I don't have usually have a problem with a story that is all male, if it would be untrue to the period or written in an era when it wouldn't occur to the writer to include a woman in, for example, a combat scene. What I dislike is women whose only roles are screaming, fainting, helplessness and being rescued.
Ditto. I also prefer books with no women to books with terribly-written women. (Neither of which applies to Tolkien, but Kindle keeps telling me I'd like Ready Player One and I have to keep telling it OH FUCK NO so the topic's been on my mind.)
There were nurses in Andersonville?
Okay. To be fair.
There were Confederate nurses in Andersonville?
I'm not a fan of war books/military history as a genre, but when I fall in love with one, I fall hard. And few, if any, war books deserve love more than McElroy's memoirs of Andersonville.
In the deadly games arena, there's also that movie called Series 7: The Contenders, in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman.
Jessica, why no to Ready Player One? It's on my maybe list, but I don't remember hearing anything bad about it.
Oh, I ranted about it right when it came out (DH got an ARC) - the main character is such a self-involved asshole, and it's written in the first person (and written terribly - if I were being charitable I'd say it's written accurately in the voice of someone who is very immature and very shallow and not very good at thinking) and The Girl Character is a two-dimensional fanboy wet dream and then there's a thing at the end where something is revealed about another character which made me literally (yes, literally) throw the book across the room. Such a MASSIVE clusterfuck of fail.
I also couldn't figure out who the book was being written to. As in, it's first person POV with a lot of asides by the main character, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me who he would be telling this story to in this way. There's a TON of exposition about the world that anyone living in that time/place would find condescending and ridiculous - he explains in excruciating detail every single fucking made-up sci-fi slang term in the book, and there's also a ton of exposition about pop culture in the 80s that I found condescending and ridiculous. So it makes no sense.
I thought it was fun enough but better in the first part.
Ah, yes, now I remember you posting about that. The book title wasn't on my radar at the time so I didn't make the connection, but I vividly remember the throwing the book across the room. *g*
Off the list it goes, and thanks for the rehash!
Hee--today's Two Lumps is hilarious!
So I finally got around to reading Martha Wells' Cloud Roads, which is a very fun and creative fantasy adventure novel. I definitely recommend it: the world-building is great, with floating islands and monumental ruins and all sorts of really cool and varied intelligent species running about.
The one thing that makes me laugh is that the POV character is, well, John Sheppard from Stargate Atlantis. I mean, not really: his name is Moon. But he's a laconic loner--an orphan who doesn't know where he comes from, and is skeptical of the motives of anyone who is interested in him. But it turns out that he's more important than he thinks, and during the course of the novel he finds a new home and people to fight for. If you know Wells' background in SGA fandom, it's really quite endearing.
