Reading year in review

[Albertosaurus Rex]

Every woman or culture is different but possibly one reason is that a significant number of women have simply tended to take a break for the purpose of raising children, and this interruption can later cause problems for climbing the corporate ladder to a true leadership position? This would no doubt be changing as many women are now, and more and more, choosing a career over a family, or stop for children only as long as maternity leave allows? Unlike myself, I have a number of friends who have chosen the latter path and they are now in very "high positions", and happy to be so with no regrets. This option for "choice" has changed in nature due to a variety of factors such as social acceptance, finanancial assistance in and out of the workplace, childcare infrastructure and support, increased commercialism etc.

I think this is a valid point. It came up during the aforementioned discussions: the simple fact that women can get pregnant. Even if the husband is a stay-at-home dad, maternity leave can cause a hassle.

One of the things I find very amusing is how pregnancies are handled when actresses in tv series get pregnant. You ever noticed in Star Trek TNG or Star Trek Voyager how Beverly Crusher and B'Lanna suddenly started wearing those long coats? That's because the actresses were pregnant. The coats, combined with clever camerawork, kept it concealed.

As for female authors, I can't say...except that it's sad when they feel they have to disguise or smokescreen their gender until their works are accepted as 'good'. It took me a while to learn that Lian Hearn was, in fact, Australian children's author Gillian Rubinstein! I think this is possibly also one of the reason why I enjoy Robin's books...they deal with the whole gender issue very well, smearing genders where issues should be smeared/don't matter and keeping them separate when they should be separate, I guess, but still giving socially acceptable and unacceptable views (don't ask me to explain that last bit! ).

I do want to note that I knew Robin Hobb is a woman before I started reading her books.

On another note, here's a category I should have included:

WEIRDEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Which would be a contest between Pandora in the Congo and Last Dragon.