Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is an enormously painful book; unlike most of the Vorkosigan books, I remembered significant sections of it with uncomfortable clarity. It's not so a matter of implausibility or coincidence in the action, but just that a lot of the events are agonizing. Even knowing how it would resolve was not enough to buffer against the rawness of it. It's an important book, but I was tempted to skip it just for it being so full of horror. I read it again anyway, and it does have a nicely satisfying denoument, so there's that. I am only giving this one a 5, though. I don't think I'll be reading it again.

Next up is Memory, which I don't particularly recall. I think I'll finish the ninth Aubrey/Maturin novel first, Treason's Harbour, first -- I'm around halfway through it already.

The Bechdel Test

I was just thinking about this rule -- that a work should '(1) have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man' -- and it just struck me that if you invert this rule to "have two men in it who talk to each other about something besides a woman", I am not sure if any of Jane Austen's books would pass.

Huh.