Reading Wednesday

[brigdh]

What did you just finish?
The Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray (yes, the director). A collection of short stories about Prodosh Chandra Mitra, who goes by the nickname Feluda and works as a private investigator. He's assisted by his young cousin Topshe (who is very consciously Watson to Feluda's Sherlock Holmes, and who is the narrator of the stories) and his friend Lalmohon Ganguli, a timid dork who writes adventure novel under a pseudonym. Together, they fight crime! No, actually.

The stories aren't particularly deep, but they are fun, and have exciting settings. Most of the stories take place in Calcutta, but there's also one in Rajasthan, and another in Bombay and the rural area to the east. Very nice if you're in the mood for something easy to read.

What are you currently reading?
Dangerous Women edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Still working my way through this. A number of the stories so far have been deeply infuriating, which doesn't help my reading speed.

Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. A nonfiction history, focusing on post-1857.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Infuriating how?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It's not all of the stories, but I'm only halfway through, and so far there's been:

Jim Butcher's story, in which the heroine literally wins the day by being hot, as she's fighting a supernatural race who "loves beauty". (As a bonus, said heroine is currently living on the streets, because everyone knows not having the resources to bathe regularly is what really brings out one's natural beauty.)

Joe R. Lansdale's story, in which two wrestlers have been competing for decades over a woman, who keeps them in her thrall through "hoodoo". The resolution is when the main character realizes that it's all in his mind and she never had any special powers. Said woman has literally two lines of dialogue in the entire story, I suppose because it wasn't obvious enough how she was functioning as a prize and not a person.

Lawrence Block's story, which is just the rambling internal narration of an incredibly misogynist narrator during a one-night stand which ends with him killing the woman he's just slept with, thus finally allowing him to achieve orgasm. In this case I suppose the titular 'dangerous woman' was his long dead mother, who sexually abused him for years.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

WTF. That is not what I thought that anthology was supposed to be about. Like, just for starters, I assumed that "Dangerous Women" meant dangerous female protagonists.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That is what I assumed also! To be fair, there have been some good stories. I particularly liked Megan Lindholm's story about an elderly woman who sees visions of another world in her backyard, and doesn't know if it's real magic or the onset of Alzheimer's, and Brandon Sanderson's story about a female bounty hunter.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

A number of the stories so far have been deeply infuriating

Sadly, I am not surprised. If I were putting together a woman-positive anthology of paradigm-challenging stories featuring diverse, non-stereotypical female protagonists, these are absolutely not the editors I would call on.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I assume GRRM is just there to be the big name that sells books, and the other guy is the one who did the actual editing. I don't know anything about Gardner Dozois, but I do wish they would have picked a woman.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Dozois edits Asimov's and the Year's Best science fiction anthologies. He does not understand the need for diversity statements, since he "just buys the best stories" and nobody should feel they need a special invitation to submit to him.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Hmm. My reply should have gone here, but it started its own thread. Thanks, LJ.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ugh, yeah, that's not a promising reputation. I wonder whose idea a "Dangerous Women" theme was in the first place.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Call me cynical (which I admittedly am), but after hearing who was on the project, I came to view it as something of a backlash against genuine efforts in other quarters to consciously diversify and feature woman-centric (and other Othered-centric) content in an anthology/issue/series of issues. As in, it's exactly the sort of project a person might try to bring up as a means of deflecting the consequences of showing their ass, along the lines of "I said this to a black friend and s/he wasn't offended!" Which is not to say that some of the contributors didn't participate in good faith, since I know of at least one who really wanted to use this as an opportunity to showcase something awesome and woman-positive.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That seems depressingly likely, given how many of these stories don't seem to be even making a good faith effort to write about women. At least I didn't buy the book!