The Female Man

Joanna Russ
The Female Man Cover

The Female Man

Chiplefien
9/27/2013
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What did I miss with this one?

The structure, haphazard, seemingly random, was a bit too much for me. I'm a sucker for in media res exposition and stream of consciousness (camera eye anyone?), they just don't always work. While The Female Man was not as tedious as some 70s french SF I submitted myself to 15 to 20 years ago, it's still on the other side of readability for me.

As a result, after a hundred-so pages I began reading pages and paragraphs at random. While the power of the writing is undeniable in most of the places, I just couldn't get hooked. Life's too short to read something you don't want to, so I quit.

It might have been and be an important book, you can rest assured its theme still is relevant, but all in all, it just might be a bit too much of a book of its time for me. I can't realy hold that against it, but I just couldn't just let myself go with the flow.