My other half, specifically. We have a guest post from Georgia, who is going through the same challenge as me. Let's hear some support!
Hi everyone!
Welcome to my guest-post which gives an update on my own 52 book challenge. At the end of week 10, I am keeping up, having just finished reading my tenth book this morning. Since I have ten books to talk about, and since George and I have had Anita Sarkeesian videos playing on the Apple TV all afternoon (these also are highly recommended - I first found out about this lady through her Tedx talk about the online harassment she suffered for her Kickstarter project - to create a series of videos exploring the role of women in video games. She has some amazing ideas; watch her stuff), I have decided to split my list into subsets based on the gender of the protagonist. First up, the ladies:
I've read some great books with female protagonists and a few really not very good ones. My favourite has to be The Dragon Queen, by Alice Borchardt. Being a Classicist, I love a good epic, and this Arthurian tale, with the eponymous hero actually being a heroine, is fascinating. Skin-changers, journeys beyond the realm of the real world, including the mandatory trip to the underworld, and a child raised by wolves all set in the Dark Age following the departure of the Romans from Britain make this a very interesting and enjoyable read - despite it being a long hefty book which required the purchase of a larger handbag to cart it around! If you like Vergil, Homer, George RR Martin, give it a try!
The worst book in the set was Stabat Mater, by Tiziano Scarpa. I received this book as an Xmas present from my mum; she thought it would be pertinent as I love stories about Venice (Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is one of my all-time favourites), I play the violin and the title is in Latin. The book is set in an orphanage in Venice and focuses on one orphan's questions about her history and how the arrival of Vivaldi as new director of music shakes up her life. Or so the blurb says. I didn't enjoy the stream-of-consciousness style with no chapters at all, and the first fifty pages are just the protagonist complaining. I'd much rather read The Passion again. And again.
Speaking of passion and lesbians (J Winterson's most famous work being Oranges are not the only Fruit - also brilliant), I also read Sarah Walter's Tipping the Velvet. Remember the sexy BBC adaptation a decade or so again starring the fabulous Keeley Hawes and Rachael Stirling? Yes, we all love a good Victorian, lesbian drama, but mostly this book is a love story, following the heroine, Nan as she follows her pash, Miss Kitty Butler all the way to London, onto the stage and then struggles to regain her self-belief after a huge betrayal by beloved Kitty. This is easy-to-read romantic fiction at its best.
Open Secrets by Alice Munro is a series of eight short stories loosely linked by the characters' connection to a small Canadian town called Carstairs, spanning the years ab urbe condita to the present day. I found this selection more and more enjoyable as I read on. At first, I was somewhat stumped by the way the author seems to set every story inside another story; in 50 pages this just seems too much to cram in. Especially when at least 50% of the female characters in the first half of the book have names beginning with 'M'. However, there are some great stories in here, from the tale of a woman abducted in the Albanian mountains, to the orphan who is handed over as wife to a man who needs a woman to look after him at the frontier, to the heartbroken and discarded wife who follows her cheating husband all the way to Australia so that she can inveigle her way back into his life. All in all, if you're paying attention, there is some really enjoyable story-telling at work here.
Last, but not least, is Un Lun Dun by China Mieville. Hannah (an old friend from school and uni who works in children's publishing) suggested this when we were discussing how much we enjoyed Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. I was hooked immediately, but lost interest slightly when I got past the number of pages that Neverwhere had taken to finish the whole story and then got more and more into it towards the ending. It's a great reworking of the Buffy-style "chosen one" concept, where the heroine turns out not to be the blonde who was destined to save the world of Un Lun Dun, but her friend whose only appearance in the book of prophecies is indexed under "sidekick". Well-written, interesting and fantastical.
Stay tuned for the male protagonists section - which contains some very different books! Please do send me any recommendations you may have!
Literary Love xxx
Stabat Mater - Tiziano Scarpa (2011)
Un Lun Dun - China Mieville (2007)
Open Secrets - Alice Munro (1994)
The Dragon Queen -Alice Borchardt (2001)
Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Walters (1998)
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