument that if difference between men and women is real, innate and even biological, then it is inevitable, desirable and the world should be organised around it.  Perhaps this is a comforting idea in a society so recently reshaped by feminism but, as Cameron proves, it isn't right, and it isn't clever.

~~Victoria~~

The Steady Flame in the Darkness

"All women know jin-ashu," murmured Rimshi. "It is our language, the language of jin-shei - passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman's heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know."

I very much wanted to like Alma Alexander's The Secrets of Jin-Shei (2004); indeed, I felt sure that I would. A tale of high politicking and sisterhood in an invented world based on medieval China, it sounded like it had great potential; that the author (as I saw when I picked the book off my TBR shelves) acknowledged a large debt of inspiration to Guy Gavriel Kay suggested fundamental good taste and, surely, an eye for the right emotional notes.

What I found between the pretty covers was not a bad novel, precisely - it was an entertaining enough read, if hardly challenging or especially memorable - but certainly a disappointing one, in both conception and execution.

I'll begin with the former. At the core of the novel is the idea and institution of jin-shei, alluded to in the opening quotation: a self-chosen, semi-secret and non-kinship tie between two (or more) women, promising mutual support and affection. This is based in, or developed alongside (it's unclear), the women's language of jin-ashu. Jin-ashu, as Alexander explains in her author's note, was inspired by Nü Shu (literally "women's writing"). This is a script, not a separate language, that was developed and used - in secret - by women in a particular region of China; it was a response to a localised social taboo against women learning the standard way of reading and writing Chinese.

It is, or should be, a fascinating idea to shape a story around. (Or, for that matter, a historical monograph!) My problem with its use in The Secrets of Jin-Shei is that the author fails to build up a world in which it could thrive convincingly. Alexander gestures (often quite successfully) at hierarchies and power dynamics based on social class, and an urban/rural divide. This is neatly displayed, for example, in one main character's rebuke to another - I liked the juxtaposition of 'search' and 'demand', here, a simple distinction between which lies a world of privilege:

"Liudan!" Yuet said. "You were born to silk and to power. Do not mock another's need. You have never had to search for your answers, only demand them. There are many out there who are not so lucky."

But there is little sense that men's and women's worlds are so divided and differentiated in her land of 'Syai' as to give rise to entirely separate means of self-expression. I found I was compelled by the idea, but struggled to see the point; although I am apparently not alone in this:

"A jin-shei-bao is a good thing to have when you are hurting and need help. I would accept your Qiaan's pledge."

"Have you got one?" Xaforn asked bluntly.

"Yes," Yuet said.

"What do you do?" Xaforn asked, perplexed.

A number of the main characters are young women who tread in what might be seen as "men's" spheres with little apparent obstacle: blunt Xaforn is a cadet in a decidedly equal-opportunities military (and is, naturally, a hand-to-hand combat whiz), dreamy Nhia becomes a respected religious teacher, and poet Tai scandalises precisely no-one when she chooses (and proposes to) her own future husband. Yuet, meanwhile, has to engage in some sleight-of-hand (and recruit a friend in a high place) to maintain her career as a healer - and expand it to include the royal court - when her teacher dies abruptly, but this is due to her youth and the fact that her teacher had yet to draw up the necessary papers to appoint Yuet as her heir, not to her gender.

Those who do face difficulties do so mostly (it seems) for plot reasons. Capricious, insecure Luidan is catapulted up the imperial succession (which runs through the female line) by an earthquake that claims the lives of both her parents and her older sisters; but when she chooses to secure her position as Empress by going against custom and remaining unmarried, we are told this is a shocking thing, but shown little outrage and little opposition (let alone any that is remotely effective), until such opposition becomes important to the story. When Luidan further goes against precedent to appoint her low-born jin-shei sister Nhia as her Chancellor, no-one seems to bat an eyelid.

Only in Khailin, the highly-intelligent scion of a well-to-do and ambitious family, do we see anything of the constrictions historically placed upon women: she is to be married off in a way beneficial to her family's status and, while she is permitted by her father's indulgence to learn to read and write the men's language alongside jin-ashu, her mother disapproves of such unsuitable behaviour in a young woman, and it is expected that she will give her interests up once she is married.

In the meantime Khailin had done her best to make sure that her betrothal did not interfere unduly with her last year or so of freedom. It could turn out well - it might have been for the best - but sometimes she wished savagely that her body was crippled like Nhia's was - that a good marriage had been harder to arrange. That she had been given more time.

These constrictions, however, seem to owe much more to her family's high status than to her identity as a woman; there is no contrast provided to suggest that a high-born man would not be similarly at the mercy of his family when it came to decisions about his future. (Most of her other jin-shei sisters, including Tai and Qiaan, are of a much lower status and come under no such pressure to marry.) In any case, all this functions largely to drive Khailin in the direction required by the plot: her thirst for knowledge of alchemy leads her to defy her family and take up with a man whom she believes can help her achieve such knowledge - a man who, of course, turns out to be not what he seemed.

Furthermore, when male and female characters do interact, they - with the exception of the villain and our heroines - do so in ways that read, well, very much like the ways in which men and women interact today (Tai and her husband share much of the childcare duties, for example). It is not even clear what need Syai's women would have to write their secret feelings to each other in their secret script, since all concerned* are free to move about the city in which they live and visit their friends in private whenever they wish, without interference and even when they are supposedly busy raising families and running households (traditionally an extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming occupation) or, y'know, running an empire.

[*Khailin partially excepted, for spoilery reasons.]

I don't mean to imply that all the men ought to be violently oppressing their wives; rather, that the sense of parallel-but-separate experiences and languages inherent in the idea of jin-shei and jin-ashu, and of a pervasive gender-based power balance that intersects with but is distinct from social status, is never brought to life or demonstrated. The book's central concept, in other words, has great potential, but never feels organic to its world.

My problem with the execution, meanwhile, is two-fold. The first is Alexander's tendency to overegg her pudding. This suits the setting well, providing the immense amounts of background detail and description that help the world to breathe, and feel lived-in, rather than just a brightly-coloured backdrop. (I was pleasantly surprised by how successful Alexander was in this, in fact, given her ill-advised and rather telling observation, in the afterword, that her world is as "ornate as only things Oriental can be". Paging Edward Said...!)

It is less welcome when applied to the story's events: no emotion goes undersold, no political nuance, however simple, unexplained; no opportunity is missed for info-dumping about customs or emphasising how Important and Heart-rending a moment is. Jin-shei is absolutely the most secret and precious and rare thing in a woman's life - so characters and narration alike tell us repeatedly, and somewhat nauseatingly - except that virtually every such relationship we see established in the book seems to be the product of a whim. Or, more interestingly, of calculation:

[T]his was what she had wanted, exactly what she had wanted, when she had set out to draw Nhia into her circle. For jin-shei sisters, it would be easy to twine lives and fortunes together - and Nhia could be the only thing left to Khailin, the only source of knowledge, of that power that she needed to keep within reach if she were to remain herself and whole. It would not be the first jin-shei bond which had been born out of a more prosaic need rather than of a purity of heart - but even those, according to Khailin's mother's stash of jin-ashu literature, were overcome by the power of the vow.

Most of all, Alexander is too quick and too unyielding in directing the reader - through a slightly muddled omniscient narration - to her desired verdict on the characters, their actions, and their motivations. Feelings are not evoked, but described. In short, she wades deeply into the murky depths of telling, not showing, and it gets tedious:

[Tammary] was angry at her family, bitterly wounded at what she saw as Raian's treachery, raging with impotent fury at her mother, at the Emperor himself, at whoever had conspired to make her life this convoluted spiral and abandoned her here to deal with it in ignorance and the innocence of the fool.

To some extent, this is a stylistic choice and a matter of taste; elsewhere, Alexander has some lovely turns of phrase. Here is Tai

They say that the bones of the earth remember the feet that walk upon them, if those feet belong to a great spirit - I know that the northern mountains recall your quiet step on their marbled stone, and still sing of it in the early mornings.

The title of the post, furthermore, comes from Tammary's observation of how Tai lives her life: "'Being with her is like sitting beside a deep pool of bright water and watching the waterlilies bloom, opening up petal by petal. She gives rest. She has this perfect life, this balance, the steady flame in the darkness'". This instance, however, would be even more satisfying if there had been any prior indication that Tammary, an illiterate wildchild and woman of flame and movement and impulsiveness, who expresses herself not through speech but through dance, had any interest in, or ear for, such poetic words.

My second problem with the novel's execution is that it is not particularly well plotted or paced. The story eases by, readable and entertaining, but there is little in the way of narrative tension, and a lot of flabby detail. Set-pieces are repeatedly fluffed (one character's death at the hands of a mob, late on, is more cursory than shocking or upsetting), twists rarely come unheralded, and several important story developments pivot upon people acting in stupid and uncharacteristic ways (step up, Yuet and Khailin agreeing to help Luidan's abrupt desire for immortality). Major characters disappear for a hundred pages at a time and return utterly changed (Qiaan), while we watch others live their lives in incremental detail (Nhia, Tai). The villain is assumed to be dead when of course he is nothing of the sort. The melodramatic denouement teeters on the ridiculous, mistaking multiple character deaths for events of genuine emotion.

~~Nic

Revenging Lost Time

Originally published in SFX 178, here is my review of Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant (2009), by Gwyneth Jones. (Longer than usual because it was the lead review.) (And no, I've no idea what's up with the cover, beyond the fact that I'm virtually certain it mingles aspects from several different parts of the story.)

--

Gwyneth Jones isn’t known for her happily ever afters. Or, indeed, for her happily evers. Her characters’ lives are often unromantic, even downright grim. Even the recreated Arthurian love triangle and hippy ‘Rock and Roll Reich’ of her recently-completed Bold As Love series were as much about people using hedonism to combat existential pain and the burdens of power as it was sex and drugs.

Spirit, therefore, might be a space opera - with noose-tight plotting and the author’s characteristic, searching interest in biological SF - but it is a very interior one, focused on the breaking and remaking of an individual mind. The setting draws on several of Jones’ earlier works: in humanity’s past are a Chinese World Empire and an extended alien colonisation by the immortal, genderless Aleutians. These periods are now over, but their legacies still permeate human life, whether on Earth or among the stars. Culturally, this is a decidedly non-Western future, whose dominant notes are Chinese and Central Asian. Socially, the Gender Wars have left divisions, between those who embrace fluidity of sex and gender, and Traditionalists who reject it.

We meet our young, orphaned protagonist – Gwibiwr, or Bibi – as she enters servitude to the elite family of a Great House, a deeply hierarchical entity headed by the powerful General Yu and his wife Lady Nef. Great Houses are bastions of Traditionalism, self-consciously aping gender roles and identities of old, reinforcing social rigidity with advanced technology. Most disturbingly, well-born daughters – valuable, marriageable currency for their families’ alliances and prestige, often artificially created to be as perfect and pliant as possible – are controlled by neurological implants called ‘chaperones’, the key to which is held by their fathers until they marry, when it is passed to their husbands.

Bibi makes the most of her limited opportunities to advance, and she is - if not always happy - content with her lot, serenely secure in her position and unaware of what a cutthroat world this is. But political manoeuvrings far above her head, and the chance witnessing of a crime, seal her fate before she even knows what has happened. Things fall apart, catastrophically, when Yu and Lady Nef undertake a diplomatic mission to the electrical storm-ravaged vistas of Sigurt’s World. Bibi is betrayed, imprisoned, and left to rot, half-mad in a timeless fugue state – echoing the motif of madness in the novel’s faster-than-light travel, the Buonarotti Transit, which works by separating mind from matter, fracturing the self.

Jones’ material is inventive – her non-human races are a compelling blend of the recognisable and the utterly alien – although certain ideas, presumably holdovers from the Aleutian trilogy, remain only tantalising hints here. The plotting and pacing are well judged. Incidents and revelations are held in reserve until they have the maximum impact: occasionally manipulative, but expertly suited to the type of story it is. A standout sequence is the Sigurtian mission, all slow-burning tension and creeping claustrophobia as the characters become aware of their isolation and powerlessness.

With Spirit, Jones has inverted, and illuminated, The Count of Monte Cristo, and not just by transferring it to space. Making the central wronged figure a woman in a repressive world heightens the novel’s interiority and its examination of social power and agency. Bibi must overcome her self-effacing cultural programming, and face down challenges and vulnerabilities that a man would never encounter, before she can emerge as the transfigured Princess, regaining control of her life.

Happily ever after? One battle at a time.

~~Nic

Another Year in Books

My luxuriously long post-thesis break has, of course, not proven as productive as I might have hoped. Two weeks into the new year, I've only just mustered the effort for a look back over last year's reading.

Not surprisingly, given that whole thesis thing, 2008 was a pretty lean year for me in terms of reading for pleasure. Discounting the mountains of stuff I read for work (except in a few cases where I went ahead and read the whole book even after I'd got what I needed, which I have therefore included), I got through some 55 books - down on 2007's tally of 67, and also on totals of closer to 80 or 90 in the years prior to that.

But I did narrowly beat Victoria. ;-)

My efforts to read all the Russian literature ever also fell foul of my work schedule, although I did manage four (and have posted about two to date, Pushkin and Turgenev), which is technically enough to complete the challenge - if not to meet my own, rather more ambitious target. My personal challenge continues, therefore; 2009 will be the year of War and Peace!

Of the 55:

• 8 were non-fiction
  • 5 history monographs
  • 1 literary criticism
  • 1 memoir
  • 1 translated medieval Persian chronicle

• 47 were fiction, including
  • 34 science fiction/fantasy/speculative (a tally boosted by the fact that in some months my only reading was review books for SFX and Strange Horizons, and by the Clarke Award shortlist)
  • 4 short story collections or anthologies
  • 1 play (Hamlet)
  • 4 novels in one omnibus volume (James Blish's Cities in Flight)

• 35 were by men, 20 by women
• 7 were translations
• one was in Spanish, and ~500 pages long to boot (Eduardo Manzano Moreno's Conquistadores, emires y califas: los omeyas y la formacion de al-Andalus)
• 5 were pre-1900

In general, my 2008 reading list looks and feels rather moribund compared with the previous year's: not only shorter and thinner, but also lacking some of the spark and surprise (and strength-in-depth) of 2007. Last time I did this, I was completely spoiled for choice when it came to my top ten; this time, there is quite a gulf between the best and the rest.

That said, my 2008 top ten can all stand proudly alongside their predecessors:

1. Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. My pick for the Clarke Award; tight, tense, and probably the best example I've ever seen of a stunning twist ending that feels, in retrospect, utterly organic to both plot and theme - and which, on looking back, was being hinted at throughout. Marvellous.
2. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. One of my biggest blogging regrets of 2008 is that I never had the time and space to rave about this book. A huge cultural history of the various conflicting and ever-evolving (and often wacky) attitudes to sexuality and the body among the Christian communities of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity. Cohesive, compelling, scholarly and surprising.
3. Anna Banti, Artemisia. The most unexpected (and immersive) treat of the year, about the life of 17th-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Part fictionalised biography, part memoir, part examination of the writing process, part tortured cry for help.
4. Richard Morgan, Black Man. Winner of the Clarke, and deservedly so.  Fast-paced, bold, and challenging: a science fictional future that interrogates the present, without ever losing the balance between message and story.
5. Gwyneth Jones, Life. A post is forthcoming on this. Emotionally-brutal feminist tale of how lives and loves are affected by advances in research into sex, gender and genetics.
6. Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army. Third in my Clarke shortlist trio; more feminism, more near future imaginings, now all dystopia to the end. Also with beautiful evocations of the Lake District. :-)
7. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others. Another forthcoming post: SFnal short fiction from a master of the form.
8. Sarah Waters, Affinity. (Link is to Vicky's post.) Victorian lesbian ghost story/penny dreadful prison drama... what's not to like?
9. Laurie J. Marks, Earth Logic. Enjoyed the first in this series, which I read at the end of 2007, but I really fell in love with this sequel. Nicely-written, well-plotted secondary-world fantasy, by an author actually bothers to think about family structures, social organisation, and the dynamics of power (rather than just sticking her characters in a Ren Faire version of medieval Europe). And more lesbians. I say again: what's not to like? Will be writing about the whole series for Strange Horizons in the near future, when I've finished the third volume.
10. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union/Ian McDonald, Brasyl. Bit of a cheat, since I can't choose between them: the two books that ought to have been on the Clarke shortlist. Chabon's is a noir mystery in an alternate history 'Jewlaska'; McDonald's is an unbalanced but still remarkable imagined portrait of Brazil in past, present and future. 

Just outside the top ten are Gwyneth Jones' Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant, a 2009 release that I recently reviewed for SFX, which does The Count of Monte Cristo in space with admirable feminist panache (review will be up here when the issue is off the stands); Kristin Cashore's infectiously-fun, sweetly-romantic, and quietly gender-subversive fantasy adventure Graceling (another SFX review, that will be up here in due course); and last but not least Temeraire, by Naomi Novik.

So much for the good. Onto the other end of the scale...

Dishonourable mentions go to The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (such a great idea, such a boringly chick-lit-y execution), The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua (I was not its midlife-crisis-male target audience, and I could feel it on every page), The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (so much less less transgressive and inventive than it wants to be), and The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern (silly, and not in a good way).

Thus was my year in reading. Here's to many more books in 2009!

In other news, I finally more or less finished cataloguing my library over at the OCD heaven that is Library Thing. Here is my profile, and here are my books. I am vastly amused that my TBR shelves outnumber books I've read, by some way... better get reading...

~~Nic

Self-Promotion, Again

While it is true that I've sadly neglected both the reading and reviewing of books over the last two months, I haven't slacked off entirely.  My most recent review for Strange Horizons was published today.  It's about a very long, very hefty Best of... collection of short fiction by Lucius Shepard, one of SFs most respected (and most controversial) authors.   It took me half a year to pluck up the courage to read it, several months to finish it and as many more weeks to write the review about it but it won me over in the end.  I didn't expect to admire it, but I did - it's true that Shepard writes macho war stories and yet I forgive him. Miracles never cease, and all that.  Anyway, if you can bring yourself to pass over the terrible, terrible cover and enjoy well-wrought short fiction, I think its well worth a look.  If you'd like a taster, Shepard's excellent prison novella 'Jailwise' is available free online for your delectation.

Coming soon (that is, as soon as I get on top of my Electronic Records essay): a hymn to Deborah Cameron's wonderfully incisive The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?  Everyone should read it.

~~Victoria~~