Hermione Granger Rules The World
I love the Harry Potter books, but I also agree with Sady Doyle’s feminist criticisms of them. Ms Doyle discusses the REAL hero(ine) of the books in her article, In Praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione...
View ArticleJust A Girls’ Book, Redux
Last year, I posted a rant about a couple of YA book reviews that had evoked my feminist rage. One of the book reviewers, Malcolm Tattersall, subsequently contacted me and expressed an interest in...
View ArticleGirls and Boys and Books, Yet Again
Oh, no! The YA publishing industry is dominated by girls! Girls reading books, girls writing books, girls actually allowed to be main characters in books . . . It’s out of control and it has to stop,...
View ArticleRegarding Internet Piracy
I’ve been contemplating this topic for a while, but put off blogging about it because . . . well, I suspected it would be a difficult and depressing experience. However, I’ve decided that writing this...
View ArticleBook Banned, Author Bemused
I’ve previously written about my books being edited so that the vocabulary, punctuation and spelling make sense to overseas readers. However, I didn’t mention another issue, which is that different...
View ArticleLooking For A Good, Clean Book
The first time I heard about this, I assumed it was a joke, but apparently this is an actual thing – librarians being asked by adult patrons to recommend ‘clean’ books. ‘Clean’ means different things...
View ArticleThe Creative Vision Versus The Marketing Department
If you know anything about the publishing industry, you’d be aware of how significant the marketing department has become in each large publishing house. The more difficult it becomes for publishers to...
View ArticleSome Thoughts On Reading
Gwenda Bond has a great post1 on her blog about what she calls “The Reading Police”, in which she says (among other things), “I have zero patience for reader shaming or for making people feel lesser...
View ArticleFive Feminist Books
Happy International Women’s Day! I thought I’d mark the occasion by recommending some feminist books. Social media has its uses and there are lots of interesting feminist blogs and online forums, but...
View ArticleMemoranda Turns Ten
Ten years ago today, I started this blog with a post about how I learned to hate poetry. Three hundred and twenty-one posts and about two hundred thousand words later, here I am, still blogging,...
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