Reading in Progress

[cimorene]

Before I started reading all that Highlander I was in the middle of two books (and then Tuesday I started another):

• Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean (1982)
  
  

  A collection of four short stories. I like the style and the universe, but it's very male. It's of its generation: this book is about the same age as many Zelazny or Saberhagen classics, and like them it has some female characters, both good and evil, sometimes very powerful and cool. The problem to my mind is more (a) some kind of unexamined/unconscious bias (like the kind of physical descriptors given to the sexy ones) and (b) the gender makeup of characters we meet is just mostly male. Like an adventure movie, these stories remember to place women in the ensemble, and sometimes to make them the villains as well as the love interests, but the principal characters in the narrative are still men who encounter these women. These aren't unforgivable sins, obviously - I love Zelazny and Saberhagen - but they get tiring. I've read half or so.




• Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award, Mythopoeic Award 1991)
  
  

  I like fantasy that deals with folklore, mythology, and specifically with Faerie. This book is older so I expected maybe a bit more like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin perhaps, or Cherryh's Arafel duology, but it's unlike them. It's set in early medieval Scotland from the beginning, and the completely magic-free bit is engaging enough, but the switch to Thomas's point of view as he enters Faerie is a bit disappointing. This Faerie is clearly magical - time definitely doesn't work normally, and the fae are clearly unhuman and they're seen doing magical things... but the narration is so... linear and going day by day and dealing with, I guess, politics, and the personality of the Queen of Faerie in a way that makes her more a magical person than an inhuman sort of unknowable entity like, say, the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair, or Jareth in Labyrinth, or the queen of faerie in Tam Lin or DWJ's Fire and Hemlock. Basically, it got boring. I may not finish it.




• Edward Said's Orientalism (NF, 1979)
  
  

  I've been meaning to read this for years but was startled by how riveting it is! I've read over half in the last two days.