Moving, so another slow reading week.
This is not current reading, but I did find time to go off on a tangent about suffragette fiction in an extended comment in a thread on![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer's review of The Odd Women by George Gissing (itself a fascinating proto-feminist late Victorian novel that I wish more people would read). Probably said tangent would have done better as a post of its own, and at some point I may clean in up and make it into one.
Arm of the Sphinx by Josiah Bancroft: I feel like maybe the author reacted to complaints that the women in the first book are generally portrayed as vulnerable in one way or another, and made up for it by putting a bunch of badass women in the second book. OK, some of them are the same women, they're just better when they have their own POV and get to pass the Bedchel test. The end of this book was pretty great, but ended on a cliffhanger.
The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft: next in the series. I've been enjoying this one less, and have temporarily put it down because things were getting too depressing. Part of it is that we've temporarily left the interesting characters from the last book behind to focus on series protagonist Thomas Senlin, who is my least favorite of the POV characters. At the end of the last book, he was sent off to be a spy, and so far has been an absolutely terrible spy, attracting attention to himself in various, sometimes amusing, ways. I assume this is part of his employer's master plan, because they seem smart enough to predict this would happen, but I don't know what the point is. It was also at the start of this book that I realized that although Bancroft's vision of the tower of Babel is fantastically inventive, it is by and large horror worldbuilding, and I wouldn't want to spend any extended amount of time in any of the levels of the tower.
Instead I started All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor, which is doing a good job of being less depressing, but I haven't gotten very far in. I'm on the chapter with the dusting, which was my favorite bit when I read it as a kid!
This is not current reading, but I did find time to go off on a tangent about suffragette fiction in an extended comment in a thread on
osprey_archer's review of The Odd Women by George Gissing (itself a fascinating proto-feminist late Victorian novel that I wish more people would read). Probably said tangent would have done better as a post of its own, and at some point I may clean in up and make it into one.Arm of the Sphinx by Josiah Bancroft: I feel like maybe the author reacted to complaints that the women in the first book are generally portrayed as vulnerable in one way or another, and made up for it by putting a bunch of badass women in the second book. OK, some of them are the same women, they're just better when they have their own POV and get to pass the Bedchel test. The end of this book was pretty great, but ended on a cliffhanger.
The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft: next in the series. I've been enjoying this one less, and have temporarily put it down because things were getting too depressing. Part of it is that we've temporarily left the interesting characters from the last book behind to focus on series protagonist Thomas Senlin, who is my least favorite of the POV characters. At the end of the last book, he was sent off to be a spy, and so far has been an absolutely terrible spy, attracting attention to himself in various, sometimes amusing, ways. I assume this is part of his employer's master plan, because they seem smart enough to predict this would happen, but I don't know what the point is. It was also at the start of this book that I realized that although Bancroft's vision of the tower of Babel is fantastically inventive, it is by and large horror worldbuilding, and I wouldn't want to spend any extended amount of time in any of the levels of the tower.
Instead I started All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor, which is doing a good job of being less depressing, but I haven't gotten very far in. I'm on the chapter with the dusting, which was my favorite bit when I read it as a kid!