“Female authors, are there any value to them? Should I even bother?”
-Hands above the wheel of the puttering vehicle as we round a bend
…
There is no sense in reading anything written by a woman since our entire society became a quivering woman in the wake of the USG murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. As with male authors, which are rarely ever men since bout 1980, the further you go back, the more they can be trusted, as the gathering lies from on high have continued to envelope and shutter literature.
But, the narrative orientation of women tends to be retained among their most brilliant non fiction minds, while the more enlightened male authors become, they tend to be almost unreadable, like Jorjani. The woman who wrote little House on the Prairie, wrote Jack Black’s memoir You Can’t Win while he was recovering from gunshot wounds in hospital, wounds sustained selling newspapers! Like modern drug dealers, news paper distributors of the 1920s would shoot each other! That should tell us something about the nature of news.
-C.V. Wedgewood wrote a history on the Thirty Years War [the best I have read] and a three volume history of the fall of the English monarch, Charles I, concluding with A Coffin for King Charles. I forget the first two volumes.
-Reay Tannahil is the smartest babe to have put pen to paper: Food in History, Sex in History and Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex are good informative reads.
-Anne Rice, whose publishing house contacted me about printing one of my books, had a great cock blocker babe on the phone, who would not consider me any longer after I suggested I give up my royalties to the old matron of blood drinking fiction, if I might have the honor of a private interview in a seedy motel… Click! Anne watched male on male porn while she wrote her best selling novels, which were very readable. She somehow channeled into mythic prose the blood anxiety of modern sex fiends and the fact that a secret society does rule us from the shadows, from where it literally drinks and now taints the blood of races. She manages to fuse Howard’s shadowy manipulator villains, Stoker’s modern dread of the primitive alpha male, with modern emasculation as psychological cannibalism. I read Interview with a Vampire, the Vampire Lestat and Blood and Gold. “This shit is gay,” as Incognegro would say, but it tracks.
-Alice B. Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree Junior, has her work collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, published by Arkham House. She inspired my nonfiction book, Chinks in the Machine. Sheldon’s short science fiction is genius work. Houston Houston, Do You Read is my favorite story, predicting much of what has been put into motion since her writing.
-Barbara Tuchman is the most readable history writer I have ever read, unlike most male authors, who are usually not men, but male things, Tuchman looks at personalities, not just political and corporate entities. Read her in this order:
-The Guns of August, best history of WWI
-A Distant Mirror, a mud and guts history of The Hundred Years War
-The Proud Tower, prequel to The Guns of August
-The March of Folly: Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self Interest. This investigation of Aztec, British and American military blunders is charted according to the naive idea that government serves itself or the people rather than their actual masters. We can forgive the old dame for not pursuing the question into the shadows where Howard’s barbarian heroes ventured.
-Reader, editor and eventual coauthor of Will Durant, his wife Ariel Durant may be appreciated with her genius husband, who again trusted to their masters’ good will in:
An Outline of History
The Story of Civilization, which should be acquired in all 13 volumes and used as a reference, it being the best, most readable general history, incomplete due to old age, up to Napoleon. I read all 13 volumes at age 15 in the Trinity High School Library, where I was peacefully consigned by all of my teachers with library passes for the crime of reading off subject during their classes. I recall the shop teacher being really offended when he brought me the pass. While I waited to drop out on my 16th birthday, I read this best of modern general histories, a life work by a readable artist of words and wife, while after school I read Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and JRR Tolkien. This was key to my triangulation, the fantasy of academic history and the reality of pulp swords & sorcery. The Durants come off as naive from my current vantage—yet they helped me gain this viewpoint.
Anne Macaffery, Ursula K. Leguin and other 1970s female fiction authors were not bad reads. Such writers seem to do well with teenage male protagonists. Pleasant fantasies written by 1970s women I forget the names of included: A Walk in Wolf Wood and the sword and the Satchel.
