Rereading things into books

[bouteillebleu]

Read "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller" a few months ago - it started out really interesting and then hit several of my no-stop-wait-goddamn-casual-thoughtless-anti-feminist-bollocks buttons and I ended up swearing at it once I put it down.

(I had a rant about it, I'll put it up at some point, either here or on a newer "here is where I am putting all the feminism stuff" blog.)

Was planning to read it through again to see if I had just imagined the main character being male, or if it would read fine with them being female-and-interested-in-women.

Turns out I didn't imagine it, they're identified as male on page 32. :( Ah well, exercise in creative rereading squished.

(The pages before that were kind of weird when read with that in mind; most of them were fine, and then the gender stereotypes demonstrated in the text but not referring to the main character would collide with things that the main character was suggested as possibly doing, such as the job they worked at.)

Comments

[eldritchreality.livejournal.com]

I know someone who first encountered Lord of the Rings in the radio play version, and found the story greatly diminished for them when they read the book and found out that canonically Merry and Pippin were male.

[loopymushroom.livejournal.com]

"vigilante copyeditor" is my new favourite tag and possibly life motto. :D