zetkin.net

Make Room! Make Room!
Harry Harrison, 1966 – strange moving on to this one after so much left-wing political sci-fi recently. Its dystopian near-future (1999) is the result of over-population, and its primary worry is public disorder. As seen through the eyes of a cop. Harrison doesn’t seem to like people much. Or women, in particular – the out-right bizarre character of ‘Shirl’ is a mash-up between ideal housewife and vaguely self-preserving gold-digger, which doesn’t convince. Still thinking about it.

The Help
Kathryn Stockett, 2009 – someone bought me this for Christmas, so I read it. Save time: don’t bother. Patronising, borderline racist (why do only the black characters speak in Southern dialect? Why do they need a white woman, who has up until the age of 23 failed to notice racism *at all* to facilitate their liberation?), essentially a fictional equivalent of the misery memoir. I amazed this book has done so well with hardly a critical review to be found.

Updates probably few and far between for a while, I’ve finally started Infinite Jest…

The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974 – political sci-fi (is there another kind?). Raises interesting questions about anarchism alongside the obvious critique of capitalist society (including much on sexual repression that still seems fresh and important).

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1921 – beautiful and terrifying dystopian novel that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four. With more myth, more symbolism and more depth, I think.

A Vanity Fair
W.M. Thackeray, 1848 – Are we supposed to like Becky Sharp, or is this the modern reader getting over-excited at the appearance of a clever, compelling and active female character in a Victorian novel? Not sure what Thack’s trying to say about the colonies either, aside from the racism. At least the servants get to be human here (occupying for unpaid wages!) unlike in Dickens.

Sexual/Textual Politics
Toril Moi, 1985 – This is great; loads on why what Moi calls ‘humanist’ feminist literary theory – Gilbert, Gubar, Showalter etc. – is a reflection or inversion of the patriarchal norms/ideals/canons it claims to be against. Also useful on the danger of categorising women’s oppression as the worst of all possible oppressions, without regard for intersecting identities and class positions; for Moi this leads to a homogenous, totalising concept of ideology, unable to cope with often contradictory facets of dominant ideologies, and strategies for subverting them.