women writers
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The Arbonaut is a memoir by Meg Lowman, a pioneer in ecology who developed techniques for reaching and studying forest canopies. Meg covers her life as a scientist and the challenges of being a woman in science, including assault, dismissal, being underpaid and underrecognized. She also talks about the mentors she had along the way,…
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This year I decided to get a book subscription box. I mean, I don’t lack ways to buy news books but I do like getting a treat in the post. Tea Time Bookshop have lots of choices of different genres so I picked Science Fiction & Fantasy and Politics, Sciences & Insights. The book in…
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Could have been better, but was a lot of fun.
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Periodically, I make an effort to diversify my fiction reading. It’s easy to slip into just reading authors I know, especially those that are quite prolific. My fiction reading has been dominated by John Le Carré, Mick Herron and Adrian Tchaikovsky lately, and it felt like time to find some new authors. Malka Older was…
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There will be a British Museum theme to most of the next few posts. Tantra by Dr Imma Ramos is the book of the British Museum exhibition on Tantra. It had just opened in early 2020 when the pandemic hit and so I didn’t get to see the exhibition itself. The book and exhibition tell…
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Welcome to my annual flurry of posts about books, where I realise I haven’t posted anything in months, have a few weeks of activity, and then get distracted by work and life again. Anyway, recently I went to the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum and, as I do, I bought a book.…
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I’m doing a writing course for the next nine months and the reading list is quite intimidating. There are nearly 100 books on it. It’s been less than two weeks and I’ve bought ten of them already. Obviously, I’ll buy more than I read and many will sit on the bookcase unread for years. But…
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I have always thought of gravitas as a quality; something a person has or doesn’t, that either comes naturally or develops through life experience. On examination my reasoning for that belief is flimsy. I’ve no clue how I thought some people acquire gravitas or are simply born with it and others don’t, irregardless of their…
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Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck is an examination of the media treatment of female celebrities (mostly celebrities, always women) when they go off the rails. Starting from the contemporary examples of Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan (the book was published in 2016 but draws extensively from Doyle’s journalism over the preceding ten years) Doyle examines…
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The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is about a crew of space tunnellers who are offered the biggest job they’ve ever had: to travel to the edge of civilized space to a small, uninhabited planet that is pretty much entirely made up of the fuel used to power spacecraft and…
Boudica Marginalia 