It’s August 15th! Happy Independence Day, India! Where my excellent friend is and I hope she is having a good time teaching children! And Happy Assumption of the Virgin Day, Catholics! I didn’t go to church today despite its being a holy day of obligation, but never mind, I will go another time. And, says my newspaper, and Wikipedia agrees with me, it is also happy birthday to Phyllis Schlafly, which I normally wouldn’t mention except it’s such a coincidence because I was just thinking about her the other day reading The Handmaid’s Tale! (When I was in high school…
2 CommentsTag: feminism (and not)
I recently read Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit, and found it unsatisfyingly lacking in good stories; I have had the opposite problem with Donna Freitas‘s Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. Like Regnerus, Freitas is interested in exploring the intersection of religion/spirituality and sex in America’s youth, though she focuses on college students where Regnerus’s book was more interested in teenagers. She conducted interviews with students at different types of universities – Catholic ones, evangelical ones, regular public ones – about their spiritual and sexual lives and those of their community. Many good…
4 CommentsMargaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is feminist dystopian satire. It was sort of a box-tick read, but it was very good, and well-written, and I’m glad I read it and I never ever want to read it again. In slightly-future America, now a fascist misogynist theocracy called Gilead, Offred (but June, really) is a Handmaid. This means that she has viable ovaries, and is responsible for producing babies. Once a month she has sex with the Commander to whom she belongs, and her life is sharply circumscribed – she can’t read, can’t walk in public by herself, can’t talk to…
13 CommentsIn Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes about the structure, creation, history, and vocabulary (among other things!) of comics. He does it, of course, in graphic novel form, with a little cartoon Scott McCloud telling us what is going on. I love this because when he talks about a technique that graphic novels use, voila, he can show it to us too! The book never becomes boring, which is partly down to the fact that it’s an interesting topic, but also partly because the form allows a lot of room for humor. (I was going to write “and whimsy”, but I…
11 CommentsThe Brooklyn Follies is all about a middle-aged man called Nathan Glass, divorced, a cancer survivor, estranged from his daughter, who goes to Brooklyn to die. While there, he reunites with his nephew Tom, who is working in a bookshop for an earnest, checkered-past-y, rather gullible man called Harry. The events of the story come together to give Nathan a life again. Hm. I cannot decide what my final verdict on the book is. In parts, I really really liked it. It was extremely well-written, as I noticed from the first. I would say this was its most notable characteristic,…
Leave a CommentLet us begin with two girls at a dance. They are at the edge of the room. One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers. The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the floor. It is the last hour of the year and the windows behind them are blank with night. The seated girl is dressed in something pale, Esme forgets what, the other in a dark red frock that doesn’t suit her. She has lost her gloves. …
7 CommentsI love books about the Victorians. It’s Oscar Wilde’s fault for being one. And I like books about mental illness, as long as they do not do that stream of consciousness thing, which I absolutely can’t stand. So when I read about this on the other Jenny Claire’s blog, I was pleased as punch to read it; and yes, I did mess up my don’t-check-out-any-more-library-books thing in order to get this book. And, okay, yes, since I was at the library anyway, I may have gotten a few other books as well. An Inconvenient Wife is about an upper-class American…
1 CommentI’ve been meaning to read this book for ten thousand years. I saw it at Bongs & Noodles once, when I had a bunch of B&N gift card credit, and thought seriously about getting it, before ultimately deciding on something totally different. And then I got it out of the library before Christmas last year. I love the library. I don’t know how anyone functions without the lovely library. This book is just what you might imagine, a history of virginity, or really, cultural attitudes towards virginity. It is completely fascinating. Really. I’ve been staying up late the past two…
3 CommentsThis is another one of those I’ve read about on several different websites. Trish’s book blog, Caribousmom, SassyMonkey … probably more, but those are the ones I remember. Everyone kept saying how good it was, but the library hadn’t got it in, and I didn’t like Language of Light enough to finish it, so I put off reading it. The Wednesday Sisters is all about five women in the sixties (then seventies) who become very close friends and form a writing group. Which isn’t doing it justice, because there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist. There are…
1 CommentAnd once again, I have Neil Gaiman to thank for some charming fantasy reading. First Martin Millar (darling Martin Millar! My only, only regret about my recent abandonment of graduate school is that I can now no longer use the university’s interlibrary loan system to acquire for myself the rest of Martin Millar’s out-of-print books), and now Lud-in-the-Mist, to which, I have to say, I believe Stardust owes a hefty debt. I’m always so pleased when I discover that Neil Gaiman has stolen his ideas or plots, mainly because the man is about ten thousand times more weirdly creative than…
5 Comments