Hello and welcome once again to the weekly feature in which I round up all the interesting or notable things I’ve read this week and pin them to a board like butterflies for inspection at your convenience. This week, I’ve been reading…
Patrick Ness’s top 10 ‘unsuitable’ books for teenagers – The Guardian. Although this was first published in 2011, the Kitchies’ twitter account recently re-linked to it, and it’s still a good read.
How to Design a City for Women – The Atlantic. A fascinating article by Clare Foran on Vienna’s practice of gender mainstreaming in urban architecture – that is, designing a city to better cater to the needs of women.
Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What would a non-Anglocentric understanding of science fiction and fantasy look like? – Strange Horizons. A long read, but a worthwhile one: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay on a future of SFF that embraces a dialectic of locality and universality, as opposed to the Anglocentric and Anglophonocentric hub and the pockets of locally-relevant material we now experience.
TW: rape. The Rise of the Anti-Rapist Anti-Hero – Bitch. Tina Vasquez on Diana, ‘Huntress of Bus Drivers’, the vigilante killing alleged rapists in Ciudad Juárez, and our willingness to take satisfaction in their murder and the murders of rapists by their victims worldwide. Terribly relevant.
Books for Boys and Books for Girls: Problems with Gendered Reading – Huffington Post. Kelly Jensen on the issues with how we gender the way children read.
When favourite authors become an addiction – The Guardian. Imogen Russell Williams writes about that phenomenon familiar to readers: becoming obsessed with a favourite author.
Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep and the art of the honourable scare – The Guardian. Upon the publication of the sequel to King’s horror classic The Shining, Anouchka Grose muses on what differentiates King’s brand of scariness from the modern Hollywood horror flick.
And, finally, We Are All Made of Stories – Joanne Harris’ tumblr. A heartfelt personal story about the grandfather of author Joanne Harris.