Last year I set myself two goals for the year. To only read books by women, more on which here. To blog about each one. The first was a great success, and the latter an abysmal failure. One of the unexpected oddities of my year of gendered reading was a surprisingly large volume of histories… Continue reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
Category: Blog
Blog posts
‘The Victorian City’ by Judith Flanders, ‘Georgian London’ by Lucy Inglis and ‘Culture Class’ by Martha Rosler
In my ongoing quest to understand the origins of planning law, I’ve been reading a lot of histories of London. That, after all, is where most of our town planning systems come from. Particularly I’ve just finished Lucy Inglis’ Georgian London: Into the Streets and Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Every Day Life In Dickens’… Continue reading ‘The Victorian City’ by Judith Flanders, ‘Georgian London’ by Lucy Inglis and ‘Culture Class’ by Martha Rosler
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
There’s a review by Laura Millar, published in The Guardian on February 11th 2015, that describes this book as “strenuously quirky”. Millar didn’t like it, writing: Eccentricities, as uncountable as the sands of the Sahara, drift and blow through this book, piling up in dunes that must be scaled by characters and readers alike. She… Continue reading The First Bad Man by Miranda July
The Mists of Avalon, The Eagle of the Ninth and England: Patriarchy and Fantasy Fiction My Mother Probably Wouldn’t Like
Whilst the rigors of life as a bureaucrat limit my time for writing, they’ve had the side effect of making me read more fiction than I have since I was a kid. Oddly enough, my taste in fiction doesn’t seem to have progressed all that much. When I was ten I read Rosemary Sutfcliff’s The… Continue reading The Mists of Avalon, The Eagle of the Ninth and England: Patriarchy and Fantasy Fiction My Mother Probably Wouldn’t Like
True Stories by Inga Clendinnen
Inga Clendinnen’s True Stories assembles her 1999 Boyer essays, revised in 2008 after the fall of the Howard Government. She personifies what Howard would have described as ‘black armband history’. Looking back over the settlement of Victoria, she follows Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson, sent to curb the violence of the squatocracy, in the 1840s.… Continue reading True Stories by Inga Clendinnen
Fair Play by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson is best known for her children’s books on the Moomin trolls, but Sort of Books has just translated and published a bunch of her non-children’s books. They’re all great, but Fair Play has the added benefit of being the first book I’ve read this year I think my mother would actually like. More… Continue reading Fair Play by Tove Jansson
Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australian Female Publicans by Clare Wright
Liquor licensing is, like planning and building law, fascinating in that it’s all about deciding who has the right to do certain things, and where they can do it. Unfortunately, it’s also very boring because its political impact is concealed by reams of dull regulation. Accordingly, I was thrilled to find Clare Wright’s Beyond the… Continue reading Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australian Female Publicans by Clare Wright
Sheila Heti’s ‘How Should a Person Be’
I was told that Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010) was a bit like Chris Kraus’s 1997 book I Love Dick. This isn’t an inappropriate comparison. Both books are about defining one’s sense of self through one’s relationship to others. Kraus uses a semi-fictionalised account of her relationship with the hot shot cultural… Continue reading Sheila Heti’s ‘How Should a Person Be’
Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘Sword at Sunset’
For Christmas, I got a shoeshine kit and Rosemary Sutcliff’s sprawling rendition of the King Arthur’s myth, Sword at Sunset (1963). The latter is unique in that Sutcliff takes out Camelot and the Round Table, and presents Arthur as a stress riddled, impotent king trying to rally argumentative Celts and fend of Saxon barbarians. The… Continue reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘Sword at Sunset’
On My Mother’s Taste in Literature
When my mother got into her mid-thirties she decided she’d read enough books by men, and has almost exclusively read women’s writing ever since. When I turned thirty-four last year, I was thinking about this. I counted through my bookshelf and it was about 70% books by men. They were mostly good books (mostly Wodehouse),… Continue reading On My Mother’s Taste in Literature