Recent Acquisitions #72

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

The charity shops have been scoured pretty much clean recently, along with the odd little charity table you can unexpectedly come across in supermarkets. Still, some 50p-£1.50 books have been acquired.

Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey Through the Roman Empire by Elizabeth Speller (Age UK, £1, hb, looks completely unread);
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by Andrew Sherratt (Tesco's charity table, £1, hb, been read);
The Russian Court at Sea by Frances Welch (pb, good condition);
Feather Boy by Nancy Singer (Hospice shop, 50p, pb, looks like it'd been trodden on recently);
The Odd Women by George Gissing (bit worn)
and
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir, the Vatican's favourite author. Not. (pb)

The Gissing book drew my attention even though the one book of his I have read (New Grub Street) was incredibly miserable and depressing because of these lines in the back-cover blurb:

"Questions of marriage don't interest me much...my work and thoughts are for the women who do not marry--the 'odd women' as I call them...."

That quote from Gissing is probably enough by itself to justify publication of the book by Virago. I wonder however if it will be as heavy on the heart as New Grub Street, which was almost Sartre-esque in its despair. But then I don't think Virago would have published it if it was all about how dreadful it is for a woman not to be married.

We shall see.

I've never read anything by de Beauvoir (now there's an admission for someone who calls herself a feminist) so if and when I get round to her book, that'll be a first. I also haven't read Greer's The Female Eunuch, although it lay around the house for a long time when I was young, as my mother had a copy. I vaguely remember asking her why it had that title. She explained the idea of women lacking the protuberance that many seem to think essential to being human, and I declared it stupid. At no time have I ever considered changing my view on that. It strikes me as so absurd as to not even be worth the effort of arguing about, but apparently it does get argued about. A lot.

One observation I did make while going through the charity shops was that people round here read a lot of crime fiction, and not much SFF. I kinda wish it was the other way round!

Comments

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

People generally read more crime fiction that SFF. Also, you've bought all the SFF already.