Monthly Wrap-Up | November 2015

November was a fairly mixed month for me. I can't believe it's December already!

Bitch Planet, Vol.1: Extraordinary Machine

by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro

Demon Road

by Derek Landy

Winter

by Marissa Meyer

A Guinea Pig Pride & Prejudice

by Jane Austen and Alex Goodwin

Sky Goddesses of Dryden, Vols. I-IV

by Laura Konrad and Danielle Evert

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale

by Catherine Orenstein

Copperhead, Vol.2

by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski and Ron Riley

Disturbance
by Ivy Alvarez

The Falconer
by Elizabeth May

The Grownup
by Gillian Fynn

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is still a Boys' Club
by Eileen Pollack

I read ten books in October, and somehow I managed to read eleven in November. Don't ask me how! The Lunar Chronicles finally came to an end with the arrival of my most anticipated release of this year, Winter, and I ended up reading a lot of good books this month - there were no books I didn't like, which is always nice!

My sister, brother-in-law and I went to see Mockingjay Part 2 together in November, and I enjoyed it! I really like what Francis Lawrence has done with the series, and given how sceptical I was about Mockingjay being divided into two I actually think it was done really well and the cast were superb. As with all adaptations there were parts of it that I didn't like as much as others, but as a whole I think it was a very good adaptation!

I was pleasantly surprised by a new period drama in November. Whenever I see the word 'Frankenstein' in the title of a drama I'm immediately wary - there has never been a decent adaptation of Frankenstein - but The Frankenstein Chronicles isn't an adaptation of the book, in fact one of the characters is Mary Shelley, played by the wonderful Anna Maxwell Martin.

The Frankenstein Chronicles is set around nine years after the publication of Frankenstein, and children, sewn together from various body parts, are being found dumped around London. At a time when science and religion are constantly butting heads, it's up to John Marlott, played by Sean Bean, to find out who's committing these monstrosities before all of London discovers what's happening.

If you're in the UK it's on ITV Encore on Wednesday nights t 9pm, and Thursday nights at 10pm. Those of you outside the UK, I have no idea if the drama's already out there or if it's going to be, but if you have the chance to watch it then do - it's surprisingly good!

Winter

by Marissa Meyer

Demon Road

by Derek Landy

The Falconer

by Elizabeth May

The Grownup

by Gillian Flynn

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is still a Boys' Club

by Eileen Pollack

Sci-Fi Month | Is Alien Gothic?

Book vs. Adaptation | Carrie by Stephen King

Sci-Fi Month | Do the Undead Breathe New Life into our Classics?

Film Recommendations for Austen Fans

Adult Fiction for YA Readers

November has been a month of highs and lows for me. Earlier in the month my sister and I went to see Imagine Dragons in Cardiff, and they were amazing. I bought tickets for us for my sister's birthday, so we'd been waiting to go and see them since February.

They were so good live and they put on an excellent show - I definitely want to see them again in future, and I'm glad my sister liked her birthday present. It was nice to spend an evening with her; she's ten years older than me, so she's married and has two daughters of her own, so I don't get her all to myself that often.

Throughout November I took part in Rinn @ Rinn Reads' Sci-Fi Month. I didn't read as much as I hoped I would, but I wrote a couple of blog posts I really enjoyed writing and I managed to get a couple of reviews up. I even took a picture of my Lunar Chronicles books on Instagram, and it ended up getting used in an article on Bustle!

November was also my last month at work as my contract came to an end. I was hired as an Administration and Marketing Assistant at the independent publishers, Seren Books, for a year to help organise the centenary celebrations of WW2 writer, Alun Lewis.

My colleagues and I went for lunch and they got me a lovely card and some unicorn-themed gifts; I think of everything it's the other people at Seren I'm going to miss most. I really enjoyed my year in publishing - I basically ended up single-handedly updating the blog, which I really enjoyed doing - and I spent a lot of November applying for new jobs.

I ended up getting an interview for a writing job that I really wanted in the city I went to university, where I still have a lot of friends, but unfortunately I didn't get the job and I'm pretty bummed about it. So right now I'm feeling a little down and a little lost, but I'm sure I'll feel more optimistic when I've stopped feeling sorry for myself. For now, though, I'm going to allow myself a couple of days to just be sad.

Vlora @ Reviews and Cake talked about Why She Doesn't Go to the Library

Jamie @ The Perpetual Page-Turner talked about her Insecurities Then Vs. Now

Kaja @ Of Dragons and Hearts talked about giving authors Second Chances

Amanda @ Of Spectacles and Books talked about Cinderella and the Marginalized

What did you get up to in November?

This Week in Books | 02/12/15

This week I'm joining in with Lipsy @ Lipsyy Lost & Found to talk about the books I've been reading recently!

NOW: I'm making my way through my eARCs, which means I'm finally reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I already love it. It really does have a Firefly feel to it, and I'm really excited to read the rest of it!

THEN: The last book I finished, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is still a Boys' Club, was also a NetGalley read. I enjoyed it, but sadly not as much as I thought I would - you can check out my review here if you want to see more of my thoughts about it!

NEXT: Speaking of eARCs, I have a handful of Christmas contemporaries to read and review this December, and I think the first one I'm going to tackle is Holly Martin's Christmas at Lilac Cottage, which sounds adorable.

What are you reading?

Review | The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys' Club

by Eileen Pollack

My Rating: 

In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist.

Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer’s institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades.

Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face.

The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.

I received an eARC of The Only Woman in the Room from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The first thing I feel like I must say is that I'm not a scientifically-minded person at all. I didn't enjoy science in school, and while science is something I've gotten a little more interested in as I've gotten older I'm still much more of a literature and history person. You might wonder why I requested this book in the first place if that's the case, but just because I'm not very into science myself doesn't mean I'm not aware of the stigma against women in science that still exists. Other than Marie Curie I don't remember learning about any female scientists at school, and there are so many unsung heroines of the science world; Margaret Cavendish; Ada Lovelace; Mary Anning; Barbara McClintock; Rosalind Franklin... You get the point. I already know plenty about women in literature and history who have been overlooked for their white, male counterparts, so I wanted to learn a little more about what it's like for women in the sciences.

This is a hard book to review, because there were some things I really loved and some things... not so much. An important thing to point out is that I think this book is actually quite misleading; both the title and the blurb imply that the entire book follows Eileen Pollack as she talks to women in the sciences, but that only takes up the final third of the book. The first two thirds of the book are Eileen's memoir, following her childhood, her time at university and the time in which she strayed from physics to writing. Personally I didn't mind that, I thought her memoir was really interesting, but I think it's very misleading for anyone coming to this book just for that final section, and it left the book feeling like two smaller books that had been mushed together.

I've become a lot more interested in non-fiction this year, and for the most part this is the kind of non-fiction I like - the majority of the non-fiction books I've read this year have focused on feminism, so I was glad to add this one to my list. As you can see from my rating I enjoyed it, there was a lot that reminded me of myself despite the focus on science, and I think all women could read this and relate to some of Pollack's experiences.

However, I think I could have given this book five stars if it weren't for a few things that just grated on me.

Firstly, I felt as though Pollack had a tendency to perpetuate some of the negative stereotypes that often work against women who want to work in the sciences. More than once she admits to only remembering the professors she had a crush on, and something about that really annoyed me. I think it's only natural for people to develop crushes on their teachers or professors, though I must admit that never happened to me, but Pollack seemed to have an obsession with potential romantic partners. When interviewing some other scientists she often asked them if they were married or in serious relationships, and while I could understand the question's relevance to the idea that a woman can't be a scientist and a wife, it felt as though we'd stepped back fifty years.

Quite often Pollack openly admitted her outright jealousy towards other women in science who had been able to do what she hadn't by working in science, and while I think it's very brave of her to openly admit that jealousy and there's the whole problem of internal misogyny that, as women, we must continue to fight against, it sometimes felt as though Pollack wanted to be the only woman in the room. She wanted to be told she was special, whether she was a scientist or a writer, and as much as I think there's a part of all of us that wants that, I don't think it's fair of Pollack to hold other women's success against them. When women in the sciences are already struggling, there's no room for girl hate.

One other thing that annoyed me quite a bit was Pollack's insinuation that women who decided to pursue the arts instead of the sciences were 'cheating'. Firstly, I think that's very hypocritical coming from a woman who now makes her living as a writer, and secondly, the arts aren't an easy fallback; I didn't pursue English Literature at university because I couldn't make it as an astronaut. I do agree that a lot more women need to be encouraged to pursue the sciences if they enjoy it or they have an aptitude for it, but I didn't like the insinuation that the arts is full of women who'd rather be doing science.

I do think this is worth reading. I know my review seems very negative, but please keep my rating in mind - there was so much in here that spoke to me and I enjoyed reading it, for the most part, I just had a lot of thoughts about the stuff I didn't like so much.

Late November TBR!

Today I thought I'd share with you some of the books I'd really like to try and read by the end of November, but as this is a very over-ambitious amount of books and I don't do well when it comes to TBRs, we'll see how it goes. The majority of these books are sci-fi, because there's no better time to read sci-fi than during Sci-Fi Month!

I received eARCs of both of these from NetGalley, so I'd really like to get them both under my belt soon. I'm actually reading The Only Woman in the Room right now, and I'm planning to get to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet very soon because I've heard nothing but great things about it.

I love historical fiction, and I love it even more when it has fantastical elements, so The Falconer has been on my radar for a while. I picked it up a few nights ago after I received an eARC of the second book, The Vanishing Throne from NetGalley, and I'm hoping to finish it soon and then jump straight into the second book and whack out some reviews!

I love the White Trash Zombie books and I always find them so quick and fun to read. If I can cross these two off my TBR during Sci-Fi Month I'll be a happy bunny, as I'd like to focus on Christmassy books in December and some other books I'd really like to have read by the end of the year.

I'm hoping I get to all of these. The Falconer and The Only Woman in the Room I'll definitely finish, and if I can read The Vanishing Throne and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, too, then I'll have crossed three of my eARCs off my TBR before I dive into my Christmassy eARCs! If I can, though, I'd love to get to those White Trash Zombie books, too.

What are you reading at the moment?