I downloaded a copy of Courtney Milan's The Duchess War about five years ago, when the kindle edition was being offered for free. Although I was very much not a romance reader, several friends of mine had spoken highly of Milan's books and I thought it was worth a try, but I ended up bouncing off hard and abandoning the book about 20% of the way through after encountering a scene recounting the hero's graphic sexual fantasy about the heroine, who he'd only just met, which pinged all of my Oh Hell No buttons*.

Given that I have made a few ventures into reading romance recently I thought I'd give The Duchess War another try, although as all the other romances I've read were (a) f/f and (b) combined romance with fantasy, mystery or both, it was my first straight romance in both senses of the word. I liked it better this time. I still found the hero's graphic fantasising a bit squicky, though on persevering I found that later on the heroine also fantasises about the hero which made me feel a bit better about it. I wasn't entirely convinced by the Victorian setting, though as I'm not an expert in the period it's entirely possible that some of that is actually down to the Tiffany Problem rather than actual inaccuracies (but would a duke, however radical his views, really decide that distributing handbills encouraging workers to unite in the struggle for better conditions was the best way for someone with money and connections to go about pushing for change?), but the plot was entertaining and had some interesting surprises along the way, and the more I read, the more sympathetic and engaging I found the characters (I was also pleased to note that there is a background f/f relationship). There's some enjoyable banter between the hero and heroine, and although there are more explicit sex scenes than I was expecting or than I'm comfortable with (both more sex, and more explict) and at one point I was slightly worried that the whole of the last third of the book was going to be sex, that turned out not to be the case and the sex scenes were easy enough to skip over. I don't know if I will seek out more of Milan's books, but I quite enjoyed The Duchess War this time through and if you like romance and are more comfortable with explicit depictions of heterosexual sex than I am I think you'd probably like it a lot.

* 'Overly graphic descriptions of male sexual fantasies about women' is also the reason I bounced off the Dresden Files, although oddly enough I can cope with Peter Grant who a lot of people make similar complaints about.

The Found and the Lost collects together thirteen of Ursula Le Guin's novellas. (I'm not entirely clear whether this is absolutely every novella-length story she ever published, or just a selection.) I've had my copy for several years but was put off reading it because it is very large - a hardback with 800 pages, printed on heavy paper - so I thought I'd seize the opportunity to read it while I was off work and didn't have to attempt to carry it around with me.

I realised when I looked at the table of contents that I'd read seven of the thirteen stories quite recently; the collection includes three of the four stories from Four Ways to Forgiveness, three of the stories from Tales from Earthsea and the title story of A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, as well as 'Vaster Than Empires And More Slow' from The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which I read several times when I was in my teens. (I also realised, looking through my other Le Guin books while re-shelving this, that three more of the stories are in The Birthday of the World, which I own but haven't read yet - if you have a substantial Le Guin collection it's worth considering whether The Found and the Lost is really value for money.) I had originally planned not to re-read the stories I'd read in the last couple of years, but it felt like cheating to say I'd read the book if I'd actually only read less than half of it, and Le Guin's writing is always worth re-reading, so in the end I read the collection straight through.

As well as the Earthsea and Hainish stories, the novellas collected here include the non-SFF 'Hernes', the story of four generations of women living in a coastal town in Oregon; 'Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight', which uses Native American mythology to look at the disconnect between modern culture and nature; and 'Paradises Lost', possibly my favourite, which is set on a generation ship five generations into its voyage, where many of the descendents of the original travellers are beginning to question the need for a destination. Told as a series of vignettes centred around two characters who have known each other since early childhood, it's a haunting, thoughtful story which feels perfectly complete in itself but still leaves me wishing there was more about these people and their journey. I also very much liked 'The Matter of Seggri', a novella set in the Hainish universe which uses an initially simplistic-seeming reversal of gender roles in the society it describes to raise questions about gender equality more widely. Of the stories I'd read before, 'Dragonfly', which is the final story from Tales of Earthsea, particularly stood out this time round for its engagement with the question of conservative backlash against change, and the way change, and the response to it, splits communities. Despite first being published in 1998, it felt very contemporary.