Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

This is without a doubt the best book on the history of Taoism. I have read the English translation twice. Once when I started to become interested in Chinese history and once when I was doing my MA at SOAS. I reviewed the book twice when I read it then. In my last review I said that I hoped one day my French would be good enough to read it in the original. So when I found a cheap copy of it when we were on holiday in Paris in August I decided I should try it. I must admit that I don't think I understood it was well reading it in French but I did manage to understand most of it, which made me really happy.

The book gives an excellent historical introduction to the history of Taoism, from its earliest origins to the development of the religion in the Han. It outlines the different developments within Taoism and the different schools that it produced during the period of disunion and the Tang and the Song. It also gives an introduction to the internal alchemy practices. Unlike a lot of European and American books about Taoism that separate it out into "philosophical Taoism" and "religious Taoism" this was one of the first to show the tradition as a whole. If anyone wants to learn more about this fascinating religion I would highly recommend this book, either the French or English translation.

I read the first five Wet Moon books in the space of a couple weeks. Five ends on a bit of a cliff hanger and I was a bit devestated I'd have to wait a whole year to find out what happened to poor Trilby. I had pre-ordered a copy on Amazon but then they didn't ship it to me and told me it'd take one to two months to get a copy after it came out! I went to Forbidden Planet twice trying to find a copy but they were sold out. Eventually I had a different comic book shop order me a copy and was able to get it this week. YAY!!!!

This book is so beautiful and so emotional. The artwork and the layout of the panels is just stunning. The story really sucks you in. The contrast of Trilby crawling through the swamp with the slumber party in the begining is a brilliant combination of the horror and every day life. The whole book is very depressing and sad. I wanted to give all the characters hugs. The way they reacted to the terrible thing that happened to their friend just felt so real and so sad. But their lives kept going and the things that happened with Trilby weren't the only sad things in this book. One of the things I liked best about this book was that even though the characters were still the same beautiful men and women of the earlier books Ross had somehow managed to totally remove their sexiness as was fitting for the tone of the story. This series is the best one being produced in comics today. Now I have read 6 I am going to go back and re-read all of them. It's such a great story that is developing into something quite scary. But at the same time remains very real. I totally love it.

Because I'd been reading quite a lot of books in French about internal alchemy I thought it'd be good to go back and re-read something about internal alchemy in English as there were a couple things I wasn't sure I was understanding correctly when I was reading about them in French.

I bought this book because Isabelle Robinet is one of the best scholars in the field on this topic. It was great to see that some more of her work had been translated into English. This book comprises of four essays on alchemy. While it contains an introduction to the topic I really wouldn't recommend this as an introductory text for anyone but for people who are already familiar with the concepts of internal alchemy it is a great way to gain further understanding of this complex topic.

The first essay looked at how practitioners of internal alchemy viewed the world and it's correspondences differently to traditional yin/yang and 5 phases cosmology. Based on these ideas they would reverse them. But of course it was also more complicated than that. But it was interesting to see that in their interpretations yang and yin were never solely the one thing but contained each other within them. (Like the famous symbol, which actually was a much later invention).

The alchemical language looked at the way words and metaphors from external alchemy was used in internal alchemy. This essay helped me realise that the things that had been confusing me in the French were because they were using a different basis for some of the alchemy than I thought. It wasn't about the qi and jing as much as about yin/yang and more "physical" ideas.

The role and the meaning of numbers explained the importance and significance of different numbers within the practice. A great reference and explanation.

The last essay was the one I found most interesting. It was the one that had the most historical context and looked at how our definitions of weidan (external alchemy) and neidan (internal alchemy) were not at all consistently used that way in texts during the late Tang and early Song and that some practitioners would use them the other way round, that there wasn't a total consistency in their use. It was fascinating and insightful.

This was a really short book that I read in a couple days. But I'm glad I bought a copy, as it's also one that I think I will need to re-read several times to begin to understand everything that it contains. I think it's great that Golden Elixir Press is printing these scholarly works on alchemy at such an affordable price. I shall definitely be buying the others they've produced.

This is the first of the "lesbian" pulps I've read that I've not liked. When I was reading books about queer pulp they talked about the ones that were read by lesbians and the ones that were read by men. This definitely fell into the ones aimed at men category. It was late 1968 so it was much more sexually explicit than the other books I read but it was also the straightest! Despite the title and the description of Kat as a "lesbian" she in fact only slept with three women and six men in the story! She spent the entire time in lust/love with a man and her exploits were all geared towards seducing a guy at the magazine that she wanted to work for. While I (obviously) have nothing against bisexual characters this really just had the feel of "A lesbian just needs a good hard man to convince her of her errors".

The book was a continuous stream of sexual encounters, most of which Kat didn't enjoy at all (only the men could make her orgasm) and she saw herself in a downward spiral of degredation and realised at the end that she was a "slut". There was none of the introspection or insight I've read in other pulp books. There were occasional moments but they were all about depressing things. It was a nice change to read a book where the woman was at home with her sexuality but when she was interacting with women she was written exactly as a male character, with other men referring to her with male pet names. (But then she slept with them anyway). I'm afraid I wouldn't recommend this one and am kinda confussed why it was reprinted. Surely there are much better pulps out there, I know all the others I've read have been brilliant

I must admit I do not enjoy the new Love and Rockets as much as I enjoy the collections. But I think that is just because I prefer longer stories to shorter ones. This is a fairly slim graphic novel that is divided up into 5 stories. Having read Gilbert's Palomar series I'm getting more out of his stories than when I first started reading them. But I must admit the cast of characters is so big I spend a lot of time trying to remember who everyone is and how they are related. The story is (mostly) followable without remembering but it is much better when you can remember all the connections. Jamie's story mostly focuses on his new character of Frogmouth, who honestly I find a little annoying. But this time he introduces us to her younger sister, whose a funny looking wannabe punk and I enjoyed her stories much more. The third issue of this series remains the best for me as it had just such an amazing heartbreakingly good story. But it is still nice to read these and get new stories.

Tereska is definitely turning into my favourite newly discovered author for this year. I just want to read everything she's written. This book was about a young girl who was going to a Catholic school in Paris at the start of World War 2. It's about the lives and loves of her and her friends and all the mistakes people make while they are growing up. The main character is interesting and insightful (and quite bisexual). She comes from a non-conventional family where her father is an atheist intellectual happily having a mistress and a wife and they are all ok with that. (Though some of her friends find it shocking). I'm not really that fond of books about teenagers, despite seeming to have read so many of them lately. But this one was really good. From one prespective it was interesting to see the approach of war and how that made everyone feel a bit more reclese and confused. The book had a wonderful part where the young girl and her friend went through a series of bars in Paris looking for the friend's lover who had stolen the families gold. They went to strip clubs and gay bars and bars where everyone was cross dressing, and they picked up a drunk Polish girls and the woman who was having an affair with her father. It was all very lovely and strange. This is the fourth book by Tereska that I've read and I think I have four or five left to read. At the rate I'm going I will probably manage them all this year!

Volume 2 is set in China with the resistance fighting the Japanese with the Chinese communists. The Chinese communists are very surprised to find that the Korean resistance movement is led by a girl. Like the first book the artwork is amazing. Here there is more politics about what is right in a resistance movement and political ideaology. While I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first book I still really loved it.

This book was mentioned in the Jack the Ripper and the Occult book I read awhile ago. I was unable to locate a printed version but Bill made me a gorgeous hand bound copy from a free ebook that I found. This book is everything I had hoped Marie Corelli would be but without her style. It is set an ambigious time and place with a man who is instantly in love with this beautiful woman who it turns out is a magician. The story has them as reincarnated souls that are bound together throughout time. Fleta is attempting to join a mysterious order and fails. The plot of the book goes in many unexpected places but it is part fairy tale part occult. The diversions and the unexpectedness of it all I throughly enjoyed. The only downfall of this book is that the style is a little bland and some of the descriptions can be a bit confussing. It would have been amazing I think to take Collins' ideas and characters and have them written in Marie Corelli's lavish style. As it was I still really enjoyed it and will have to see if she's written any other novels. It was so great to read a book about magic where the main character was a woman.

I was really happy to have found this book in Paris. It describes in tremendous detail the banner belonging to the Marquis of Dai found in the tombs at Mawangdui. Many books I have read have referred to this banner and how it is a representation of the Chinese afterlife. Having read this book it seems less of a journey of the dead like you'd find in an Egyptian tomb and more of a description of the world, both heavenly and earthly. But that could just be because of the way they chose to describe it.

The book gives a brief background on the object and it's significance and then goes through the banner and examines each figure, animal and talks about the meaning of that figure within Chinese cosmology/thought and how it fits in with the other images. Most of the descriptions related to yin/yang theory. There are plenty of ilustrations so it's easy to see what they are talking about. Often reading the descriptions you start to see things that you didn't see to start with. It focuses mostly on yin/yang and the five elements and I did wonder if more had been done putting it in more of a religious context but I wasn't able to find any more articles about it on Jstor.

But I would definitely recommend this book. I really enjoyed it. I felt that I learned a lot reading it. Not only is it a good description of the banner but can also be used as a reference book for Chinese symbolism.

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.

I enjoyed this queer pulp novel an awful lot. It was such a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy. The main character Paula was living poor in New York with an alcholic father and a soon-to-be-proposing boyfriend. At 18 she was working a dead end job as a secretary and looking forward to being married. But then she met her fiance's aunt and all that changed. Paula's relationship with Byrne definitely bored on the fantasy part of the story. She met a lesbian instantly fell in love and changed her whole world. It was like there was a story of this ordinary girl trapped in this world of poverty and alcholism who practically invented this perfect rich lesbian who'd be able to take her away from it all. The mixture of the reality and the fantasy was odd but made for interesting reading.

Part two where you learned of Bryne and Greta's relationship felt much more realistic. Here were two girls who fell in love and started having sex. Not realising there was anything wrong Greta told her mother how WONDERFUL it all was and her mother freaked out. The resulting breakdown Greta suffered was realistic and terribly sad. One thing that bothered me about the book was how Greta was then portrayed as a horrible monster. She was violent, an alcoholic and had sever mental health issues but you couldn't help feel sympathy for her anyway. It also raised the question of responsibility and happiness in relationships and how much you should sacrifice yourself and feel responsible for another's behaviour.

While the book was flawed it was still very enjoyable and I will definitely track down more books by this author.

So when we were in Paris in March I found a french copy of this but decided not to buy it as Paris was full of lovely French comics that hadn't been translated from English ones. So I was able to borrow this from a friend. It was really great to have a 40K story where the main character was female. It didn't make any difference to the story that she was a woman, she behaved like all the male characters in 40K stories but I kinda liked that.

The book is a collection of comics, done by different artists and I'm guessing writers and as such the story isn't nearly as cohesive as you'd expect a single graphic novel to be. The story seemed to go off in several different directions but it was still enjoyable. My only complaint was the version I read was novel sized which made it too small to see all the art well and sometimes had trouble reading things. The French version was a large hardback (And I'm pretty sure it was colored) which I think would be a much better to read it.

I started reading this book over a decade ago. My friend and I had gone on a long weekend trip to San Fransisco to hang out with the queer dyke culture there. My friend bought the book and I read the first couple pages while coming back on the plan, but I hadn't slept from the night out before where many drinks had been consumed and I had succesfully managed to pick up a girl in a nightclub. It was all very decedant and the book seemed a perfect mirror for life in San Fransisco and hanging out in the queer clubs in Seattle. Though of course I was too fucked up at the time to read much and I forgot about it for years until I found another copy at the library.

The book is a series of chapters about lives of punk dykes in San Fransisco in the mid 90s. More memoir than fiction, not even the names are changed, but that sense of reality and glimpse it give you are intense. I totally loved it to start with but there is just a series of women one after the other, drunken nights and there is no arc or destination or coherance to it so after awhile it just seems a bit repatative. I think it probably would have been better if the stories of the girls had been balanced with more stories about life outside of the sex. There were some moments of pure brilliance though, visiting her girlfriend's family in the South was pretty horrible and striking as were the stories about prostitution, the mushroom trip was really descriptive and told so very well. I got this from the library and have already ordered another book by the author. Having read so many older queer books it's nice to read one more recent.

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.

I must admit i was expecting a bit more from the first cyberman adventure. I liked the artic base and the astronaunts (ironic that they considered there should be black astronauts in 2000 but that they still referred to him as a negro). I liked the old and sick pre-regeneration doctor and the way Polly and Ben tried to compensate for him. It seemed like a good start but then it all kinda fell apart. The arrival of the other planet and the cyberman's lack of a plan seemed rather silly. Of course the biggest problem was the sexism in this story. Polly, being a woman, wasn't considered a big enough threat to even be locked up with the Doctor and Ben and all she had to do was make cups of tea and coffee!!! Which she got yelled at for doing wrong! It's only a few years away from Zoe defeating the entire invasion fleet and sending missles into orbit with the power of her brains! But what a big difference those few years make. I love Polly and Anneke Wills but this was just too sad.

This book was mentioned in the queer pulp book I read. It was originally published in the 19th century as a true account of a woman who lived in the "Wild West" dressed as a man. This version was published by the University of Oklamhoma Press and contains several different versions of Charley's story.

The "autobiography" reads to start with like a novel, it tells the story of her parents who had her out of wedlock, the mother thinking her father was dead and marrying a man she didn't love because she was already pregnant. It was all very dramatic. When Charley was born she spent time living with servants before being sent to school. She seemed to have gotten married about 12 or 13 then when her husband was murdered she decided to seek revenge on the killer by dressing as a man and hunting him down. Her life as a man to start with seems very unrealistic. She claims to have made 1000s of dollars working on boats which seems rather unlikely. But parts of the story definitely sound more plausible, running a bar and on the trail west which were excerpts taken from her diary. It seems impossible reading this how much was factual but that doesn't really matter as it is an entertaining story anyway.

The next part is the account of Mountain Charley written by a newspaper man. The woman he describes has a totally different background and different adventures. Dressing as a solider and joining the army. I found his section much less interesting.

I'm not really very interested in the US in the 19th century or cowboys but nonetheless this was an interesting story of someone living the life of another gender. So I would recommend it.

The edition of this book that I read had a very 70s looking threesome on the cover. The books starts with a young Jewish girl on a train fleeing for her life with her family in 1940. They are all heading to Portugal to escape the war. The story is the tale of this group of refugees. Most of the characters are Jewish but others are fleeing France for other reasons. Some want to flee the war completly traveling to the US or Brasil. Others want to go and join the fight in the UK. In the meantime they are waiting in this beautiful beach resort where it is sunny and they are untouched by the war. The characters are all very interesting and the book gives a nice insight into their lives before the war and the different ways they are dealing with their trauma.

There is a bit of sex in the book as the characters have affairs and try out different diversions to keep their mind off what is happening. One of the things that I love most of Tereska Torres is that her books always (or at least all the ones I've read so far) have queer characters. It's just very normal and a part of life. It's so nice to see, particularly in a world war II setting where the reality of queer people is often missing. Here there is a married woman who had a brief flirtation with lesbianism in her youth but fled it and got married. There is a beautiful young girl who falls desperately in love with her even though she has no idea what she's doing, until she reads Radclyff Hall and suddenly the wool is lifted from her eyes, so to speak.

I really enjoyed this. Torres is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors and I am trying to track down and read everything she's written.

I bought this book in Paris. It was throughly gorgeous the art was just amazing, not really a manga style but sort of comic meets East Asian ink painting. The book was about a young girl in Korea fighting robots who belonged to a Japanese occupational force in an alternate universe. While set in an alternate universe it had a LOT of interesting things to say about Korea in our world and cultural imperialism and freedom and was all around fantastic. It is one of the best and most unique comics I've read in a long time.

The third book of the Hungar Games was quite possibly the grimest book I've ever read. While not quite as good as the first one I did enjoy it much better than the second one. I loved the fact that the "hidden" society that showed up to rescue everyone was just as corrupt and horrible as the one that people had been fighting against. It all felt so horribly pessimistic and realistic. The way they used Katnis and the way everything was centered around propaganda was quite depressing. One thing that would have been nice would have seen how people actually took a more active role in the rebellion and how they were able to break such strong control by the central government. So much of that happening "off screen" made it seem less realistic than it should have been. The last 100 pages or so though more than made up for it. Things just kept happening one after the other each more unbelievable than the last. I can't believe how good this series was. I would recommend it very highly. I think it is probably the best fiction I've read all year

I read the second volume of hunger games yesterday. It was enjoyable but I didn't love it quite as much as the first one. In a way the world seemed even darker which was very good. The problem I found was that Katniss didn't seem to have quite as much agency. While in the first book she was very much a pawn of the games and the people she was handling she felt independent in her mind and actions. In the second book, particularly with the reveal at the end she felt much less in control. The fact that President Snow was such an active character was also a bit disappointing as it put a face and a person to blame for the nameless and pervasive evil that was in the first book. However, despite all that I found it very enjoyable. The way the different rebellions were handled the way it all seemed so very hopeless. I think I enjoyed the paranoia and the claustrophobia of the first half of the book the most. Started book three afterwards and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

I have to say this book was a bit disappointing. It's one of the first things that either Burroughs or Kerouac wrote and I'm really glad I had the chance to read it. It captures the events (again) of the Lucien Carr David Kammerer murder. Having just read a better version it was a bit disappointing. Neither writer managed to get anywhere near their later prose styles. What it was was like visiting old friends and seeing what they were up to. It was another interesting and different version of the same people hanging out in New York. Listening in on conversations not heard before and getting a new glimpse into their lives. Interesting just nowhere near as good as later novels.

I read the first book of the hunger games triliogy and now understand why people love it so much. I grabbed a copy at smiths for emergency train reading and couldn't put it down. The lead charcter is just engrossing. She's strong, smart but also angry and surley. The book just has the best gender balance of any distopian fiction ever. I really recommend it!They are really engaging. I put the first one down to eat dinner and do an afternoon of work but read it all in a few hours. For a kids book there was an awful lot going on

I think it really is an excellent book for girls. It reminded me why I spent my teen years reading science fiction. I didn't see her as that indecisive just really focused on staying alive. I thought it was a nice twist that it was the boy who was in love and the girl was just thinking what do I have to do to survive this and keep my family safe. I don't think I want to see the film though as I think it would ruin my idea of what she's like.

I also liked how in the first book while the culture in the capital was supposed to be horrible the people she interacted with were all really nice. As were the "rich" people in her village. The threat and the evil was very undefined and pervasive but not really something tangible, like voldemort, that was identifiable. With the exception of the "careers" it was kinda just good people letting bad things happen. And even in the case of the nicest people support and encourage the killing, I'm thinking of the designer who is really nice but whose job it is to prepare children to kill.

I think Katniss in the first book is powerless to go against the society even though she risks her life hunting to break the rules she's not willing to help the girl and the boy she sees trying to escape. And seems to hate that she has to go along with it but when she acts against it when she gets angry about the trials she's then terrified her family will be punished. It really is a very good example of a powerful distopia that people hate but support cause they can't do anything to change it (though I suspect that changes in the next two books)

It was very claustrophobic and very scary and I realy enjoyed it.

I have to admit I only got half way through this. I found it very disappointing. It felt like as a history it was all over the place. She seemed to have no real structure or thesis behind her arguments, what she was choosing as her sources seemed odd and in the end gave a very odd and distorted view. There was totally no sense of change over time in this book, rather she seemed to be doing almost the opposite, looking for things that were the same and saying becuase they were the same they must be the same thing. Rather than looking at how folklore grows and changes and the position that it holds and how it relates to society.

Her thesis to start with was that European, or in particular British fairies, came from mesopotamia, greek and roman culture. Her argument for this was when she was reading about demons in those cultures she noticed that they did exactly what the fairies she had been studying did, and fulfilled similar roles. Most of her examples were Greek, but then she says people in Britian got these greek ideas through the Roman invasion (The same way that modern British culture is influenced by French culture she said?) But then she skips 1000 years and talks about a rite that's designed to find out if your child is a changeling or not. 1000 years is a huge length of time for beliefs not to grow or change or develop, she then skips another 500 years and starts talking about Elizabethan times. 1500 years have past without any development or explanation. Then to look at beliefs then she picks confessions made in witch trials as her main sources for fairy belief (sources made under torture that often talk about the devil as much as fairies). She dismisses Reginal Scott as a source as "he's primarily a demonologist". In relation to the witch trials she starts talking about recovered memory syndrome and memories of abuse which made no sense at all and it was shortly after this that I decided to give up and read a different book. (Before she started talking about literary fairies and Victorian fairies).

I must admit I was quite disappointed in this and quite surprised that it had been written by a fellow of Oxford! (Though she was an English professor not a history professor). I'm afraid this book did nothing for me and I didn't even learn anything. There were instances where I knew she was wrong and her aruguments were very questionable. One thing that did strike me while reading this is that fairy beliefs seem to be entirely linked to Christian cultures and it would be interesting to read a book that linked the relationship between the two. Not really one I can recommend I'm afraid.

While we were in Paris in March Bill and I went to an exhibition at the Musee Guimet about scholars rocks. While we were there I told Bill about the story where there was a guy who liked his rock just a little too much and it brought him nothing but trouble. A couple months later I found this version of the story in Foyles. It's a totally gorgeous storybook for children based on the older story. The illustrations are just gorgeous. The text is simplified Chinese with no pinyin or translation and is quite liteary for something that looks like a childrens book. It's very beautiful and I'm sure I will be re-reading it quite a few times.

This is a book I found at the SOAS bookshop sale for £1. It's a 70s book published in China. The readings are more like a textbook text than something you want to read. They come with a large vocabularly list (usually 30 words for a couple pages of story?). The stories are a mixture of traditional Chinese tales (which I liked) and Communist propaganda tales (which I didn't like as much). The stories were supposed to be easy but I would say they were more at the intermediate level as there was such a large ammount of vocabulary, most of which is stuff that doesn't get covered in textbooks nowadays. Still at over 100 pages it was definitely good practice.

This book was really great. I knew very little about the LA punk scene and this was an interesting first hand account of what happened. The book is an autobiography told in snippets. It chronicles the life of a Mexican girl growing up in East L.A. as here neighbourhood deterioates around her. One of the things that catagories the early chapters of the book is the incredible domestic violence that took place between her father and mother for most of her childhood. Incidents of horrid violence are related and yet Alice is able to see both the good and bad sides of her father and the complex relationship he has with her mother and herself. It was interesting to read how much school can affect the lives of people. The Junior High Alice went to seemed much more dangerous than the high school. It was great to read about her obsession with Elton John, which reminded me so much of my own Bowie obsession when I was growing up.

The punk scene chapters hit me the hardest as they reminded me the most of what it is like to be a part of a scene like that where you feel so totally like you belong. Where you feel everyone welcomes you and you can truly be yourself and be loved for that. It was amazing to read about and made me feel very nostalgic. But then I was also surprised how quickly the LA scene seemed to splinter and fall apart. It seemed like heroin and other hard core drug use took the scene apart after only a couple years. I was surprised to read when Alice decided to move back in with her parents and go to university to become a teacher. It didn't feel so much like a life turn around though but just growing up. She still kept going to gigs and being in bands but also helping the kids at the same time. Which I thought was great. I learned a lot reading this book. The book was more snapshot than introspection but I still realy enjoyed it. I hope she continues writing as I'm very curious to hear the rest of her story.

This started really strongly and for the first half I think was one of my favourite 40k books. It seemed like for the first time there were actually women in the universe of 40k! Granted it still seemed about two thirds male, but was getting much closer than previous books. The women characters were more interesting and had more important roles. I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the book but then the plot seemed to fall apart a bit and in the end I felt like not much had really happened. Still overall I enjoyed it much more than the first one and am looking forward to finishing the trilogy.

I found this book accidently while browsing the shelves at SOAS. Apparently it's part of a series and I've now added all the other stories to my wish list. Idema is great at presenting how these iconic Chinese stories have actually changed quite a bit over time and how there are different regional variations. He translates several different versions from different time periods from the early 17th to the late 19th century.

I read this a month ago but really enjoyed it and will definitely read it again. It's interesting and insightful and the story of White Snake remains one of my favourites.

Warrior's Gate is one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes, the last one with Romana. It's just so odd and strange. Trapped in a dimension where time and space are all over the place. The story is quite confusing with time shifts but I really like it. It's disorientating in a good way and gives you a sense of how baffled the characters are. The novelisation didn't really add much to the story but was nonetheless enjoyable.

I bought this cause an interview with the author came up in my google feed. It sounded quite interesting, a different take on kids holding a school to hostage as they want an alternate magical reality to take shape. But I'm afraid it was just disappointing. There were no new ideas here, it was very 60s with the use of acid and Buddhist ideas to disbelieve in reality. Rather than the very optomistic apocalypses of Alan Moore this just felt terribly depressing, the real world was an illusion so you should kill yourself and move on to a better world. As social change strategies go that is really not a very viable one. I'm sure there are better and more interesting and more original young people out there.

I finished this book over a month ago and had a hard time remembering everything that happened! I started writing book reviews to remember books but alas when I get too far behind they kinda defeat the point. But I started this book in the run up to the Olympics. Reading about America as this horrible militarist theocracy seemed very appropriate. I really enjoyed the first story though I felt a bit let down that so much of the action happened "off screen". It was also interesting in the second story to see how the revolution failed. The third story was totally disconected and as it was so short seemed kinda uninteresting. I know it relates to later Heinlein stories but without having read those it did little on its own. Still it was a nice enjoyable scifi that even though it was written decades ago could still be seen as relevant today.

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 book was also recommended by the queer pulp book, but it didn't actually have any queer characters or plot. Despite that I found I really enjoyed it. It's a translation of a 19th century French novel. It was a story about a young man who fell in love with a lovely ageing woman who'd been notoriously known as Sappho (and not because she was a lesbian) but because she modelled for a statue. She was totally an amazing character and I really loved her. In my mind I saw her being played by Alex Kingston as she was that time of stronger older woman. Even though the story focused mostly on the man and how she really wasn't a suitable companion for him, she really was by far the best and most sypathetic of the two. She also had a huge ammount of agency. Even though the man tried and failed to leave her in the end it was she who decided her fate and what was going to be happy and I really admired her for that. In many ways she was everything Nana wanted to be and failed to be. I loved the little old hardcover I found and will definitely pick up more Daudet if I find him.

I randomly found this on Charing Cross road and bought it because I thought it had the most lovely title. It was a very odd little book and I have quite mixed feelings about it. It was a series of short stories that took place either in ancient Greece or in 1920s/30s England. The writing was very beautiful and at times the stories were lovely but about two thirds of them were ruined by very heavy Christian evangelising. For instance there was a story of a guy who was travelling back and forwards in time from a present day cricket match to ancient Greece where his best friend had been transformed into someone who was Gay and talked about his tragic romance, which was lovely, but then his friend had to tell him how such things were evil and false love compared to the love of the Lord! And then there were the people in ancient Greece who discovered the "true god" including the guy who ran the marathon. The goddess of ghosts story itself had a few lovely moments and descriptions but just wasn't what I was hoping for. I won't be bothering to find any other books by this author.

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 one I did not enjoy quite as much as some of the other Bain books that I've read. It was the story of a man who heard about a beautiful woman who had requirements for marriage. A storyteller told her stories each night in an effort to win her hand for his lord and each story developed their relationship a little. It was done quite well and I really liked the queen. Though some of the repetition in the style got a little tedious at times.

This is the second book I've read by Thereska, the first Women's barracks I really loved. It took me awhile to find other books by her, this title was recommended in the Queer pulp book I read recently. It was a lovely story about the intertwined lives of a group of friends in Paris. The story was short focusing on the events of one single night in Paris shortly after world war II. Only one character in the group was "queer" the youngest sister of one of the characters who in the space of the night fell in love with a female prostiute she was trying to "rescue". Their story was very sad and sweet and my favourite part of the book. There was also an "older" woman in her mid thirties who was living alone and having a succession of affairs to try and find meaning who was my second favourite character. The stories were a lovely little glimpse into life. While one of the couples did end up at an orgy they didn't really seem that sordid or beyond belief. I'm really looking forward to reading more books by this author.

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.

Having read a few Greek plays now I must say I prefer Euripedes to Sophocles. I read this story as we were going to see a modern adaptation and I wanted to know the story before we went. Reading it I wasn't sure how they'd be able to adopt it to the modern day as the entire point of the story seemed to be you shouldn't piss off the gods but give them their due or you will be horribly punished. There were however some really great lines mostly by Creon. But I must admit that sadly the story didn't inspire me enough to go and read the rest of the plays in this edition.

I must admit I was a little disappointed with this book. Mostly because it focused entirely on external alchemy and totally ignored internal alchemy. This is of course just my personal preference and not a reflection on the book itself. The book was a collection of different essays published over the authors life. There were detailed examples on how to go about dating texts and different methodologies you could use that was most interesting. Then there were large translations of various alchemical texts. However, as these were all external alchemy it was a list of different ingredients and the different properties of each. Useful for a reference but not really something you want to sit and read cover to cover. I'm glad I borrowed this one from the library rather than buying a copy to find out it wasn't really what I was interested in (Despite Daoism and alchemy being in the title).

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.

I found a copy of this book in Foyles and was shocked to see that amazon didn't stock it! So I ended up ordering from Foyles so I could get a copy which I'd never done before. I am glad I did though as I throughly enjoyed this book. I was surprised to see that it had started as a webcomic as the art was just gorgeous and there was a real sense of continuity. This was a really great story of two guys meeting and starting to go on a road trip together. It's a lovely queer comic that goes against stereotypes and I hate to use the word but was just really sweet.

If you can't find a copy the URL for the web comic is http://tjandamal.com/ I really enjoyed it and am pleased to see that volume 2 will soon be released as I'm really looking forward to their continuing adventures. Another one I very highly recommend.

This is my favourite book I've read this year and definitely the best book about London I've ever read. I just totally loved it. It's the kind of psychogeography book about London I wanted Iain Sinclair to write, but instead found him too posh. This is London from below. The history and stories of squats and punks and a desperate housing shortage and prices going up and a future wasteland. Sometimes seeming autobiographical sometimes more like short stories but it always feels very real. Mixed with photos and artworks as a cut and paste zine rather than a traditional comic the art just multiplies the feelings on the page. There's a real feeling of depression, hopelessness and tragedy here but there's also an overwhelming sense of life. Each chapter looks at a different part of London but overall you get a sense of how interconnected it all is. This book is absoultely fascinating. I don't think it's for everyone but I think I know many people that would really love this too.