wednesday books
10 July 2019 20:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowhereThe Hod King, Josiah Bartlett. Done with the Tower of Babel for now... until the fourth book comes out. Will be curious to see if it sticks the landing. Enjoyed the ending of this, though it does leave a lot of loose threads. I have mixed feelings about whether to recommend this series -- there is a lot it does well, but I'm not wild about the parts that are Senlin point of view, and that's a lot, including the first book. Bartlett is clearly capable of writing interesting female characters who don't just serve as props for the male protagonist's character development and who do things like argue with each other about the revolution, so why couldn't he have learned how to do it before writing the first book in the series? I would maybe recommend starting with Arm of the Sphinx, the second book, except I have no idea if any of it would make sense without the first book.
New Grub Street, George Gissing. I'm on a mission to convince more people to read George Gissing's novels, because they have all sorts of interesting late-Victorian socio-economic commentary that I'd like to have more people to talk about with. This is the one I started with, and it's a reread -- the first time I read it was when the first section was assigned for a history class in college, otherwise I'd probably not have read it at all. I'm now thinking that it would be better to start with The Odd Women (see @osprey_archer's excellent review here), as I'd remembered various characters as being more likeable than they are, and some of my favorite characters don't even appear until well into the book.
It's a really interesting look into the late Victorian publishing world! But well, it starts with Jasper Milvain, our antihero, mansplaining to his mother and sisters as to why he needs to spend all the family's money jump-starting his literary career. His sister Maud is having none of it, and I'm totally on Team Maud here -- and curious to see how things go with her, as she's one of the bits I recall less well. Really the women in this book need to meet up with the proto-feminists from The Odd Women, who could help them smash the patriarchy or at least suggest other career options. Right now Maud and her sister Dora are writing children's books as suggested by Jasper, which seems to be going well so far. I really want them to be more successful than Jasper in the end, but don't recall if this is the case.
New Grub Street, George Gissing. I'm on a mission to convince more people to read George Gissing's novels, because they have all sorts of interesting late-Victorian socio-economic commentary that I'd like to have more people to talk about with. This is the one I started with, and it's a reread -- the first time I read it was when the first section was assigned for a history class in college, otherwise I'd probably not have read it at all. I'm now thinking that it would be better to start with The Odd Women (see @osprey_archer's excellent review here), as I'd remembered various characters as being more likeable than they are, and some of my favorite characters don't even appear until well into the book.
It's a really interesting look into the late Victorian publishing world! But well, it starts with Jasper Milvain, our antihero, mansplaining to his mother and sisters as to why he needs to spend all the family's money jump-starting his literary career. His sister Maud is having none of it, and I'm totally on Team Maud here -- and curious to see how things go with her, as she's one of the bits I recall less well. Really the women in this book need to meet up with the proto-feminists from The Odd Women, who could help them smash the patriarchy or at least suggest other career options. Right now Maud and her sister Dora are writing children's books as suggested by Jasper, which seems to be going well so far. I really want them to be more successful than Jasper in the end, but don't recall if this is the case.