Happy Birthday Rob!

It's my brother's birthday. I hate that he's 3000 miles away and I can't bake him a cake. And razzing him about his age is not as much fun on email as it is in person.

Feminist Fiction Friday--bits and pieces

There's still time to get in on Patti Abbott's "drabble contest." She supplies the prompts, you write a story in exactly 100 words.

Huzzah--Gillian Flynn has a new book out. Gone Girl. About a marriage gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Coming at the end of the month is a debut novel called The Age of Miracles by  Karen Thompson Walker. It's a combinatin of science fiction, thriller and coming of age story. 

in July, there will be another entry in Tana French's excellent Dublin Murder Squad series. It's called Broken Harbor.

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?