MADreads

It's been two steps forward, one step back for women in media organizations across the United States over the past four decades. Kristin Gilger and Julia Wallace have gathered stories from many of the most influential women of the newsrooms and dissect what it takes to succeed in male-dominated organizations when you are female. Some of the stories cemented my admiration for media superstars in perpetuity.  International correspondent and legend Christiane Amanpour, that shout-out is for you.

Beethoven is everywhere. Cell phones trill ‘Fur Elise,’ parents dote as their offspring murder ‘Ode to Joy’ and the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony practically define classical music for many. For all his familiarity, though, Beethoven the man is frustratingly hard to pin down. Little written evidence survives of the composer’s formative years, and later documents have become burnished by fame over the years. Beethoven scholar and British radio host John Suchet tries to fill in some of the holes in a very user-friendly portrait in Beethoven: The Man Revealed.

I had no sooner finished reading Angelo's debut novel than I started to see people tweeting about an article about an Instagram "influencer" and the woman who was her friend and un-sung (according to her) ghostwriter for a number of years. I found the article and had to double-check the date it was written because the story told there of two young women who meet in New York and team up to take on social media. One has low self-confidence but the ability to work hard and write and the other is a super-confident, though somewhat feckless, woman who wants nothing more than to be famous.

My first Joe Abercrombie reads were his Shattered Sea trilogy, so A Little Hatred, introducing his Age of Madness series, is my introduction to the world of Angland (a world created with a cast of characters who are a generation earlier in his First Law series).