Survey Ship, and other small communities

Last week I went to a used bookstore and bought a Marion Zimmer Bradley book I'd never seen before: Survey Ship. I read it with quite a bit of amusement, because it wasn't very good at all. It's about three men and three women in their first 10 days together on a spaceship. Because it's MZB, the technical details are secondary to the relationships between the characters. These six characters are going to be alone on this ship together for at least nine years, so of course they all jump into quick relationships, with every character getting propositioned at least once. I assumed that Survey Ship was just MZB's attempt to work out the dynamics between men and women that she explored in depth in The Forbidden Tower, so I was amused and chagrined when I looked it up, and realzed that Survey Ship was published three years later.
I finally finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, the first in the reading project I started back in January. I had trouble warming up to The Professor, and because I've been so burned out, I didn't want to use my limited mental resources on a book I wasn't excited about. I'll tackle Tom Brown's Schooldays next.
But first (a tip of the hat to the Chenbot and my current obsession, Big Brother 7), I'm going to go finish reading Among the Free, the last in the Shadow Children series by Haddix.

my new reading project

I've started a project for the new year (the "Girlsown re-read", I've been calling it). I collect girls' school stories, mostly from Britain. I have a lot of them - over 300. So this year I decided to re-read all of them (which adds up to roughly one per day) chronologically by the date of publication. I'm limiting myself to books I actually own, so there will be some gaps in my reading. I'll miss some seminal works, but by the end of the year I'll have read a lot of school stories, and should have some new ideas about the development of the genre.
The problem is, my first book is The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte. I've never read it before, and I'm finding it slow going. I suspect it would be easier if I weren't sick - I went home from work early today, and everything! Some sort of stomach bug or food poisoning, because I'm nauseated all the time.
So instead of reading The Professor, I've been catching up on Donna Simpson regencies. One of them, The Duke and Mrs. Douglas, included a lesbian character. It was well handled, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this in a Regency romance.
Over Christmas, I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for a book club. It has symbolism that is heavy and obvious, perfect for freshmen in high school. I never felt any connection to the characters, which is a bad sign. Anna Quindlen wrote the introduction to this edition. I was irritated to read her comparison of Tree to Little Women and the Betsy-Tacy series, because she dismissed Alcott and Lovelace as light fluffy stuff. Better that than overly-symbolic, cold prose, I'd say. This wouldn't bug me so much, except that (1) Lovelace wasn't trying to create Great Literature, so it's a straw man argument and (2) Quindlen has written in praise of the Betsy-Tacy books in the past. If she feels they're so markedly inferior to Tree, she shouldn't have bothered.