Tasty linkspam goes here!
- The Omniscient Breasts: The Male Gaze Through Female Eyes Kate Elliott talks about the male gaze and why it’s a problem.
- Rejected Author Attacks Literary Agent Seriously? This is not how you deal with rejection. I am not a fan of the victim-blamey tone of this particular summary, either. The person attacked did absolutely nothing wrong–all the blame for this lies with the person who attacked her.
- Pride and Prejudice and Readercon Beth Bernobich’s absolutely spot-on here. It doesn’t matter how one deals with a harasser, there are always going to be people who think you haven’t done it correctly.
- Weight, Body Image & Body Portrayal in YA Books This is a well-done piece outlining many of the issues around fat characters in YA books. Trigger warnings for discussion of weight loss dieting at the beginning of the post, however most of the post is not about weight loss dieting and ultimately advocates characters of all sizes and shapes in fiction being portrayed in non-stereotypical ways. Specific titles are discussed in subsequent posts.
- “‘Fat’ is a sensation of monitoring how much space you occupy, then judging it.” I need a print of this.
- Waterstones bookseller found trolling self-published author The response to an author behaving badly is not to behave badly yourself
- The Beauty of Broken Kindle Screens
- Comics Get Scholarly Treatment at Columbia Interesting article about increasing academic interest in both comics and science fiction. Very New York centric, as these things so often are, but interesting nonetheless.
- Kari Sperring on Harassment (trigger warnings for descriptions of harassment)
- The Distress of the Privileged Draws a clear distinction between compassion and justice.
- The first chapter from Iain M. Banks’s new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata Donna will have a more detailed write up of this book sometime next month (spoiler: she mostly liked it!).
- New issue of the Journal of Transformative Works and Culture
- How to Be a Good Commenter Scalzi, why do you have to be so smart all the time? Sheesh.
- Romance Novels for Feminists Brand new blog that looks interesting as heck!
- The case for anonymity in fandom Interesting interview with the founder and moderator of fail_fandomanon on LiveJournal
Donna will certainly have lots to say about Banks’ new Culture novel, provided Donna gets her copy back from the friend she loaned it to…
I figured you’d have something to say about that comment.
I mentioned this book to Paul, but I’d really be curious to see your opinion of how weight is treated in Rae Carson’s YA book “The Girl of Fire and Thorns.” The body image link you posted linked to a comment by Rae Carson about how she wanted to treat weight in the book, but I found both comment and book more patronizing than enlightening. It’s a great book that I really loved, but the way weight was treated made me uncomfortable and I can’t seem to find any reviews that have a more balanced perspective on it. Am I the only one that thinks its patronizing?
That P&P&R piece was so. well. done. (applause and shudders)