I've only managed to get through one novel in the last fortnight, though I've started two others.
The book I read was Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, a re-imagining of Part II of Virgil's Aeneid from the POV of Lavinia, the barely-mentioned wife of Aeneas, the Trojan hero claimed by Rome as its forebear. But Le Guin adds a twist to what might have been plain semi-historical fiction -- Lavinia owes her existence to Virgil, who appears to her at a sacred site as he lies dying, and he tells her some of what he's written and therefore what will happen to her when Aeneas arrives in Italy. But as Virgil didn’t give her enough life in the Aeneid she effectively writes her own story, filling in the blanks he omitted, and then after Aeneas dies -- and the Aeneid ends -- she has to make decisions for herself and her son without any help from Virgil. A little slow to get going, but strongly written, though in a quiet, thoughtful way, and resolutely unshowy, just like Lavinia herself. Recommended.
Another feminist work followed, The Female Man by Joanna Russ, my second attempt at this SF Masterwork, but after struggling to about one-third of the way through I gave up again. Less a coherent novel with interesting and realistic characters than a cross between a justifiably angry polemic about the position of women in the 1970s (at least women who were nicely middle class and attended cocktail parties) and a literary mood-piece with no evident desire to be comprehensible nor to incorporate such old-fashioned concepts as plot, characterisation, entertainment or readability.
And the last book started, The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson, the first in his Wax and Wayne series set in the Mistborn universe but in the equivalent of early 1900s America. It's well-written enough, but I'm finding it hard to get fully interested in the world or characters so far, so it's something to read when I've nothing else to do, rather then my making time for it.
