Sharon Bakar has posted up a fascinating piece she wrote for Chrome magazine in January 2006, which struck me not because of its truth (the publishing industry is well aware of the stigma surrounding female authors) but the quotes from some of her readers.

For the uninitiated, her article is about how men prefer to read male authors, opting out of reading prose written by the fairer sex. Listen to this:

… (a) blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

“I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with p*nis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”.

If that was the case I would’ve never read The Age Of Innocence - one of my absolute favourites. Nothing like heart rending, heart stopping dialogue as a warmup.

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Just to let you know, i’m starting to seriously crack my head over my sidebar. This is one of those rare times i curse the day PHP was written … Or that the fact Wordpress is written in PHP.But i guess it’s marginally better than dealing with Movable Type’s Perl Modules…

Nevermind. You’ll probably find this unbecoming of me to talk about my code woes on a blog about books - but bear with me for awhile. My War and Peace is stuck with Prince Andrew Bolkonski on the way to death, and my writing project is suffering a lapse as i dissect Edith Wharton’s ability to craft conversations that make your pulse speed up. Good stuff, just that it takes so much time.

PS: And, anyway, aren’t blooks literature on code? Think about that - ‘ol Dickens didn’t have to deal with programming languages to get published. He just needed a contract with a newspaper and a pen.

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It’s funny what gems can crop up when immigration is concerned. 2006’s Booker Prize Winner, The Inheritance of Loss, dealt with the issue fairly heavily, and look where it got? Nevermind that i don’t like the book - i’ll run a review sometime later.

The Joy Luck Club, however, written by Amy Tan and published in 1989, is one of those books that remain as relevant today as it was a decade ago. I like it. A lot.

The premise

Joy Luck can almost be called a book of short stories, and if the author’s note is anything to go by some of the stories have been published in woman’s magazines. The book opens with one from Jing-Mei Woo (”June”)’s perspective, just after her mother’s death, and we’re quickly ushered into their world of clashing cultures, and of the tender and sometimes fragile bond linking mother to daughter.

There are four families in the book, four sections, and four stories per section. The first and last sections of the book are written by the mothers (with the exception of June, since her mother has passed away) and the middle two written by the daughters. It’s nicely structured and the interlocking stories give a sense of balance to the narrative.

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If you’re wondering why i’ve not been posting lately, it’s because i’m hard at work trying to give this site a unique look, something easier said than done when my CSS skills are limited to Blogger redesigns. But it’s frustrating fun, and it’s a learning experience that should help with the readability of the blog, plus i’ve got a few ideas about web presentation for blooks that i want to try out.

Oh yeah, and i’m finishing up War and Peace and The Joy Luck Club. Reviews when the site looks nicer.

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