Hmph.

So I finished both Persuasion and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.  

I'm given to understand that Persuasion, the last of Austen's novels, is one of her best, but I disagree.  I'm cognizant of the style of the time, but it reads like a synopsis rather than a novel--there doesn't seem to be a complete conversation anywhere in the book.  To me it feels like she got tired of it partway through, and hurried to finish it rather than develop it.  

I do like the fact that the heroine is not only proved right but says so at the end.  Though I had trouble telling from the hero's behavior just what he was supposed to be feeling until it was spelled out. 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not what I'd consider one of Heinlein's better efforts, and not just for the outdated attitudes about women.  It goes on and on towards its goal, sometimes at tedious levels of detail or needless diversions into the author's political theories, and then finishes lickety-split, leaving the reader falling over the edge of the ending and wondering how things got sorted out afterwards.  I can understand why he did what he did with Mike, but it still feels like a cop-out, and I knew someone was going to die by halfway through the book. 

And all the way through I kept thinking, perhaps unjustly, that while Heinlein did it first, John M. Ford did it better.  

Hmph.

So I finished both Persuasion and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.  

I'm given to understand that Persuasion, the last of Austen's novels, is one of her best, but I disagree.  I'm cognizant of the style of the time, but it reads like a synopsis rather than a novel--there doesn't seem to be a complete conversation anywhere in the book.  To me it feels like she got tired of it partway through, and hurried to finish it rather than develop it.  

I do like the fact that the heroine is not only proved right but says so at the end.  Though I had trouble telling from the hero's behavior just what he was supposed to be feeling until it was spelled out. 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not what I'd consider one of Heinlein's better efforts, and not just for the outdated attitudes about women.  It goes on and on towards its goal, sometimes at tedious levels of detail or needless diversions into the author's political theories, and then finishes lickety-split, leaving the reader falling over the edge of the ending and wondering how things got sorted out afterwards.  I can understand why he did what he did with Mike, but it still feels like a cop-out, and I knew someone was going to die by halfway through the book. 

And all the way through I kept thinking, perhaps unjustly, that while Heinlein did it first, John M. Ford did it better.