Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

I borrowed a copy of this from the library as due to the popularity of the tv series and the out-of-printness of this book copies on amazon start around £50! I have to say I would NOT pay £50 for this. It was an enjoyable enough story. It felt more like generic fantasy rather than GOT. The similarity being the names of the places the characters came from, and even in a comic being too many to easily keep track of. But it was much more a generic story about a would-be-knight than anything else. It also highlighted the lack of roles for women in that world as there was only one female character who had two conversations in the whole story. The art really isn't all that great though. Standard Marvel/DC type and looks kinda cartoony and not very interesting. The story was quite enjoyable though and I found myself getting caught up in it and wanting to finish it all in one go. I have reserved the second volume from the library. Not a brilliant graphic novel by any streach of the imagination but alright to read.

So I read Fun Home which was Bechdel's book about her dad where every chapter got more complicated and showed a deeper insight into his life and their relationship and it was all very interesting and tragic. I was interested to read her book about her mother having had one or two issues with my own. But I have to say overall there really wasn't much here. While Fun Home gave you a really good sense of the complexity of the dad, the mom was treated much more superficially, she was a teacher, she wrote poetry, she liked to act in local theatre. You'd eavesdrop on her converstations with Alison but really there wasn't much there. Likewise there didn't seem to be much in their relationship. Alison felt unwanted and not as valued as her brothers but really her mum didn't seem that bad at all and it seemed like they had a fairly normal relationship. There were hints of more trauma beneath the surface about her mom's homophobia but that was hardly touched on. Likewise while fun home was all layers this book felt very flat and didn't really get any deeper. I'm afraid that despite having a psychology degree, and courses in child development I just wasn't that interested in her favourite child psychologist that she kept quoting. The best bits for me were about Virginia Wolf which made me convinced I really should read more of her books. This book was good it just wasn't fantastic like her last one. I think you'd probably get more out of it if you have more of a typical relationship with your mother as it seemed to be aiming at finding some general truth about mothers and daughters which I'm afraid because of my personal circumstances I just couldn't identify with at all.

This book is about £300 pounds on amazon and an excellent example of why I had to rejoin the SOAS library. I can't think how I missed reading it when I was at SOAS. (Or if I did I had forgotten it) It is a selection of essays about women in Chinese history from around 400 CE-1200 CE. The essay by Suzanne Cahill is on the exact same topic as I did my dissertation on (Women transcendents in Tang Taoism) so I feel like I can't have missed it. Though it is possible I only had time to read the relevant article and skip the rest (As while Cahill's article was excellent there was nothing in there that I didn't already know).

The first essay, The death of a princess by Jen-der Lee, looks mostly at the different punishments for adultury in the Northern dynasties, and the different positions of women. I think Lee underestimated the importance of rank and social standing as gender wasn't the only classification that mattered. The story of the princess was quite interesting. She was quite a horrific person, having found a maidservant had an affair with her husband she killed the maid then "aborted and mutilated the unborn child, stuffed the maid with straw and showed her naked to Liu Hui [her husband]" (4). She wasn't punished but her husband was stripped of his noble title and forced to divorce her. They were remarried ten years later by imperial decree and he injured her while she was pregant and killed the baby (she later died of her injuries). It was a very sensational story.

The next essay, Women in China's frontier politics by Ning Chia, looked at the imperial policy of marrying imperial princess to "barbarians" and the role that they played in international politics. I think this was a good essay and showed how you can't simply judge someone by their gender alone but that their rank was far more important. Granted they wouldn't have been able to marry the foreign leaders if they'd been men, but the fact that they were imperial princess meant they had power and prestigue in their own right. Though while portraying these women as important it was also important to mention how their writings that survive show them to be homesick and unhappy and how they had little of their own agency.

The third essay, From cross-dressing daughter to lady knight errant by Sufen Sophia Lai was probably my favourite just because it's a topic I've found so interesting. From the very start of my interest in Chinese history I've always been slightly obsessed by the idea of the women who disguise themselves as men and go and fight or live as men in society. It's interesting to read how relatively common this idea was. This essay discusses the way such women are portrayed in literature, with many examples from the Tang dynasty. In some tales Lai argues that the women are portrayed as "inhuman" performing deeds such as killing their babies and cutting off the heads of their enemies (93). However, this seems like more of a modern judgement as while unusual behaviour for a woman I don't see them as doing anything that you wouldn't find men doing in similar tales.

The fourth essay, Writing virture with their bodies by Sherry J Mou looks at two Tang biographies of women also address women dressed up as men and seeking revenge. It talks about how women mutilated themselves in acts of protest (against being raped, remarried or in order to honor their parents) It also showed how the stories differed in different versions.

Ji Entertainers in Tang Chang'an by Victor Xiong was a short article that was interesting in that it showed how close to the palace the "red light" district was.

Cahill's essay on the Taoist Hagiographies of women saints from Du Guanting looked at how women achieved asscendence in the same way as men Taoists.

Father in Heaven mother in Hell also by Sufen Sophia Lai looked at the gender perspective of the story of Mulian rescuing his mother from hell and how she basically got a worse deal with every re-telling of the story. She also showed how the increasing linking of yin and yang with gender roles led to a more negative view of women. However, this I questioned a little as in proper yin yang teaching people were supposed to be a balance of both yin and yang. And that the "weak" or "yielding" yang was not considered negative in any way but was in fact the stronger of the forces in traditional teaching.

Bonds of certain consequence by Don J Wyatt looked at two different views of concubines in Song China. I'm afraid I didn't find this essay as interesting mostly because it represented a man's view of what a woman should be doing and was all the reasons I find the neo-Confucians rather dull.

This is an amazing collection of essays though. I'm very glad I was finaly able to read them all and will hopefully be able to make some photocopies before I hand it back to the library.

This was actually a collection of stories you couldn't sit and read in one go. Each "comic" had it's own collection of short stories, most of which were very funny and as such needed to be picked up and read in short bursts. I have to admit one of my favourite stories was the one where the superheros had to take on Jerry Springer. The boy genius who was everyone's favourite didn't do much for me. Americana even as a paradoy is a bit annoying. But I loved the pulp adventures and it was lovely to see more artwork by Melinda Gebbie. I borrowed this from the library but will definitely have to get my own copy.

This was a very good selection of translations of Tang tales. However, it's another one I'm glad I got from the library instead of buying my own copy. The annotated notes for each tale are very good but have more to do with the technical process of translation than they do literature or cultural or social history. The tales are all very good though. Hongxian is the story of a very competent woman who "was originally a man in a previous incarnation" who was punished for killing people and therefore born a woman(19) and after performing her meritous service was able to return to her original male body (21). Likewise in the next tale Du Zichun was reborn as a woman as punishment and was not able to speak (57). He lived happily as a woman but when his husband killed their child he cried out and so lost his chance of immortality. Record within a pillow has the character start his career in the palace library (only later to discover his successful life was just a dream that brought no happiness). The Governor of the Southern Branch is about a man who has a reputation for drunkness gets very drunk passes out and becomes an honored guest at a palace. He has lots of success but then awakens to learn that the palace he was with was a colony of ants. He ends up giving up his drinking and following the Dao. The Tale of the curly beared guest has the guest disguise the competent serving girl as a man to help her escape with him. The last tale is the tale of Huo XiaoYu was about a scholar who swore his love to a girl but once he had became successful forgot his vows to her and betrayed her and she ended up killing herself and haunting him for awhile. I hope that one day I will get this collection and be able to use it for studying the original tales. The tales that were chosen were all familiar to me yet it was interesting to read this translations and see them in more depth. Once more I'm struck by the gender transformations and the cross dressing element of these stories.

I have to say the thing that really struck me about this book was the sheer ammount of books written and published by women writers, especially when you consider the equivalent in English history. There were huge volumes of collections of women's poetry that had been printed since the 14th century and women decided to edit and publish their own collections of poetry from the 16th. There were thousands of published women poets before the 20th century which I found most remarkable. Also not all of these women were elite women but some were self taught and had started their lives on the equivalent of the working class end of the social scale.

The structure of the book is very nice. She looks in depth at the writings of one woman whose work was published after her death Gan Lirou (1743-1819). This woman's poems were autobiographical that she'd written throughout her life celebrating and commisorating the different things she'd experienced, a lot of which were quite tragic. Fong translated only key moments rather than the whole collection (as there were far too many poems) but with the background she supplied even these gave a good insight into the woman's life and feelings. Fong also included the original Chinese as well as the translations which was very helpful. The poems show her playing an active role in "official matters" as well as religious matters. Praying for rain in 1807, which was mentioned two years later in the local gazette (46). She also regretted not being able to participate in the examinations and reap the same success as her brothers (48)This is something she writes about both in her 20s and in her 70s. Despite her orthodox approach to her gender roles she still seems them as limiting.

The next chapter looked at the poetry written by concubines (as opposed to nice respectable wives). I thought it was a bit of an interesting descision to seperate out the writing of the women dependent on their relationship with men. But in doing so there were some interesting things revealed. Like the concubines were often helped write poetry by the "wives". It seemed that these women, freed from the responsibility of running the household would have more time for their studies. Several of the concubines themselves expressed preference in the 18th century saying that they "would rather be concubines to men of literary talent, rather than as a principal wife to a man of wealth" (67). One of the poems "Songs of selling a daughter" ends with a great deal of anger or anguish,
... For a hundred years it will be difficult to wash away the disgrace of being a maid
Rtaher than sell the daughters body,
Why not eat her flesh?
Eating the daughter's flesh will fill the parents' stomachs.
Selling the daughter - the daughter's heart will never feel fulfilled, even in death (68)

However, another poem written by an old woman to a neighbour girl expresses satisfaction with her gender ending with the lines "I just wish that it will always be like this, even in my next life I still want to be an old woman". I've recently become fascinated with the transgender idea of rebirth, and how you could be reborn as a man, and all the different implications that this brings about. But I like that this woman was so satisfied that she didn't want to change.

The third chapters, authoring journeys, looked at women's travel writing (both wives and concubines). The problem with this chapter was most of the examples used were poetry, and the prose describing the journals was put in an appendix at the back. I would like to have seen this brought into the main text. Though it seemed like an interesting enough topic to have at least a whole book on the subject. The women writing were not sheltered either from the horrors they encountered, some were injured in battle, one was injured in a battle many times trying to save her husband and wrote about wanting to be a woman warrior like Mulan.

The last chapter examines women's anthologies and women as editors, and as I have already mentioned earlier was very enlightening.

I borrowed a copy of this book from SOAS as it's only availble in hardcover for almost £50. It's a shame a paperback version hasn't been released for half that as it would be a fantastic book to reach a wider audience and deserves to be read by more people.

This is a fictionalised autobiographical account of a young Jewish girl in World War II. Based on the author's own experiences and told as a children's novel the book tells of Kitty's experiences as an evacuee and back in London during the Blitz. The young Kitty is a strong willed child, running away from two houses that she was evacuated to and eventually convincing her mother to let her stay in London. There is quite a lot of interesting social history here, from daily life of Jewish families in the East End to experiences during the war.

Ok I admit that everything I know about Livia I learned from I Claudius. The entire point of this book seemed to be that everything in I Claudius was WRONG. As a historian I can understand how frustrating it must be to be a professor and have to explain to your students again and again that you shouldn't get your history from television (even BBC dramas from back in the day). But unfortunatley the author seemed to be so intenet on dis-proving popular conceptions of Livia he lacked any other thesis or further information.

It's always interesting to go and read books, particularly academic press books, on other subjects other than my speciality to see how historians in other fields are writing, what techniques they use etc. Unfortuantely the author of this book didn't seem to have done any of that. He seemed not to have read any books on women's history and different interpretations of history but seemed soley intent on writing "what really happened" looking for an absoulte truth where none was obtainable. He was very critical of the Roman historical sources, he would refer to them as "literary" sources not historical as they didn't fit his idea of what "proper history" was. He would dismiss huge sections of the sources saying how he couldn't believe something like that could be true while taking their word on other topics. Later in the appendix he goes through the different writer and gives his impressions of them and what they wrote and his opinion on what was fact and what wasn't. But for me he totally missed the bigger picture of WHY they were writing what they wrote. The most critical historian of Livia was also the one who said how the senate heaped rewards and offerings on her and made her a goddess. A very interesting dichotomy. Whose opinions were the writer's reflecting? If it didn't happen why did people say it did? What were the similarities? Did they write based on different representations of her or were they purely the writers own invention? It would have told us so much more to learn why these different discussions were taking place rather than simply dismissing them out of hand as "not actually true".

The book was split into two parts, the first a dry account of Livia's life, but mostly that of her relatives and what they did while Livia was alive. The secound half tries and put in more of a social context but I felt like I only got glimpses into what she as like and what people thought of her. I know she likes a specific type of wine and drank it every day, she liked herbal medicines, she was a reputed to be a match for Augustus, she had a reputation for being chaste (despite being married twice). The Senate loved her (despite all the rumours that spread about her). She was worshipped as a goddess for at least two centuries after her death.

The best thing about this book was in the appendix it gave a list of all the sources that mention her, and a brief overview of what they said about her.

I was quite disappointed in this book. I know that two biographies of Livia came out close to each other. I thought the academic press would be much better than the popular history but I was quite disappointed. I did learn things, and particularly in the appendix I learned the most but I feel like this work needs to be re-done in the hands of a good expert in woman's history. That way you'd be able to see where Livia fit into the bigger scheme of things. How represenatitve she was and all the ways that she wasn't and all the things that made her special and interesting. The author actually didn't seem to like her much. He mentioned how she'd stayed married to August for over 40 years without a child, when he was busy passing reforms saying women should give birth or divorce, saying how they stayed together and how people wrote very highly of her. But he seemed totally baffled as to why this was. In many ways it was a worse treatment than the Roman historians who accused her of many crimes. At least they saw her as capable and powerful and interesting. I'm glad I got this book from the library though I think I will copy out some of the references before I hand it back.

I first heard of Anne Lister a year ago when the BBC did a documentary and a dramatisation about her life. This book is extracts from her diary with commentary by the editor giving additional details of what is happening in Anne's life at that time. The diary itself is a mixture of dry and dull preceedings with heartfelt and heartbreaking discussions about the women in her life and their strengths and failings. It is wonderful as so much of queer women's history is often dismissed as being "emotional friendships" and even though the women use the language of romantic love scholars are always quite trepedatious about saying whether the women involved actually "got up to anything". While part of me can respect the historical position that you don't want to say something happened without the evidence to back it up. To say that these women were having these relationships without the physical side just seems terribly naive. This book is great as it is a first person account of such lives and friendships in the most wonderful detail. Here the women clearly have physical feelings for each other, act on those feelings, suffer jealousies and love, and also recognise the bond of romantic love in other women who also love other women. One of my favourite parts was when Anne went to visit a Lady who lived in Wales with her partner of 40 or 50 years and Anne was thinking how wonderful it would be to live with a woman for that long, and how she discussed the women's relationship with her other friends and wondered if the Lady's relationship was purely Platonic or like theirs, and they all seemed to think it was like theirs. It was also interseting that when Anne did meet other women outside her circle of friends she was quite hesitant to tell them about the nature of her relationship with women, even after these women had admitted to their own relationship with women. While the diary never discusses prejudice against them, just the fear that M's husband will suspect the true nature of their relationship, it shows that the women weren't able to be at all open about their feelings. Though it was interesting on how many occasions Anne discussed M with her aunt and her aunt was always giving her advice on M and the other girlfriends.

One of the things I think is rather sad about this is that many people have dubbed Anne as "not very nice" (rather like they have Radclyff Hall). It seems like these women are looked down on for rejecting a society that doesn't accept them. Not to mention the fact that they are often continuing several affairs at one time. Rather than seeing this as an attempt to find love and companionship in a society where it's denied them they are judged for not being part of a "monogamous feminine ideal". Surely if they were lesbians and in love Anne should have just contented herself with M? But M was married and not availble to be a full time partner to Anne. The relationship came across as very sad and very real and very "modern" to me.

I'm really glad I got this book. I borrowed it from the library but am definitely going to buy my own copy as well.

I bought this book for work as I do all the library's cataloguing as well as training cataloguing volunteers. The books said it would be good for experienced cataloguers and outline the changes to RDA. However, this wasn't really the case. The book would be a good introduction to library students who had no experience cataloguing. It had very basic introductions to cataloguing, going over the requirements of the current systems and introducing the new changes. I can say having read this I have a clearer understanding of what the changes are. At least what they seem to be, not using abbreviations and copying more directly from the text (as is done in rare books cataloguing). The most useful part should have been the examples at the back which list library catalogue records in all the different standards. However, lack of proof-reading shows that there were mistakes in the samples which is confusing and disappointing. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone whose actually been doing cataloguing before but as an introduction for library students it's ok.

This was a comic that I really liked when I was a teenager. I barely remembered anything about it. But this version I think is much better than the one I read when I was younger. It's set up as a direct translation of the Japanese, (to the point where the panel layout is "backwards" and while I've read quite a few Chinese comics in this layout doing so in English felt odd). I have to say it was much better than I remembered and much better than black magic. It was divided into four storylines. It was a strange brand of gritty distopian future with random humour mixed in. (The only thing that bothered me was the homophobic joke). It was kinda light on characterisation, more fighting and explosions. But Leona was much more interesting than I remembered, Uni Puma and Ana Puma a bit more disturbing. It was fun though I don't know if I'll bother ever reading it again so I'm glad I borrowed it from the library rather than buying a copy.

This was another book I borrowed from SOAS but I have to get my own copy. It's only £30 and it's just totally amazing. Without a doubt this is the best book focusing on Chinese fox spirits I've ever read. It's so nice to see the subject given a full scholarly view. The book focuses on treatment of the foxes in the Qing dynasty but gives an account of them from the earliest recorded statements and how their abilities and reputations change over time. The book is very strong on tradition and literature but a little bit more weak on the religious side. That said it is still brilliant and I definitely recommend it.

It talks about different books and stories about foxes, everything from pornography to classic works, it includes male and female foxes and looks at the different ways the two are represented. It also addresses the fact that foxes can change their gender, sometimes at will, at so they outstep the boundaries of "men and women". Foxes stand on the borderline between the strange and the commonplace (93). It includes translations of shorter stories and interesting social analysis of the stories. It looks at foxes haunting places and how this transforms into worship of the fox as well as how prevelant the cult of the fox was in late Imperial China. It looks at the relationship between foxes and spirit mediums, how mediums would exorcise foxes and how they would posess women. As well as how they disguise themselves as women and seduce men leading to their death, but how not all female foxes are portayed as having this dangerous nature. He even looks at foxes and homosexuality. There was an amazing story (Feng Sanniang" 封三娘) that could have been Victorian about a young fox who befriends a young girl and the two become "very close" friends and eventually the fox leads the young girl to get married but still wants to retain a relationship with her. But the girl feels badly she doesn't have a husband so tries to get the fox drunk so her husband can sleep with her, but the fox manages to escape and not get raped and ends up leaving the girl. It sounded like a lovely sad story. There was also the story Lianxiang which was a story about a fox and a ghost in love with the same scholar.

It was a lovely book addressing both the supernatural and social and cultural gender roles. I think I will try and be very good and not spend any money for the coming week so I can treat myself to a copy at the end of the week.

I randomly found this book while I was in the SOAS library. It's a lovely translation of a 6th century book of ghost stories. It has a brief introduction to the stories, talking about their provenance and the author. The stories are literary rather than literal translations to be read and understood by non-specialists though the author includes some translation notes at the end of the stories.

The only problem with this book is it uses the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system of romanization of Chinese characters. Now I'm pretty good at Wade Giles and Pinyin but this was totally mad. I just couldn't figure out what most of the words were supposed to be. This took away a lot of enjoyment for me as it felt like I was back reading another culture's work and not something that I was familiar with. Which was quite disappointing.

The stories themselves were quite good. Some I liked better than others. There were 64 stories in all. What was surprisng was the vast number of stories about court. Most of the ghost stories I've read from later periods in Chinese history tend not to focus on the very high elite but are more about the lives of ordinary people, or at the very best litarati or local government officals. It was interesting to see the stories told on a national level. There could be some interseting analysis of this. The stories being told to show how justice was eventually reached even if it wasn't meted out correctly in the first place. The stories were very much of the no bad deed goes un-punished variety. Another thing that was interesting was how sometimes it would take years after the person saw the ghost for them to die. It was like the ghost had been inserted into a historical story. My favourite stories were the ones that were about ordinary people. A girl who was executed for being a bandit when she wasn't, a woman haunting an inn, a ghost who threw his clothes in the air so people could find his body. The lower stories were more interseting as they seemed to divert the most from the official histories.

I'm very glad I found this book in the library as it's £100 on abebooks. I think I will scan my favourite stories before giving it back.

I was super excited when I discovered this series. A post-apocalyptic or at least far future scifi world written and drawn by a woman with lots of characterisation and quirkiness. How had I not come across this before? Finally Darkhorse have done something right! They've relased three of the collections in one HUGE tome at a very reasonable price. Granted the book was so huge that at times my hands did hurt reading it but I was still in love.

The book collects three separate stories, Sin Eater, King of the Cats and Talisman. Sin Eater was the introduction to the world and the characters. It was the longest stories and while there were times I wondered where everything was going overall I really enjoyed it. It started showing you the world, it was quite post apocalyptic with deserted and harmful wilderness and the majority of people living inside a domed city that was gradually falling apart and no one knew how to make the material of the dome anymore. But for all the aparant far futureness the people, even the ones that were part animal, were still very recognisable as people. There was a lovely lesbian who ran a bookshoop (I wish they'd had more of her). After the first few issues the story settles on a family that the Finder Jaega knows. The rest of the graphic novel focuses on his relationship with the family and their relationship with their crazy father/ex-husband. I liked the story more as it progressed and the issues which were told from the perspective of the children towards the end were my favourite. It was just such a huge and sad and very real drama in this big crazy world.

King of the cats was much less emotional. Here there was much more commentary on society and different races, and how we view things, and consumerism and disneyland. While being quite absurd and still trying to say interesting things. It was good though not as good as the other two stories.

The third story was the best. It was the least futuristic but was the story of the youngest girl in the family from the first story. It was all about her love of books and reading and her trying to find the perfect story she remembered from a child but how it wasn't quite right. There were lots of lovely bits about alienation and the point of reading and feeling like you were wasting your time and the nature of creativity. And it was all just brilliant.

Dark horse have relased a second volume which I will definitely buy and even though I borrowed this one from the library I will definitely have to get my own copy as well. I'm currently waiting for the new volume, Finder Voice to arrive in the post...

This book had a nice balance for a children's book, there were lovely descriptions of houses and everyone was very pleasant and yet it was set against the backdrop that one of the characters would die horribly and the woman they were trying to save was doomed to be executed! There was a lovely dream like quality to it. There was no explanation or method for the time travel, just that the girl would go back and forth in the old house. There was only one villain in the piece, and despite her trying to kill the main character even her motives were quite sympathetic. I must admit I always preferred Elizabeth to Mary but I still enjoyed this.

I was very pleased when I found that JMS had written a graphic novel that wasn't about superheros! I was particularly excited as the art was by Collen Dorran who was one of the first artists/writers that I became a fan of when I was reading comic books as a teenager. Collecting all her various early renditions of A distant soil. Her art work is still lovely and the pages are a rich and detailed and full of colour. Having read so many black and white comics lately this made a lovely change.

The book was listed as Book of Lost Souls vol. 1 but I have been unable to locate any other volumes. I don't know if the comics continued after the ones collected here. It was nice to read something that felt like individual comics rather than a graphic novel. There was a storyline and plot being introduced but through self contained stories. Once again the wome were a little weaker than I would have liked, there was an abused wife, a homeless woman who'd lost her boyfriend and a prostitute. They were the lost souls that needed "saving". There were forces of light and dark and people whose destiny had not yet been decided and a strange man with powers that let him affect people's lives. When written out it sounds quite trite but it was actually much more enjoyable to read and I wish that they'd done more of the series and gone further with it.

This book is a very interesting look at class and gender in the late Victorian period. If focuses on the way that wealthy and middle class people portrayed and interacted with the poor, particularly in the East End of London. The book does this by looking at the portrayal of poor people, their jobs, their homes, their apparance in newspapers, photographs and novels. In many ways the Victorian attitudes towards their portrayal of the poor reminded me of reality tv shows today. The book starts with Greenwood's report on the night he spent in a workhouse and the subsequent publication of that event. The book considers the strong homoerotic themes of the article as well as the different responses to it including the coupling of homlessness with homosexuality in the 1898 vagrancy act. Chapter two looks at Dr Barnados photographs of street children and the claims of sexualisation of them. It considers the way images were manipulated to play on the emotions of those that donations were being solicited from. Chapter three looks at the women journalism, particularly the writing of Elizabeth Banks and American journalist who reportedly said that she did her investiagitive journalism on the conditions of the poor not because she wanted to improve their lives but to earn her own living. The chapter was quite hard on Banks, she had a lot of negative things send, but later when she wrote something different, instead of saying that perhaps this was because her ideas had changed Koven seemed to indicate this just proved her unrealiability as a writer. However, there were some very interesting gender stereotypes between the UK and the US examined and I learned a great deal about women journalists.

Part two looked at "cross class sisterhood and brotherhood in the slums". This was divided into two chapters, one on women one on men. The methodology here was a little strange. When the women and their relationships were discussed it was entirely from the point of view of women philanthropists who wrote novels. When the men were discussed it focused entirely on the reality of two homes/charitable agencies Oxford House and Toynbee Hall. This seemed to present a little bit of a strange dichotomy. That said the chapter on women was fascinating, and reminded me once again that I really do need to read some more Vernon Lee. The chapter discussed her book, Miss Brown and L.T. Meade's Princess of the gutter. What was interesting was the portrayal of same sex attraction within these novels. Vernon Lee's book was dismissed as "dirty" even though it was the more restrained of the two. Meade, a devout evangelical Christian, had her two herioines making out in a prison cell and was considered terribly pure.

The only critisicm I had of this book was that it focused entirely on London. I think it would be interesting to expand the work that was done looking at the different portrayal of gender and class into the whole of the UK, particularly the North of England and to see what if anything was different in these accounts. But I would definitely recommend this book very highly.

I have absoultely adored every other book by Kundera that I've read but I just didn't care for this one at all. It started quite well with an interesting look at the way we are being photographed constantly and the way people long after immortality of some sort. The main character Agnes was quite intersting in her hatred of being constantly surronded by people. The first few pages were very beautifully done. But then I found I was starting to loose interest. For the book was almost a collection of mini essays disguised as a novel. The novelist at one point said that it was his intention to write a novel that could not be turned into a film. But it didn't make for much of an enjoying read. It was divided up into sections, some sections about the characters being created for the novel and the novelist and some about Goethe. As much as I like history and German Romantacism I found the parts about Goethe quite dull as they were all about this girl who wanted to have an affair with him and Kundera was very harsh on the girl. The plot then returned to Agnes' family. But I just couldn't bring myself to care about her sister or her husband. There was a lot of enforced gender roles that annoyed me. I kept reading because I liked his other books so much. I skimmed the last half towards the end hoping I'd start liking it again but alas it wasn't meant to be.

This was written in 1991, much later than his other books that I read and liked. So I think I won't try reading any more later ones. I was quite disappointed.

I decided to read this book as it had been quoted in the recent Limehouse Chinatown essays I'd been reading. It has a chaper devoted to Limehouse depicting how it was in 1917. The problem with the book was that it was full of nostalgia. Harking back to the way things were in the past that was so much more interesting and colourful. The problem with this is that Burke admitted when he wrote Limehouse nights he hadn't actually been to Chinatown or spoken to any Chinese people. So when he said it just wasn't the same as it used to be it did make me wonder. He's writting about how in 1917 Chinatown has all but disappeared. However, recent work done on the census shows that before this period there were even less Chinese people living in Chinatown. When going on about the past he quotes one newspaper report "from thirty years ago" to describe the area. This article gives the conditions of an overcrowded boarding house (much like the conditions I recently read about London's Chinatown in the early 21st century). But in the report he quotes it's discussed how the house also has Lascars, Irish and other sailors staying in it. While there are Chinese people, they are not the only ones there. For a description of a glorious "Chinatown of the past" it totally fails. In the description of the current Chinatown he mentions bars where white women and Chinese men hang out (a pub on the corner of Pennyfields) and the white girls had a fight. He mentions how Chinatown has already become a tourist attraction, people coming in to see the exotic and buy overpriced imports. (Which he is very snide about).

The rest of the first half of the book is very similar. Compalining about the London that is no more. Everything being less interesting and drab now there is a war on. The second half was much more interesting. Vodka and vagabonds describes different people living in Stepney. He describes different meeting places and the people who wait there. This really captures the feel of the different areas. My favourite was the description of flappers waiting to meet men they'd contacteed through "companionship" coloumns. At it's best it's an interesting slice of life, but unfortunately too much is coloured by his love of his imaginary past.