99 Books Like Catling's Bane

I write character-driven fiction and it is always the people and their relationships that most engage me in any story. I found the characters here complex, real, engaging, and, in some instances, foul specimens demonstrating that existence for survival alone is an inadequate way of life for any person. These are fully developed people, though they are mostly unusual individuals; archetypes rather than stereotypes. The people hooked me from the start. I cared what happened to these adventurers. I also cared that those who deserved retribution would receive it.

Character-driven romance is relatively rare, but this book, essentially a complex and deep love story, is seen entirely through the eyes of lovers. The people on these pages are both exceptional and real. We’re treated to their aspirations, frailties, courage, desires, truths, and lies. These are people I’ve met and been impressed by.

When young, gifted, and hauntingly beautiful Sarah enters the hideaway of best-selling reclusive author, Jeremy, both their lives are fundamentally changed. To supply any more details of the story would be to give spoilers, and the last thing I want to do here is spoil anyone’s read.

This story begins in the first person in the company of a young boy. I lived with him through his early teens and schooling, a huge tragedy, and his fate as the isolated offspring of high-flying achievers, his early experiences, and the casual physical and mental cruelty associated with boarding schools.

Abruptly, I was plunged into the life of a young woman in her late teens, still in the first person. Surprisingly, this overnight transition, both physical and mental, caused me only a short pause to reflect on the nature of gender. I travelled with this developing young woman as she experienced love, sex, and the joys and sorrows life throws at a sensitive, intelligent, and creative soul who enters the world of writing. Her journey as a budding novelist struck a real chord with me, having travelled that difficult and demanding route.

I have written speculative fiction, and the protagonist, Angel, a feisty, courageous, enigmatic, curious survivor is placed into such a setting. Climate change, one of my personal concerns, has wreaked havoc with the geographical, and therefore the political world, as we know it. It deals with the way elites take what they see as the necessary action to continue their privileged lifestyles.

The author managed to make me empathize with almost all the characters on some level, regardless how selfish, wicked, good, generous, or courageous they may be. I encountered elderly heroes and heroines, resourceful individuals and communities, victims, self-serving demagogues, cruel leaders, uncaring servants, unquestioning followers, and a group of talented and determined resistance fighters bent on turning a terrifying world into a just and equable future.

Song’s interdisciplinary work in the fields of politics, law, and philosophy explores the tensions that arise when culturally diverse democratic states pursue justice for religious and cultural minorities and justice for women. Much of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism relates to North America. Song argues that egalitarian justice requires special accommodations for cultural minorities and that gender equality may restrict cultural accommodation. While we need to be sensitive to historical cultural rights, we should also protect basic human rights. Song lucidly and incisively discusses cultural defense in criminal law, aboriginal membership rules, and Mormon polygamy, examining the role of intercultural interactions in shaping such cultural conflicts. As I did in my work, Song emphasises intercultural democratic, deliberative dialogue as a means for resolving cultural conflicts.

Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, “We need to know how women disappear….”  Although she spoke of women who disappear from the historical record, all too many women seem to disappear from any sort of public life as soon as they leave high school: so many shine there, but once they graduate, they become invisible. What happens?  

Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys are visible.  Everywhere. Even the straight-B boys are out there. So what happens?

This is what happens.

Although this novel focuses on the world of investment banking, I list it here because it shows the difference between being a female working in finance and being a male working in finance; like This is what happens, it shows the impact of sexism on one woman's professional life, her dream, her ambition, her failure to achieve the former despite the latter.

I read it quite a while ago but was reminded of it while reading recently about the recent Martin/Nicole thing (wherein they switched email addresses, so Martin experienced what it was like to be Nicole for a couple of weeks) ("Folks, it sucked" was his summary).  

This bawdy 1958 novel reads like a bizarre porn script (or a parody of one).

Like the hapless hero of Voltaire’s Candide, Candy Christian is an intelligent and generous-minded (albeit naive) college student who lets herself be taken advantage of by all sorts of sophisticated perverts whose only goal (they claim) is to assist Candy on her spiritual journey.

It’s probably asking a lot of the contemporary reader to continue with this absurd (and sexist) premise, but I admit it – I laughed a lot and on almost every single page. 

Candy is prurient, amoral, and silly, but easy and fun reading. Such novels upend the stereotype of 1950s American society as prudish and straight-laced and herald a more relaxed attitude towards sex.

Once I’d belatedly realised that women wrote noir, it was a short step to becoming obsessed with Margaret Millar, a Canadian/American counterpart to British Celia Fremlin.

This book kept me guessing right to the end. It has a psychological complexity that means the characters got under my skin, and it is crammed with razor-sharp insights into dysfunctional relationships. I just love Millar’s spare prose: "The smile meant nothing. It was one of habit. She put it on in the morning along with her lipstick and removed it at night when she washed her face. Jim liked this smile of Daisy’s…"

It is easy to see why Millar was celebrated in her own time – and, sadly, equally easy to guess the reasons she now needs "rediscovering."

I found that the length of Colwell’s career has given her a depth of experience that shines a light on just how bad science was for women even in the 1950s and 60s.

We sometimes forget that women have been discriminated against for decades, even as they’ve fought hard-won battles to be treated fairly. I appreciated Colwell’s detailed narrative of her science, too, and how the challenge of finding a solution to a scientific problem led to much celebration when that solution was found.

I also liked that she told stories of other women in science, like Nancy Hopkins at MIT, who worked tirelessly for equality for women at her institution.