Hornby not the railways
I just got that Nick Hornby 31 Songs book. It was one of the free ones through amazon/kelloggs. I've had a load so far (7 in fact), thanks to B eating so much Kellogg's Just Right, but I didn't want to buy any of the "women's fiction" so I went for this.
Funny. In 1990, when applying to go to university, I realised I'd almost exclusively read male writers, in much the same way as I'd only listened to male musicians/singers. So I set about deliberately seeking out and reading female writers, just to be a little more right-on, you understand (and as it turned out, it didn't matter really).
It wasn't that I hadn't read any female writers; probably more that I rarely notice the names, and sometimes (in the SF field, at least) a female writer will take a male pseudonym. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. Beyond Kate Wilhelm and Enid Blyton, I couldn't bring any to mind. In the same way that Nick Hornby is all about songs, I've always been all about stories when it comes to writers.
It was around then that I bought my first Nanci Griffith CD, and the rest is history, including Nanci Griffith (who is just a little too schoolmarmish for me). Over the years I have read a great many female writers, including firm favourites like Katharine Kerr and Lorrie Moore, but when faced with that kind of metropolitan Guardian readerish kind of modern fiction written by women, stuff that's all about relationships and marriage and divorce and all the rest of the kind of stuff you have coming out of your ears every day of the week, I felt I had to go for the Nick Hornby exercise in insufferable self-indulgence.
Still, it was free.
Funny. In 1990, when applying to go to university, I realised I'd almost exclusively read male writers, in much the same way as I'd only listened to male musicians/singers. So I set about deliberately seeking out and reading female writers, just to be a little more right-on, you understand (and as it turned out, it didn't matter really).
It wasn't that I hadn't read any female writers; probably more that I rarely notice the names, and sometimes (in the SF field, at least) a female writer will take a male pseudonym. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. Beyond Kate Wilhelm and Enid Blyton, I couldn't bring any to mind. In the same way that Nick Hornby is all about songs, I've always been all about stories when it comes to writers.
It was around then that I bought my first Nanci Griffith CD, and the rest is history, including Nanci Griffith (who is just a little too schoolmarmish for me). Over the years I have read a great many female writers, including firm favourites like Katharine Kerr and Lorrie Moore, but when faced with that kind of metropolitan Guardian readerish kind of modern fiction written by women, stuff that's all about relationships and marriage and divorce and all the rest of the kind of stuff you have coming out of your ears every day of the week, I felt I had to go for the Nick Hornby exercise in insufferable self-indulgence.
Still, it was free.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
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