Reading: Women and Power

Mary Beard's Women and Power is a compilation of the slightly updated texts of two lectures, originally given in 2014 and 2017, tracing the classical antecedents of our current political discourse and structures of power and the exclusion of women from both, together with an afterword addressing issues which arose between the second lecture and the publication of, in my case, the paperback edition (most notably #MeToo). The first lecture, 'The Public Voice of Women', looks at the Greek tradition of public oratory and how that still colours our perception of public discourse, causing women's voices to be marginalised and ignored; the second, 'Women in Power', looks at portrayals of powerful women in ancient Greece (Clytemnestra, the Amazons, Medusa) and how these are still used to attack women who seek power.

It's a very short book - only just over 100 pages, with a lot of those given up to illustrations which were presumably included on the slides accompanying Beard's original talks - but it's well-written and doesn't pull its punches, and while I already had at least a passing familiarity with most of the classical examples Beard cites the connections to contemporary Western culture were interesting and thought-provoking.

Reading: The Honey Month

I first heard of Amal El-Mohtar when her short story 'Seasons of Glass and Iron' was nominated for the Hugo Awards a couple of years ago (and eventually won). That was the first year I paid attention to the Hugo short fiction nominations (and how I discovered Uncanny magazine, too); I read all of the nominated stories that were freely available online, and El-Mohtar's was by far my favourite, so I went looking to see what else she'd written. The answer turned out to be mostly short stories in anthologies, but there was one single-authored book available on Amazon: The Honey Month.

The Honey Month is a collection of very short stories and poems, themed around a gift of a month's supply of samples of different honeys. Each piece begins with notes on that day's honey - colour, smell, taste - followed by a story or poem inspired by it. El-Mohtar's writing is beautiful: lyrical, sensuous, atmospheric, and several of the pieces in this collection play with familiar fairytale narratives in the way I loved so much in 'Seasons of Glass and Iron'. It's a short book, but utterly delightful and deeply absorbing.