I read a lot. I always have. Not as much as I’d like these days due to my health, but I do still read. Back in September 2005 I started a Xanga, in which I reviewed books as I read them. Going back to read those reviews of mine shows me, how far I’ve come in terms of my feminism, my ally-ism and my literary criticism. Of course, since then I had a few more years studying English Literature at university, my lit crit is the most developed in those reviews, too. But it’s also extremely telling, that since I stopped reviewing a few months before I quit university (for reasons that shall remain undisclosed for now), I have worked, lived and breathed in the real world. None of those reviews contain what I have to say now, and on some of the books I suspect I might even have made a 180, when t comes to judging the quality of the writing.
Copied from the post I wrote here.
I have, for a while, pondered reviewing the books I do manage to finish these days. I’d also have to go and re-read and re-review some of those books of old, just for the sake of thoroughness. I have visited pages where such things are done, and I have enjoyed reading other people’s views on the fiction they read.
I am a fantasy and sci-fi fan. Let that be said immediately. That means that many of the books I read are written on the assumption that the readership is white, male and mostly in their teens or early twenties. It shows. Badly. A few months back I had a discussion with a friend on a message board, about whether it was okay to have such graphic depictions of rape in a book. He argued that it made the medieval world much more realistic, and he completely did not understand how this could be seen as disrespectful to female readers. I will maintain that rape doesn’t make a book realistic, realism does. Also, mentioning that a rape occured is not what I have a problem with, it would indeed be unrealistic if it never occured, no, it’s the graphic description of the rape of a thirteen year old girl, I take issue with. I’ll get into this further, when I actually review “A Game of Thrones” by George RR Martin, and as well when review “The Lions Al-Rassan” by Guy Gavriel Kay.
My ambition is to provide a feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQI, anti-ableist, etc perspective on this my beloved genre (plus whatever else I might read). What finally urged me to get started was this post by Karnythia:
It is time for the books to reflect more than one view of strength, of femininity, and of reality. And it shouldn’t be a case of “Well there’s this one author or this one perspective that represents *those* people” but I know that breaking the mainstream of this habit of viewing POC culture as monolithic is going to take a lot more than just attending cons and putting out books. We can’t be the only ones doing the work to change the face of fiction.
I hope to one day produce a work of fiction good enough to get published. I hope to honour my ideals through that work. And for now I think the best way to prepare myself for writing it, is to read and be critical of what has already been written. Truly, while I’d love to be “that one author” Karnythia mentions, I’d love it even more if the majority of authors would wake up and respect all members of their readership.
For a long time I’ve been semi-feminist in my critique of what I read. It’s been an unconscious feminism. I can best exemplify it with my intense annoyance, at how every single character in David Eddings’ “Belgariad” and “Malloreon” gets married at the end. Every single one. Well, except for the eunuch of course. My equal annoyance when minority characters show up in books, not as people, but as stereotypes, very well exemplified in Christopher Rice’s “The Snow Garden”. But at the same time I wonder, how I missed so many obvious things elsewhere. Like what kind of fairly awesome feminist attitudes Emma Donoghue has displayed in “The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits”, it’s not great literature, but well worth a read to be sure. Also, I find it telling how I’ve failed to applaud the strong female cast in certain novels, perhaps I missed that because it comes natural to me, to think of women as just as central to a tale as the menfolk, I speak of how Anselm Audley has a trio of main characters two of which are women, and both strong in each their own way, in “Heresy”, “Inquisition” and “Crusade”. Also how Stephen Lawhead has managed to expand the roles of the terribly few women in the Arthurian legends in his Pendragon Quintet.
So, I’ll be making a new series of posts – no telling how often as that will likely be completely random – and since Feminist Criticism is actually a literary discipline, and I’ll cover more than just matters of sexism and women’s situation, and since Feminist Review already exists in many forms, I’ll probably call the series Ismist Review, and touch on as many isms as I can find or that are relevant. Anyhow, that describes my next project – hopefully the first instalment will be up in not too terribly long.
