scenes from the life

Over the weekend I read Pressfield's Gates of Fire, which is a novel based on the battle of Thermopylae. It's pretty good -- at any rate, the story carried me through the book. It's written from an outsider perspective, but doesn't quite capture the strangeness of Spartan society. I was talking about it with my husband, and he made the point that the narrator is strongly pro-Spartan, for a set of reasons that make sense within that particular point of view. Then he added that it's always a bit off-putting to get that pro-Spartan perspective as the narrative voice, since he doesn't want to think well of the Spartans. (at which point I said the conversational equivalent of ::facepalm::)

I also found the book very, very straight, which of course is what you'd expect for a book that's aimed at straight white men -- but it's so bizarre because Spartan society is so intensely homoerotic that even a novel like this, where I don't think the author wants to have that kind of subtext at all, can't avoid it. The men are always admiring each other's beauty (the beauty of women, too, but it's not an either-or kind of thing in Sparta). It was one of the things that struck me about Persian Fire, actually -- that Holland doesn't just pull a veil over that side of Spartan society -- but of course in a popular history you want to include as much sex as humanly possible, on the principle that readers like that kind of thing.

I found it hard to read more than two or three sentences of fanfic over the weekend, but will get on my beta-reading, writing and just general reading-and-feedbacking now.