Update to You are not as smart as you think you are...

My landlady got an A in English. The grade was based half on the letter she wrote and half on a final taken in class, so she earned that A herself. And now she will never have to sit in that teacher's classroom again!  I'm very happy for her. 

Feminist Fiction Friday--the TBR Edition

Priscilla Royal

The lovely people at Poisoned Pen Press aare offering the first of Priscilla Royal's medieval mysteries free if you buy them from the Apple Store and for 99 cents over at Amazon.com and on other platforms. (They wanted to offer it and several other books for free everywhere but not all the outlets are cooperating)
I don't know Royal's work, but when I read the blurb for The Wine of Violence, it sounded right up my alley. I snapped up the first two books in the series (for a whopping $4 altogether) and can't wait to dig in. The series, which is now up to eight, with a ninth coming in December,  "stars" a prioress named Eleanor of Wynethorpe.  Here's a link to an interview with Priscilla Royal done for Women on Writing.  Here's a link to eleven more books from PPP, all priced at 99 cents.
I suspect the first medieval mystery most people read was either one of the books in Ellis' Peters' Brother Cadfael series or one of Candace Robb's Margaret Kerr or Owen Archer mysteries. (There's actually a Medieval Mysteries site that has lots of lists and an open review policy for writers of medieval mysteries.) A lot of medieval mysteries (and series) feature clever female sleuths who are often nuns or churchwomen, but not always. I'm particularly fond of Peter Tremayne's "Sister Fidelma" series, and Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse books. I have not read the most recent book, Winter Heart, which is described as a "tale of frigid winter and icy passion."
Also on my TBR list is the first of the Hawkenlye Mysteries by Alys Clare.  "Alys Clare" is such a beautiful name I was disappointed to find out it's a pseudonym. The sleuths are Abbess Helevise and the knight Josse d'Aquin (friend to King Richard the Lionheart). I'll start with Fortune Like the Moon, which is available used for a penny on Amazon.

I don't mean to be cranky, but....

I saw Snow White and the Huntsman this weekend. It looks gorgeous and had a couple of truly magical moments in it. But it also had a line, a throw-away line, a tossed off moment that got a big laugh and made me cringe.
Snow White and the Huntsman are struggling through a dark enchanted forest chased by the Queen's brother and a miscellaneous assortment of murderous  minions. Realizing that Snow White's long skirt is making it hard for her to run, the Huntsman slashes it off with his knife.
Snow White, who's really been through quite a lot in the last few minutes of screen time, shrinks back, uncertain of the Huntsman's intentions.
"Don't flatter yourself," he snarls and then they move on as the audience chuckles.
"Don't flatter yourself?"

Call me a cranky feminist but I couldn't help but notice that the script was written by three men.

"Don't flatter yourself."

Don't get me wrong. For the most part, Snow White is witten as brave and strong and true and noble. I'm not sure how she learned to sword fight whilst  being locked up in a castle keep for years, or how the Duke managed to procure that snazzy form-fitting armor at short notice, but this is a fairy tale after all.
Did we really need that line?
Am I just being over-sensitive? (One of the disparaging insults hurled at early feminists was that the had no sense of humor when it came to sexist jokes.) After all, I was the only one not laughing.
Sigh

You are not as smart as you think you are...

Shiny brain photo by Artem Chernyshevych

One of the hardest lessons you ever have to learn in life--harder even than finally admitting that "life isn't fair," and there's nothing you can do about it--is realizing  that no matter how smart you are, you are not as smart as you think you are.
Yes, you think, I'm smart.  I'm no Stephen Hawking but then, who is?
It is so tempting to look at someone you dislike and smugly think, He/she is so stupid.  And you might be right. But you might be wrong, too.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
My landlady asked me to help her with an essay for an English class she's taking as a prerequisite for nursing classes she's going to start in the fall. (She's acing the math class that is also a requirement.)
She asked for my help because she was confused by the teacher's instructions for the paper. She asked for my help because the instructor called her stupid and she's not, and she wanted to prove it.
English is not her first language.
It is her fourth.

Feminist (Non) Fiction Friday: The biography edition

One of the things I noticed while compiling my list of good and great biographies was that the names tht kept appearing on the list--David McCulloch (Truman, John Adams), Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs, Einstein), Ben Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime), Robert Massie (Peter the Great), Joseph Lash (Eleanor and Franklin) and A. Scott Berg (Lindbergh) were all men. There were men who specialized in stories about businessmen like Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Liar's Poker) and men specialized in scientific figures, like Mike Venezia (biographies of Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall and Thomas Edison, among others). George Vecsey seems to be a go-to guy for sports bios (Martina, Stan Musial, but also a bio of Loretta Lynn). There are a lot of men specializing in chronicling the lives of interesting people. Women? Not so much.  And I was looking...

Claire Tomalin

My list--which has almost two thousand books on it--only repeats two women writers; both of them specialists. They are Claire Tomalin and Alison Weir. Turns out they're pretty interesting people in their own right.
Tomalin has been dubbed the "queen of literary biography" whose works include biographies of Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hardy, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Katherine Mansfield and last year, a biography of Charles Dickens that's considered definitive. (Here's a link to an interview Tomalin did on the eve of publishing Charles Dickens: A Life.)

Alison Weir

Alison Weir, who is two decades younger than Tomalin, has focused on English royalty, and is the best-selling female historical author in Great Britain (according to Wikipedia). One of the trials she's forced to bear is that she has the same name as a sensationalist journalist and apparently gets mistaken for her enough that she has this notice on her website: 
**THIS AUTHOR IS NOT THE AMERICAN ALISON WEIR, founder of the organisation If Americans Knew.**
Weir regularly hosts tours themed to the subjects of her books, as well as day trips to Hampton Court Palace and The Tower of London.  How much fun would it be to go on one of those tours?

So Many Books, so Little Time: More for the TBR Pile

I've been compiling a list of good and great biographies for a new site that's about to go up, and have been bookmarking books as if I just learned how to read.  I expected that.  What I didn't expect is how many books I'd stumble over in the course of posting my daily story story blog entry over at 365 Short Stories.  Today's entry was by Jack Scalzi and in reading his blog, Whatever, I was introduced to Jo Walton's alternate earth history/mystery Farthing.  I LOVE alternate history and mysteries, so this book (about an alternate 1949 in which the Brits made peace with Hitler) is right up my alley.  And there are apparently more.  (Of course there are.) Here's a list of her books with a picture of her rocking a fedora like Kelli Stanley's Welsh cousin.
By the way, the story of the day is Scalzi's HILARIOUS, Hugo-nominated fantasy parody "The Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue." Here's a link to it.

Separated at birth--Aaron Sorkin and Peter Dinklage

Ever since I saw Station Agent, I've had the nagging suspicion that Peter Dinklage  looks like somebody I' know and today when I saw this picture of Aaron Sorkin on the Deadline Hollywood site, it finally came to me.  Peter Dinklage and Aaron Sorkin look alike. I have worked for John Wells' Productions, the company that made West Wing, and have seen Sorkin a couple of times.  He's got real charisma.
He's also a fantastic writer as everyone who saw Social Network knows.  (He also wrote Moneyball, a movie that was full of fine acting and great moments.)

Like everyone else, I could watch Dinklage play Tyrion Lannister the rest of his life. (Only one more episode of Game of Thrones this year?  Noooooooo.) But the project I really hope is still alive is the one based on George Chesbro's books about Robert "Mongo the Magnificent" Frederickson. The book optioned was the third in the series, Affair of the Sorcerers, and Dinklage was attached to play Frederickson.
It's a great role. Frederickson is a criminologist who moonlights as a private investigator, often helped by his brother Garth, who's a cop. "Mongo" was his stage name when Frederickson worked as an acrobat in the circus and his best friends still call him that.
The books started out very real-world, but as the series went on, they got more and more out there.  The last of the books, called Lord of Ice and Loneliness (all the books have really poetic titles) is only available in a French translation; it has never been published in the U.S.