Books I've read recently:
The Red Tent
The Bonesetter's Daughter
Janet Frame's autobiography

Books I have waiting to be read:
The Nanny Diaries
A Moveable Feast
When We Were the Mulvaneys
The Hours
Backlash
Susan Brownmiller's book on rape
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You

(From Limpet.)

1. John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig
2. John Turturro as Barton Fink
3. Alison Janney as C.J. in The West Wing
4. Lucy Liu's character in Kill Bill, Vol. 1
5. Any of the characters Tony Bordain bases on himself (that gets me around the "is Tony Bordain a fictional character?" problem)
6. Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands (very, very carefully!)
7. Angelina Jolie as Laura Croft.
8. Angelina Jolie as Gigi.
9. Angelina Jolie as Lisa in Girl, Interrupted.
10. Mercutio.

It has come to my attention that my blogging lately sucks. It sucks a lot. I only post memes or short, stupid rambles about my personal mental state. I can't remember the last time I wrote something interesting.

Truth be told, I am suffering from blog impotence, triggered by my inadequacy complex. Over there on the left you will see a list of blogs that are nearly all better than mine. Some of them are miles and miles better than mine. The more I read them, the more I wonder why anyone would bother to read this, the less interesting stuff I can think of to write.

So yeah. That's the big reason for my prolonged (well, prolonged for me, anyway) silence.

In an effort to update--I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents this weekend. It's worth reading. Yesterday, when I was home feverish and throwing up, I watched The Life of David Gale. It is worth watching, and it gave me an inexplicable crush on Kevin Spacey. One of my senior year prospies at Reed had a producer daddy and was a family friend of Spacey's, or so she claimed (and I vaguely remember checking out her story and having it stack up--her dad worked on Swimming with Sharks, I think). Anyway, she told me Kevin Spacey is definitely gay. Makes me sad that he's not out. But he was hot in David Gale anyway, in a philosophy professor kind of way.

What else...? Saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 over the weekend. Actually, S. and T. and I went with some of their friends, to a double-feature of the first and second volumes. It was a good time. I love the Alamo Drafthouse.

Do you ever think that maybe I put in lots of links in a effort to hide my lack of content? I do.

by Gini Sikes
Doubleday, December 1, 1996

Last night, I finished reading Gini Sikes' 8 Ball Chicks. The book is a study of female gang members in Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, circa the mid-late 1990s. Sikes did a year of research, traveling around and talking to the girls themselves, their families, police, social workers, etc. Her level of involvement is amazing. She obviously cares about her "subjects" and her willingness to go into depth with them, and to examine herself as much as she is examining them, is truly inspirational. I will definitely look for other work she's done (I think she's a journalist and this is her only book, but I'm not certain).

As anyone who has been anywhere near me recently is undoubtably sick of hearing, I just read this really great book. It's called Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Basically, a writer took the time to talk to a bunch of groups of elementary-to-high school aged girls about how and why they are mean to each other. Teaching girls not to be aggressive, the author postulates (and I think she's right), backfires into girls putting their aggressions into all of this underhanded, backbiting meanness. Rather than just getting in an argument or a even a fight and getting it over with, girls spread rumors, exclude, keep secrets, use particular kinds of body language, "kill with kindness," etc. And it causes psychological damage that haunts us for the rest of our lives, sometimes sutble ways, sometimes in clear-cut ones, like abusive romantic relationships, self injury, and eating disorders.

So I'm reading Janet Luhrs' The Simple Living Guide. Well, not so much reading it as being consumed by it, actually. I have hardly put it down all day. With every passing chapter I am more and more sure that my life needs major changes, and that parts of what Ms. Luhrs writes about should be speaking to me very directly.

So, I'm probably about to embark on a whole bunch of navel-gazing entries. Don't say I didn't warn you.

So last night I'm on the Stair Stepper, listening to an audiobook I just downloaded. It's Confessions Of A Reformed Dieter: How I Dropped Eight Dress Sizes and Took My Life Back (perfect for the Stair Stepper, don't you think?). So I am listening and huffing and puffing along, and then she says it. Something that has been in the back of my mind since Tracey Gold was on the cover of People in 1992. Something that other people have thought and said as well, but never so clearly, at least not within my hearing.

Sad story articles about anorexic celebrities are not meant to be warnings, or just tear-jerkers. They are instruction manuals. The pictures they print of the "deathly skinny" celebrity aren't for shock value, they are something to aspire to.

I've stolen this from an entry a few days back on Bitch, Ph.D..

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

We actually had a long midnight discussion about this once when I was in college. I can't remember what I said then, but now I think I'd go with People's History of the United States. Not fiction, I know, and quite a lot to memorize, but it's the first thing that came to mind. The Beauty Myth would be another contender.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Hasn't everyone? The first one I remember having was on Sodapop Curtis from The Outsiders. Honestly, though, even before that, it was probably Harriet the Spy. Most recently I crushed on both of the main characters from The Time Traveller's Wife.

The last book you bought is:
Hrm...I'm not sure. The last book I remember buying was Temptress: From Original Bad Girls to Women on Top.

The last book you read:
Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food

What are you currently reading?
When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession. Sensing a pattern?

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
The Clown of God
Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo (this is obviously the only way I would ever get through it)
Anything by Andrea Dworkin (see above)
Some complete works of the Bronte sisters collection
A really great art book

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?
Honestly, I probably won't pass it on, but I'd like it if Frog, Melinda, and Emilin to do it. I'd also be curious to see what G. has to say.

As I have spoken to some of you about and written about elsewhere (and even written about here, but written about so badly I had to delete it), I am lately finding myself in a bit of an existential crisis. Being 25, I am told it's called a"quarterlife crisis." I think there is some credence to that. Anyway, one of the big hallmarks of this crisis is my continued discouragement with having a job that is not a career path, and having no fricking clue what career path I should be on, if I should be on one at all.

So, being me, I picked up a book. The book is called I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It, and it is by Barbara Sher. I have no idea if it's a good book or not--I picked it up for $1.99 at the Goodwill-but anything is worth a try.

I'll come right out and admit it: I'm a fan of Oprah's book club. Not only do I think it's a good idea in theory, and not only do I think it has been a help to a number of virtually unknown female authors, but I have also really liked quite a few of the books I've read (yeah, most weren't great literature, but a couple were, and most weren't crap). Anyway. A few weeks ago, I heard quite a bit of hoopla about Oprah's Summer of Faulkner. The upshot of her plan, if you don't feel like bothering with the link, is that she has picked three William Faulkner books for the club's summer month selections: As I Lay Dying for June, The Sound and the Fury for July, and Light in August for August. At first, my reaction was simply continued dismay that she is now highlighting dead white male authors who are already famous, rather than current female authors, as she was doing in the first few years. Then I considered that my exposure to Faulkner has been limited to three books, two of which were for school (Absalom, Absalom and As I Lay Dying) and one of which I tried to read on my own and got frustrated with and didn't finish (The Sound and the Fury). This fact, in combination with the fact that I have a Faulkner-obsessed Masters-in-Literature office mate, as well as my general brain atrophy, led me to decide that I was going to enroll in Oprah's Summer of Faulkner.

I am a Harry Potter-phile. Certainly not to the extent of some people (today has been my first troll around the fansites, for instance), but I'm a fan. I pre-ordered the book, I read it in two nights, etc. I've only read each book in the series once (though I have seen the first and third movies twice each, but that's more circumstance than anything else), but I have a pretty good idea of the general mythology. I think these books are Lord of the Rings for our generation, and they thrill me.

Which is why, now that I've gulped down book six, the second-to-last book, by most accounts, I am suffering from some post-Potter depression. I want more! I don't want to wait two years for it! I don't want just one more book! Wah!

Thinking about this last night, and about how lame it is that my joy at having just read book six and how good it was is overshadowed by what basically comes down to greed. Wanting more. I didn't take time to savor what I had, but rushed through it to get to the end, and now I'm sad to be done. It's one of those things I was supposed to learn better about when I was 5, you know?

And that got me thinking about Chance, and about how grief is, at least in part, about wanting more. It's about focusing on not having more time, rather than focusing on the time you had.

Twisty has a brilliant review of Margaret Cho's new book-and-DVD combo on her site, and that is what got me thinking about writing this, though it has been in my head for some time. While I haven't read the book, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, I did see a live performance of Cho's Assasin tour (which is what the DVD is), so I am pretty familiar with what Twisty's talking about. And my reaction was very much like her's.

I am finally seeing the light at the end of the semester tunnel, and I am getting all excited about reading for pleaure again. And reading real books, not the light stuff I've been reading in between school books. So I need recommendations! Specifically, I am interested in:

1. Really good biographies. Doesn't matter who the subject is, I love a good biography.
2. Face-paced non-U.S. history books. In specific, I'd like to read something comprehensive about the Russian Revolution. French and Chinese Revolutions would be interesting as well.
3. Really spectacular fiction. I'm not much for fiction in general these days, so it has to be really excellent fiction for me to be willing to devote much time to it.

by Koren Zailckas
Viking Adult, February 7, 2005
368 pages

This is another one I didn't read, but listened to. And there was a big gap in my listening, as I didn't make it to the gym for the whole month of December, for various and sundry reasons.

During the time when I wasn't listening to it, though, I was still thinking about it. And when I put my iPod headphones back on during my flight to Oregon for Christmas, it took only a minute for me to be right back in Zailckas' story.

by Carol Shields
Penguin (Non-Classics), April 1, 1995

This book won a Pulitizer Prize in 1995, and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the 1980s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. The mix and overlap between these two subjects is fascinating, and Shields' writing is first rate, making this a pleasure to read.

by Billie Letts
Warner Books, July 1, 2005

Billie Letts' newest book, Shoot the Moon, is a lot better than her first, the saccharine Where the Heart Is. Though the characters Letts follows through Shoot the Moon are from similar geographic and socioeconomic situations as those in Where the Heart Is, they are much better fleshed out and much easier to identify with, even if the plotline is similarly unusual. Whereas I spent most of Where the Heart Is irritated with the characters' and plotline's sillyness, I was cautiously enamored with both in Shoot the Moon.

The basic premise of the novel is the return of a man, Nicky Jack Harjo, to the small Oklahoma town of his birth. The twist is that Harjo has no idea he was born there, and knows nothing about the circumstances of his disappearance from the town at the age of 10 months. What unfolds is the reopening of the nearly 30 year-old murder case of Harjo's mother. While unravelling the mystery, Harjo befriends several townspeople, including some of his long-lost family.

This is not great literature. It's a sweet and strange story, kept exciting by the element of mystery. It's a good airplane read, which is where I read it. Go into it with those expectations, and you shouldn't be disappointed.

by James Frey
Anchor, September 22, 2005

I really wish I'd gotten my shit together to review this before all of the news about how much of it might be fiction started swirling around. But since I didn't, I feel some responsibility to talk about that, as well as about the book itself. Oh well.

The drama, in case you live under a rock, is that the truth of a number of the claims Frey makes in this book, a memoir, is being contested. You can take a look at this article if you'd like more information. My thoughts are that Frey probably did exaggerate or simply make up some of the things he writes in A Million Little Pieces. Mostly, though, I don't care.

by Ernest Hemingway
Scribner; Reprint edition, June 1, 1995
336 pages

For those who, like me, are new to the audiobook world, I have a tip to share: skip the classics. If you are going to read classic literature, pick it up and read it. Listening to it is no good.

At least that was the case with me and Farewell to Arms. I like Ernest Hemingway a lot, perhaps more as a character than as a writer, but as a writer as well. I've read most of his other work, and am a particular fan of The Sun Also Rises. So I was happy when, upon finding myself with several hours alone in a car over my Christmas break, I thought of taking along the old CDs of Farewell to Arms I've been hanging on to since we made the Portland-Austin trip.

by Suze Orman
Random House, Inc., December 2000

While I was feeling sick and depressed last week, I decided thinking about finances probably wouldn't make things any worse, so I picked up this book. Suze Orman has been recommended to me before, though I think the book I was actually supposed to read was The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke. However, that one was not available at the Goodwill for $1.99, and this one was, so this is the one I picked up.

And, freakish pictures of the author aside, I'm not sorry I picked it up. As far as financial books go, this is about the best one I've read. The first 3/4 of it are basic financial advice: investing, wills and trusts, credit cards, etc. A lot of it was review, some of it was new, and all of it is useful. It gave me a much needed butt kicking as far as putting steps in place to work towards my 2006 financial goals, and it wasn't nearly so preachy and holier-than-thou as it could have been. I felt like the audience Orman was speaking to was a bit older and a bit wealthier than I am, but it was still helpful.

by Chris Willman
New Press, November 17, 2005

This book is a fascinating look at the political makeup of the stars and establishment of country music. Working both forward and backward from the Dixie Chicks' scandal, Willman interviews a whole host of musicians, songwriters, and other country music types to get their takes on where the country music establishment falls on the political spectrum.

Unsurprisingly, most everyone agrees that the majority of mainstream country acts are conservative, while the majority of alt-country/Americana acts are liberal. What's interesting, though, are the nuances to these positions that the interviewees themselves articulate, as well as the ways they have found to put their political differences aside and work and play together, as shown in the cover photo of the very liberal Willie Nelson and the conservative (and, IMO, war-mongering and obnoxious) Toby Keith.

My friend T. recently asked me for a list of my favorite feminist books, to use for a book review website project he's putting together. Unable to contain myself with the joy of this task, I put together a fairly comprehensive list (though I edited it down quite a bit). It was so much fun, I thought I'd share it here. Disagree with my picks? Think I left something essential out? Comment--I'd love to hear what you think!

Foundations

1. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (W.W. Norton and Company, 1987)
2. The Second Sex by Simone DeBeauvoir (Everyman's Library, 1993)
3. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (W.W. Norton and Company, 1963)

It's tempting to me to skip these books altogether, because I don't like any of them, but I think they are necessary as foundation if you really want to get into this stuff.

Histories

4. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen (Penguin, 2001)
5. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left by Sara Evans (Vintage, 1980)
6. Tidal Wave: How Women Changed at Century's End by Sara Evans (Free Press, 2003)
7. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle Freidman (Ballantine Books, 2003).

If you only read one book about feminism, the Ruth Rosen book gets my vote. It's very comprehensive, yet easy to read, and it has an amazing bibliography, sorted by subject. It's a great place to start. Personal Politics is also important, as it situates 2nd wave feminism in the other social movements of the time, which is something people are likely to miss. I haven't read Tidal Wave, but given what a good historian Sara Evans is, I can't imagine it's anything but good. Freedman is also a top-notch historian, and her book is excellent. It does a better job than the others with feminism before the 1960s.

2nd Wave
8. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement edited by Robin Morgan (Random House, 1970)
9. Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (Basic Books, 2001)
10. Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (Doubleday, 1970)
11. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone (Vintage, 1971)
12. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (McGraw Hill, 1971).

Of the first two, which are both document/essay collections, I'd say Sisterhood is Powerful is probably the better book, but Dear Sisters is a lot easier on the eyes and more reader-friendly. Both are definitely worth reading. The other three are all books written by activist women during the late 60s and early 70s. Kate Millett's has to do with sexism in literature, while Greer's and Firestone's are more broad-reaching.

3rd Wave

13. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism by Rebecca Edby Walker (Anchor, 1995)
14. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)
15. Listen Up! Voices from the Next Feminist Generation edited by Barbara Findlen (Seal Press, 1995)
16. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio (Seal Press, 2002)

I'm not a huge fan of most of the 3rd wave writing, but I think Manifesta gives a nice overview, and I am a big fan of nearly everything Rebecca Walker has written. Listen Up! is also a primer of sorts--short, easy-read essays. There is actually a newer version of it as well, Listen Up 2 Edition, which was published in 2001, but I haven't read it. Cunt is a must-read.

Radical Feminism

17. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly (Beacon Press, 1990)
18. Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin (E.P. Dutton, 1989)
19. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Harvard University Press, 1988)

This is a category I am not all that well-versed in, but I've read Pornography, and got quite a lot out of it, and the other two books seem to be standards.

Women of Color

20. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks (South End Press, 2000)
21. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks (South End Press, 1981)
22. Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y. Davis (Vintage, 1983)
23. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lord (Crossing Press, 1984)
24. Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism edited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman (Seal Press, 2002)

I am ashamed to say that I don't know nearly as much as I should about this category. However, I can vouch for both the Davis book and Feminism is for Everybody, and I have heard nothing but good things about Ain't I a Woman. Sister Outsider is mostly short stuff, and I have read most of it and loved all I've read. Colonize This! is anther one I haven't read, but since the rest of these are older writings/writings by older women, I think it's good to include a younger perspective as well.

Sexual Minority Feminism

25. Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation by Karla Jay (Basic Books, 1999)
26. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel by Leslie Feinberg (Firebrand Books, 1993)
27. Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam (Duke University Press, 1998)
28. Amazon to Zami: Towards a Global Lesbian Feminism edited by Monika Reinfelder (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1996)

Again I haven't read all of these, but have heard good things about all of them. I can personally vouch for Tales of the Lavender Menace and Stone Butch Blues, and neither should be missed, in my opinion.

Beauty/Body Image

29. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf (Anchor, 1992)
30. Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image edited by Ophira Edut (Seal Press, 2003) (Formerly Adios, Barbie! Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, Seal Press, 1998)
31. Girl Culture by Lauren Greenfield and Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Chronicle Books, 2002)

The Beauty Myth is an all-time favorite of mine, and I think it holds up well over time. Body Outlaws is more fun to read, however, and is also quite good. Girl Culture is a photo essay book, and it's amazing.

Memoirs/Autobiographies

32. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller (Delta, 2000)
33. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin (Basic Books, 2002)
34. Saturday's Child: A Memoir by Robin Morgan (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000)
35. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem (New American Library, 1992)

For my money, memoirs are the best way to get into reading feminist writers, especially someone like Andrea Dworkin. The Brownmiller and Morgan memoirs are both excellent, and Steinem's is a bit too wishy-washy for my taste, but you can't argue with her selling power or her staying power.

Misc

36. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller (Ballantine Books, 1993)
37. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi (Crown, 1991)
38. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf (Random House, 1997)
39. Femininity by Susan Brownmiller (Ballantine Books, 1985)

These are about a variety of topics, obviously, but they are books I think are important and beneficial that don't fit in elsewhere.

by Cecilia Konchar Farr
State University of New York Press, November 4, 2004

This is an interesting little book. Even though it's written by a full professor (at St. Catherine's College in St. Paul, Minnesota), it seems almost like a dissertation. A really good dissertation, but a dissertation. I think the short length is part of the reason, but part of it is also Farr's willingness to take up a topic that, as she admits, more "serious" scholars have avoided.

And, she thinks (and so do I), avoided to their detriment. Oprah's Book Club has been an amazing force, and one worth studying. Farr does a great job of it, too, associating the Book Club not only within contemporary American consumer and talk show culture, but within the history of the novel and the book group as well. She's obviously done her homework, making insightful comments both on the books that have been chosen and on the shows that were dedicated to them, and I agree with 99% of the insights she provides.

(Cross-posted at Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!)

by Liza Featherstone
Basic Books, November 30, 2004

This excellent, interview-based book follows the case of Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the gigantic class-action suit brought against Wal-Mart by its female employees. Journalist Featherstone talks to what have to be a hundred current and former Wal-Mart employees, managers, lawyers, etc. in her effort to get the whole story, and the story isn't pretty. The picture painted is one of institutional discrimination against women on a scale of over a million. The discrimination permeates all levels at Wal-Mart, with women making less than men for the same jobs, being sexually harassed, and all of the usual crimes. The thing that makes Wal-Mart different, though (or at least this is the case the prosecution will be making) is that the policy of discrimination is not limited to a given man, or a given store, but to the entire, huge company. As women fight their ways up the management ranks at Wal-Mart, things get worse rather than better, and eventually nearly all women top out. For all of its rhetoric about being woman-friendly and family-friendly, Wal-Mart does worse by women than any other company its size.

These are the first three books we've read in my U.S. Policy History course this semester, and once I get this review up, I'll be all caught up!

by Julian E. Zelizer
Cambridge University Press, March 22, 2004

Don't read this book. It's boring. I'm interested in policy history and how Congress works, and I was bored out of my mind. It's also a lousy primer, because it skips around in time and doesn't spell things out clearly. It's a book all about Congressional reform written for people who already know all about Congressional reform. With that audience of around 13, Zelizer ought to be rolling in dough.

by Pam Houston
W.W. Norton and Company, January 1992

I'll admit it, I picked this up based on the title. I mean, what a great title, right? Unlike most books chosen based on title, though, this one paid off. It's a great book of short stories, mostly centered around women's relationships with men who are unsuitable for one reason or another, generally due to being one kind or another of "cowboy."

Which I realize doesn't make it sound very good. In fact, it makes it sound pretty fucking trite. But it's mostly not.

To your left, you see a sign I spotted in a bookstore the first night I was in Minneapolis. It caught my eye, and I have since been thinking about chick lit.

From what I can tell, chick lit covers any book by a woman or about a woman. And it is-surprise!-a derogatory term for these works. They aren't real literature. They're literature lite. Literature for girls. Diet literature. Chick lit.

edited by Megan McMorris
Seal Press, March 28, 2006

This is a book of short pieces from a variety of female writers (mostly journalists), all about dogs. I've been slowly reading it for several weeks now, and just finished it the other night.

A few of the women featured in the book are ones I've read before, most notably Pam Houston and (the late) Caroline Knapp, both of whom have other work I much admire. The dogs featured are a motley bunch, from Pam Houston's herd of Irish Wolfhounds (how I envy that!) to a couple of dauschunds. They are personal pets, dogs of friends and family, or neighborhood menances. Some of them are already gone, but most are still alive. And the essays in the book explore several angles of the human-dog relationship. Or, I guess, more specifically, the woman-dog relationship. There are good dogs and bad dogs, and relationships that are more and less fulfilling. Which is exactly why I liked the book as a whole--it portrays the relationships between women and their dogs as something more than a simple idea of unconditional love or, worse yet, surrogate children. It portrays these relationships as complex, organic entities. Which is what, in my experience, they are. As books about dogs go, I'd rank this one up there with Knapp's full length work, Pack of Two. And that's saying something.

by Marion Meade
Nan A. Talese, May 18, 2004

As hard as it was to pull myself away from the television this weekend (six soccer matches! eight episodes of Gilmore Girls!), I did also read a book. A non-fiction book, even. This book, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, which is a mixed autobiography of four American women writers from the 1920s, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edna Ferber, and Zelda Fitzgerald.

You'd think that with subject matter like that, you couldn't lose. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. This book is just not very good. It portrays all four women, to greater or lesser degrees, as pampered, marginally talented, mentally ill, alcoholics. Which, in some cases, is likely true, but it's not very interesting, particularly when all four of the female protagonists, who were, to my knowledge, quite different, are treated interchangeably.

I started the book knowing very little about any of the women it portrayed, and I think I ended it knowing not much more. The accounts given in the book seemed very surface level, artificial, and doubtfully well-researched. And more lines and thought seemed to be given to the male characters who should have been out the outskirts (especially the fairly repulsive F. Scott Fitzgerald) than they were warranted. All in all, I found it disappointing. It did peak my interest in these women (particularly Edna Ferber, about whom I previously knew nothing) and this time period for American female writers, but it did nothing to hold it. Guess I'll have to look elsewhere.

I've been reading a lot of fiction over the past few weeks, which has been really nice. I started by picking up Toni Morrison's latest offering, Love (Knopf, October 28, 2003), which I really liked. I'm not generally a huge Morrison fan (I liked Paradise a lot, as well as The Bluest Eye but most of the books she wrote in between the two didn't do too much for me), but Love was a good read. Intense, the way all her books are, but not particularly confusing and not as irritatingly overt as some of her other work. I'd recommend it.

After I finished Love (in a couple of nights, it really is quick), I started Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (Nan A. Talese, November 1, 1996). Atwood is another one I've never really been able to get into. Everybody loves The Handmaid's Tale, but I found it fairly irritating. And Alias Grace was even worse. Or at least started out that way. To be perfectly honest, I put it down about 50 pages in and haven't picked it back up.

I've recently been very into Pam Houston. It started when I picked up her first book of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness (remember, Amazon is for research, indie bookstores are for buying!), based solely on my love for its title. Not generally being a short story person, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book. The stories are basically all about the same woman/type of woman--a early-mid 30's woman born and raised on the East coast by dysfunctional parents who expatriates to Colorado, gets into an artistic profession (usually photography or writing), does a lot of outdoor activities, especially boating/rafting, has unsuitable taste in men, and loves dogs. But they are not boring, each story illuminating a bit more of this woman/these women, and Houston's love for nature, the West, and especially dogs shines through.

by Sara Gruen
May 2006, Algonquin Books

Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants is a book after my own heart. It takes place in a travelling circus in the 1930s--what could be better than that? Told through the recollections of an elderly (either 90 or 93, he claims) man who is unwillingly cooped up in a nursing home, this tale of animals, intrigue, and true love on the circus circuit in the early 1930s kept me rapt for the entire 300+ pages, and wishing there were more when it ended.

Gruen's narrative is very colorful, with both the spectacle of the show itself and its cast of characters described so I could clearly see them in my head. This is unusual for me, as someone who usually sees nothing more than words when she reads, and it was very nice. It also really made me hope that somebody in Hollywood reads this novel, because it would make a great movie.

by Ronlyn Domingue
Atria, September 13, 2005

Razi, the narrator and protagonist of The Mercy of Thin Air, is dead. The story moves back and forth between memories of her life before she drowns in the late 1920s and her observations on the present, over seventy five years later, where she lives "between" life and death. In common parlance, Razi is a ghost--she has no physical form, but she can see, hear, and smell everything around her in the living world, as well as moving objects and herself telekinetically.

At the beginning of the novel, Razi takes up residence with a young couple, Scott and Amy, by following a bookcase she knows from her life move from an estate sale into their home. As Scott and Amy's story unfolds in the present, so do Razi's memories of what happened between her and her fiancé, Andrew, in the years before her death. Slowly, the connection between Razi's past and her "present" become clear both to her and to the reader.

by Katherine S. Newman
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and the Russell Sage Foundation, 1999

Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City is one of those books I've been meaning to read for quite some time. I first encountered excerpts from it about a year ago, while taking a class on Family Policy that focused heavily on urban poverty, but we didn't read the whole book for class, so it found its way to my personal reading list. A year later, I actually picked it up from the library and started reading it.

It's quite good. Newman is an anthropologist at Columbia, and she and her team of graduate students spent the better part of two years talking to hundreds of employees, managers, owners, and job seekers at several fast food restaurants (pseudonymed "Burger Barns" in the book) in Harlem. Newman's goal was to bring the perspective of the working poor into the poverty debate, which at the time of her research and writing (the second half of the 1990s), was heavily centered on welfare reform. She and her students work hard in the service of that goal, logging hundreds of hours of interviews and even, in some cases, taking jobs at "Burger Barn" themselves in order to get a better view of the culture and the employees.

by Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books (September 6, 2005)

Much as I loved Ehrenreich's previous bit of class-conscious undercover work, Nickel and Dimed, and much as I admire her in general (we did go to the same school, after all), it took me a long time to get around to reading her newest work, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. A number of my acquaintances read it and didn't like it, their criticism ranging from a perceived lack of dedication to this project on Ehrenreich's part through criticism of her hubris in expecting to get a middle-class job with false or no credentials at all, but it wasn't really these criticisms that stopped me from picking it up. Really, what it came down to was that I didn't understand why Ehrenreich would bother with this project. I mean, given the work she did trying to understand what it was like to be part of America's working poor, why would she then revert back to (in my mind) wasting her time with the middle-class?

by Jeffery Eugenides
Farrar Straus Giroux; September 4, 2002

Middlesex is one of those books that was recommended to me so many times that I put off reading it out of spite. It was recommended as a great novel, a Pulitzer winner, another novel by the author of The Virgin Suicides, and a novel about an intersexed individual. That last one is the really important one. I took a year-long seminar on the moral and legal position of intersexuality in the U.S. my first year of graduate school, and I've been very interested in the challenges and bigotries faced by intersexed people ever since.

And, to the extent that it is a novel about an intersexed person, I liked Middlesex. I thought Eugenides portrayed his intersexual narrator, Cal, as a complete person facing a very serious and very complicated relationship with his body, without making him a freak, and I appreciated that. The last third of the book, in fact, was great.

I've recently decided that I really want to join a book club. The problem is, how do I go about that? There are several local book clubs I could pick from--the ones at the library, several at bookstores, including a woman's book club at the local feminist bookstore and another one at the local indie bookstore, and various annoucements for book clubs soliciting members on Craigslist. No shortage of places to try out.

So what's the problem?

Well, me.

by Jennifer Traig
Highbridge Audio; UNABRIDGED edition, September 9, 2004

After getting a new iPod for my birthday, I have once again fallen in love with audio books. I used to be scandalized by the very idea of the audio book--listening rather than reading? ABRIDGEMENT? But then I realized two things: 1) the good ones come unabridged, and 2) audio books don't replace books, they allow you to "read" in circumstances you otherwise wouldn't be able to. Like when you are walking somewhere. Or in the car, when reading makes you carsick like it does me. Or on a treadmill. So it's all very exciting. I don't have to listen instead of read, I can listen AND read. Brilliant.

The first audio book I listened to on my new iPod was one I had from Audible.com from my last iPod and gym phase, Jennifer Traig's Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. Devil in the Details is Traig's memoir about growing up as a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder, including bouts with anorexia and the hyper-religious form of OCD known as scrupulosity. Traig is both self-effacing and funny, while treating her condition as the serious mental illness she now knows it is (growing up in the 70s and 80s she and her family had no idea her strange behavior had a brain chemistry cause). The book is interesting both because of the hilarity of her antics and her descriptions of them and because of the thought Traig has obviously given to what it means, philosophically, to have obsessive compulsive disorder, and particularly to be scrupulous.

by Augusten Burroughs
Audio Renaissance; UNABRIDGED edition, October 28, 2002

I started listening to Augusten Burrough's weird-ass childhood memoir, Running with Scissors a long time ago--sometime last winter, I think. After seeing the preview for the new movie version of it recently, I picked it back up. I'd only made it about an hour in the first time, to the point where Augusten has just met the Finches. So I was ill-prepared for how weird it was going to get.

Basically, young Augusten Burroughs is pawned off at the age of 12 on the family of his mother's shrink, a man who is, arguably, even more nuts than mom. Running with Scissors is his tale of his adolescence moving between life with his psychotic poet mother and life with the variously bizarre Finches. Burroughs' gift is clear, as he makes the story not just sad and absurd, but also hilarious. It's a very strange thing to finish the story and realize that you've been entertained by such a horrible tale, with abuses of power, several instances of rape, victimizing of the mentally ill, and the eating of dog food. You feel almost guilty for enjoying it, as Burroughs' assumedly lived through at least some version of it, but then you realize that enjoying it is exactly what he wanted you to do.

I'll admit it, I'm a convert. I already have Burroughs' other memoir, Dry, on order from the library. Mixing a Sedaris-only-funnier type of dark humor into memoirs of a truly strange life is my recipe for good audiobooks, and Burroughs' is among the best I've heard.

And I look forward to the movie.

by Margaret Mason
Peachpit Press, August 11, 2006

As November quickly approaches, and with it, National Blog Posting Month, I am becoming a bit trepadatious about my ability to blog something worth reading every single day for 30 days running. Or to blog anything at all for 30 days running, worth reading or not. So, as I suspect many other bloggers will be doing, I'll be relying on Margaret Mason's new(ish) book, No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog to provide me with post ideas on days when my mind is fallow.

I got Mason's book as a birthday gift from my friend The Princess, and I've really enjoyed looking through it. Quite a few of the ideas are things I've written about before (either from memes or they've just come up), but there are several that are new to me, which I'll definitely be using. A lot of them remind me of the "free writes" I've done in creative writing classes and workshops before, when you're given a general subject and told to write on it for X minutes without letting your pen leave the paper. And there's certainly some element of that in blogging, at least for a blogger like me, who tends to write unedited, stream-of-conciousness posts.

Mason's book isn't rocket science. It's a few good ideas, presented in a cute, funny, easily readable way. Great for a gift if you know a blogger with a birthday coming up, and likely very helpful to those of us who've made the commitment to NaBloPoMo.

I've been doing a lot of listening to audio books lately. The purpose, when I got a new iPod for my birthday, was supposed to be to listen to them while exercising. Which I'm not. But I do listen to them as I move to and fro, and sometimes while going to sleep, or cleaning the house, or walking the dogs if I'm by myself. One of the first books I listened to was Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors (which I reviewed here). A few books later, I listened to Burroughs' Dry. Now, I'm listening to David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. I've heard bits and pieces of a couple of Sedaris' other works as well.

It's not hard to draw parallels between the two writers. Both are gay men living in New York (for at least some of their stories). Both talk at length about their fucked-up childhoods. Both talk openly about their addictions (Burroughs' alcoholism and Sedaris' speed usage). Both have a merciless, dark, nothing-sacred brand of humor that appeals very much to me, but I'm sure horrifies some people. Sedaris is more famous, more popular, and less controversial.

And, to my mind, Burroughs is more talented.

by Larry Colton
Warner Books, October 2001

Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor in the Little Bighorn was recommended to me by my stepdad when he and my mom visited last month. His description didn't make it sound like much--a book about high school girls' basketball on a Montana Indian reservation?--but his taste is often excellent and he swore I'd love it, so I requested it from the library.

He was right. It's fantastic.

by Judy Blunt
Knopf, February 5, 2002

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean continued my recent trend of reading books about the West, and like most of the Western authors I've picked up recently, Blunt tells her story in a sparse, no-holds-barred way that I both appreciate and identify with. She takes it one step further, though, making explicit her thoughts and feelings about the role of women in the West in a way that other writers (Annie Proulx and Pam Houston come to mind) haven't. The book is simply fabulous.

Here is a list of some of my favorite things in 2006.

Top 5 Books
5. I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris
4. My Life in France by Julia Child
3. The Class Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls
2. The Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue
1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Top 5 Movies
5. Wordplay
4. The Science of Sleep
3. V for Vendetta
2. Little Miss Sunshine
1. Kinky Boots

Top 2 TV
2. House, Season 3
1. The Wire, Season 4

Top 5 CDs
5. The Be Good Tanyas, Hello Love
4. The Little Willies, The Little Willies
3. Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
2. The Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way
1. Roseanne Cash, Black Cadillac

What'd I miss?

I've been doing a lot of reading and audiobook listening lately, and haven't posted about much of it. I don't really feel like doing full reviews, but here are some briefs:

Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns
by Kenneth Briggs
Doubleday, 2006

This is an interesting little book about the post-Vatican II changes in the lives of American nuns, the ways in which many orders changed and wished to change, and the barriers that were put in their way by Catholic officials. It's all very interesting stuff to me, as I know almost nothing about Catholicism. I wanted more information about the specifics of the nuns lives in and outside convents, but I suppose that would be already known by most people interested in this book. Another interesting thing it went into was the retirement problem American nuns are facing--there are not nearly enough young working nuns to support all of the elderly retired nuns. In part this is due to lack of interest in entering the convent in recent decades, and in part it's due to the pittance nuns have traditionally been paid for their work. I had never even considered how nuns are funded (or not funded, as seems to be the case), so that was really interesting. All in all, this is a quick and fascinating read.

Two more books to mini-review...

The Partly Cloudy Patriot
by Sarah Vowell
Simon & Schuster, 2003

In the past, I have resisted Sarah Vowell. The reason for my resistance is that I have been told that her books are far more interesting to listen to in audio book format than to read, and her voice drives me bat shit insane. So I haven't listened to them. However, because I was enjoying David Sedaris so much, and I associate the two of them in my head (for no good reason, as it turns out), I finally gave in and decided I'd give Sarah Vowell a try. Why I started with this particular book is anybody's guess...I think maybe I just liked the title.

Well, I loved it. Vowell is just my kind of geek. Her writing is smart and funny and self-deprecating, and she's interested in just the same kind of dorky stuff I am. I mean, the first chapter of the book is about Gettysburg. The woman clearly has a crush on Abe Lincoln. And I'm all for that.

And her voice...well, it's still irritating, but somehow it seems like it's supposed to sound that way after a few paragraphs. And when she says that she's convinced that the supposedly high-voiced Lincoln "sounds just like me," I almost believed her. I'll definitely be getting her other books in audio format and will probably go through them just as quickly as I did this one.

by Deborah Digges
Anchor, 2002

This is a great book. You should read it. Seriously.

Deborah Digges is a single mother of two boys. This story is about her youngest son, Stephen. When the book starts, Stephen is 13 and he's in a lot of trouble. He's associated with gangs, doing drugs, carrying weapons, skipping school, in trouble with the police, the whole nine yards. Digges is desperate not only to turn her son around, but to regain her close relationship with him. In her desperation, she turns to whatever ideas she can grasp--Stephen is sent to live with his father, Digges tries to be more stern, military school is even considered. There are serious repercussions to Stephen's behavior and to Digges responses to it, including the ultimate break up of her second marriage.

by Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's Press, 2004

As I've mentioned before, I'm a pretty big fan of Augusten Burroughs. I loved Running with Scissors, I thought it was a beautiful, hysterically funny book; and I thought Dry was quite good as well. I've defended Burroughs' choice to make his horrible childhood experiences and his battle with alcoholism at once poignant and comical, and I admire his ability to do so.

That being said, Magical Thinking is a whole other thing. It's a more mature, reflective Burroughs that shows through the stories that make up this book. It's a more likable Burroughs, who has, in some way, gotten past some of his baggage. And it's great stuff.

by Allison Klein
Seal Press, 2006

This is a fun little book. Basically, Allison Klein writes about the roles of women in sitcoms in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. She focuses on a handful of shows to illustrate the metamorphosis of women's roles from the typical 50's sitcom mom (June Cleaver, etc.) to the independent women that came with and after Mary Tyler Moore. She addresses women's relationships with men, children, careers, and their own bodies. Though there has been linear progression of women's roles by no means, Klein argues, women have in each decade been able to push a bit farther on television, in one arena or another.

Parts of the book were a bit lost on me, as a result of having never or rarely seen the shows Klein analyzes. Though she talks about a lot of shows, she focuses heavily on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude,
Roseanne, Golden Girls, Murphy Brown, Friends, and Sex in the City. Of these, the only one I ever watched often was Roseanne (though I am, of course, aware of the premises of the other shows and have seen a few episodes of Golden Girls and Friends). Her points seem well argued, though, even for someone who isn't familiar with all of the characters about who she writes. She views certain things a bit optimistically, I think, but the claims she makes are generally well-founded.

by Madeleine Blais
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995

After reading Larry Colton's Counting Coup a couple of months ago, I became a little bit obsessed with women's and girl's basketball. In keeping with that obsession, this book, In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle was repeatedly recommended to me. So, this past week, I read it.

It certainly begs comparison with Colton's book. Both books are about high school girl's basketball teams with big dreams in the early 1990s. But really, the similarities end there. To begin with, Colton's book is about poor girls in a lousy school on a Montana reservation. Blais' book is about upper-middle class girls at a good high school in Amherst, Massachusetts. The problems faced by Colton's subjects, white and (mostly) Native American, are quite different than those faced by Blais', who are largely white, with the exception of two Black girls and one Cuban. Sharon, the star of the high school team Colton follows, harbors a hope to go to a regional or community college (and she does not succeed). The stars of the team Blais follows go to Stanford and Dartmouth. Perhaps most importantly, Blais' team wins, and Colton's loses.

by Sarah Vowell
Simon & Schuster, 2005

Sarah Vowell, will you marry me?

I liked The Partly Cloud Patriot, but I loved Assassination Vacation. Vowell's pilgrimage to sites associated with the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley struck so many cords with me it is hard to know where to begin. First, I learned a ton. I knew a lot of what she mentioned about the Lincoln assassination (though by no means all of it), but really, does anybody know much about Garfield or McKinley? I knew McKinley's assassin was somehow associated with Emma Goldman, but that was about it. So the book is worth reading (or, in my case, listening to, because Vowell's story-telling style lends itself so well to audio book) just for the information it contains.

Through murmurings on a message board, I recently discovered something so great I have to share it here: Paperbackswap.com. The premise is fairly simple--you join up, then list books you have (don't have to be paperbacks, can also be hardcovers or even audio) that are in good shape, but you want to get rid of. These books get listed on the site, and when someone wants one of them, the system emails you and lets you know. You send it to them them. When they get it, they log in and tell the system, and then you are issued a credit, which you can use to order another book from someone else. Simple enough. As a bonus, you get three credits when you list your first nine or more books, even before anybody requests any of them.

It's fantastic! Media mail shipping isn't expensive (usually $1.59 for a regular sized paperback), so you can fairly cheaply get rid of your old reading material and get new stuff. The selection is good, if not great. If you were a genre fiction or series reader (can you feel me judging you?), it would be really great--the site is full of Harlequin romances and those westernish Christianish series. But even if you're more like a me, a just-about-anything reader with a focus on Oprah's book club type novels (can I feel you judging me now?), there's a lot to choose from. Plus it has a feature where you can "wish list" books you are looking for, then if anyone adds them, the system gives you right of first refusal on them. Excellent.

Also, if you happen to have active readers for children (more young adult than little kids), I think it would be great to get them into it. The site is full of the type of kids' books I consumed like candy when between the ages of about 8 and 13. Babysitters Club, Lemony Snickett, Harry Potter, Judy Blume, Lois Lowry...it would be great for a kid to have an account all his/her own, to swap books via U.S. Mail with others like him/her all over the country. I would have LOVED that.

I don't think there is any bonus for signing up new members, so you don't have to tell 'em I sent you, but if you're a reader who isn't 100% library (I know, I know...), definitely check it out.

edited by David Sedaris
Simon & Schuster Ltd, August 1, 2005
Audiobook, abridged

As a big fan of David Sedaris, let me just say that I am very very glad he has not been able to better emulate his writing heroes. Because for a very talented storyteller, the man has appalling taste in stories.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a Sedaris-edited short story collection. Sedaris makes clear in the book's introduction that these are stories by authors he particularly loves, and that he aims to be as great as he thinks they are. Oh dear.

It is unsurprising, I'm sure, for those readers who didn't know me in my sulky adolescence (circa 1992-2000), that I was, for a spell, a bit of a vampire dork. I loved me some Anne Rice (back when she wrote steamy New Orleans-based vampire books and not scary pseudo-Christian crap). I could, at one point, recite long passages from Interview with the Vampire. I burned through two paperback copies. I'm not bragging, here, just giving you the necessary history. I was never really goth (though there is a period in my photographic history that would force me to qualify that statement), but I got heavily into the vampire mythology and hell-to-high school metaphors. I was miserable, the world was miserable, add hormones and stir. You know the drill. I'm too young for The Cure (sadly), but I listen to an awful lot of Concrete Blonde (still do, actually).

It may well have been fear of reverting back to my cuter but far less pleasant adolescent self that kept me from watching Buffy for so long. After all, angst that's annoying-but-understandable on a teenager is just kind of pathetic on a woman pushing 30. Be that as it may, though, I gave in and started watching, and I am so right back there.

I am feeling both book-y and meme-y today, so I give you a book meme that I found...somewhere.

Total number of books owned: I'm not sure, having never counted, but I'd say somewhere around 1,000, maybe? They rotate in and out.

Last book bought: I actually went to Book People with my friends on Monday and picked up three books, How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, and another one I can't remember the name of that is about the disappearance of rural communities.

Last book read: Well, I'm working on both Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Dorothy Allison's Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature. The last book I read before those was Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume.

Five Books that Mean a Lot to You: This is a tough question for me, as I tend to read things and then forget them, even if I really loved them. I'm changing it to

Best Five Books You Read in the Last Year:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year by Anne Lamott
The Stardust Lounge: Stories From a Boy's Adolescence by Deborah Digges
The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

I Tag:
Frog
Laurie
Jenny
Suebob

First, about football. Both of my teams won on Saturday. Oregon's butt-stomping of much higher-ranked and more-respected Michigan was a particular cause for joy at my house. Today, the AP has Texas at No. 6 and Oregon at No. 19. From what I've seen so far, I think that is an over-ranking for Texas and an under-ranking for Oregon, but we'll see.

In other news, I read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness this weekend. No fewer than a dozen people have recommended Le Guin to me over the past few years, and a couple of people whose tastes I generally trust recommended to me recently that I start with this particular book, so I picked it up at the library last week. And...I don't get it. I read the whole book, but I probably would have put it down less than halfway through if it hadn't been so highly recommended. To me, it seemed unnecessarily opaque and kind of poorly written. I had very little empathy for the characters, particularly the protagonist, Genly Ai, and spent most of the time I was reading it hoping it would be over soon. While I found the concepts very cool, the execution just didn't do a thing for me. So now I'm not sure if I should give up on Le Guin completely or try another of her novels. I had so hoped she would be a new author I could really get into.

Not all recommendations are futile, though! Another friend recently suggested that I give Grace Potter and the Nocturnals a listen, and I am rawkin' out. As soon as I can justify buying more new CDs, their new one is going to be headed my way.

Dorothy Allison published Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature in 1994, only a couple of years after her amazing first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. I've read the novel probably three times, but for some reason it never occurred to me to look for further work by Allison. I guess I assumed that she, like Harper Lee, had probably given so much to write that amazing novel that she didn't have any writing left in her.

I was so wrong.

I got an inclination of this a couple of years ago when, on the recommendation of a friend, I picked up Allison's 1995 memoir, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Just as much as Allison's fiction, and in many of the same ways, her memoir was stunning, beautiful, mean, and hard to get through. I read it twice back-to-back. Then I didn't read anything else of Allison's.

I've never been a particular fan of Jennifer Baumgardner. Although my age plants me firmly in the Third Wave, my philosophies often don't, and Manifesta just didn't quite work for me as a feminist treatise, though I think it was well intentioned. Still, when I saw that she was interviewed in the latest Bitch, on the heels of the release of her new book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, I was excited to read the article. I don't see a lot of ink spilled on bisexuality in the feminist media (or any other media, really), and I was curious to see what Baumgardner, of Amy Ray-dating fame, had to say.

Turns out I should have kept my skepticism.

Last night, I started reading The Merry Recluse, a posthumously published book of essays by an writer I really admire, Caroline Knapp. Knapp was not married and never had children (she died very young, in her mid-40s I think, of cancer). A couple of the essays in the book are about her decision not to have children and the importance of other people's children in her life. Knapp is clear that just because she has no particular desire to have children of her own does not mean that she doesn't like kids, or that she doesn't want to spend time with them. Quite the opposite, actually. She dotes on a niece and nephew in one essay and another niece in another essay, and even credits the relationship she wants to have with her niece as being a primary reason for her decision to stop drinking. The children in her life are clearly very important to her.

And they are to me, too.

Yesterday, as I was whining about not having any place online to store a running list of books I want to read, I decided to try and find something. Everything exists online, so why not a list tool? Well, I didn't have to look very hard before I found Ta-da Lists, which is exactly what I'd been looking for. It's free, simple to use, and allows me to make multiple lists, which can be either public or private. Perfect!

My Books to Read list is here (also down on the sidebar). Check it out and tell me what needs to be added?

By the time I was introduced to Caroline Knapp's work in 2005, she had already been dead for several years. When I learned this, after reading and being astonished by her book, Pack of Two, I was heartbroken. I went on to read her other books, Drinking: A Love Story and Appetites: Why Women Want and found myself very sad that I couldn't read the newspaper column she refers to writing or any of her magazine articles.

The Merry Recluse fixes that problem, at least to some extent. Published several years after Knapp's death, the book is a collection of some of her most notable essays from her time at the Boston Phoenix and her magazine writing. For the most part, the subject matter is the same as that found in her books--her alcoholism, her anorexia, her relationship with her family, her relationship with her dog. One thing the essays get at that the books didn't as much, though, is Knapp's decision to live alone and to be what she terms a "merry recluse"--a person who is content and even happy with her solitude.

I've been drinking a lot of coffee lately. Beer and coffee (not together--ick). I have been drinking less Pepsi, and these are the super-healthy replacements I've found. Anyway, my increase in coffee consumption seems to have precipitated an increase in thoughts. Really. I am just having more thoughts. I know this because many more times a day than I am accustomed to I am stopping and saying to myself, "I should blog about that." That's how I know I have a thought--I consider blogging about it. (And does Grace think if there is nowhere to write it down? Probably not.)

by Ami McKay

I requested Ami McKay's The Birth House from the library at the recommendation of my friend Trudi, a Nova Scotian. The book takes place in Nova Scotia and is written by a Canadian radio journalist. Reportedly, McKay lives in a house that was formerly owned by a midwife, and her curiosity about and investigation into that woman's life led her to write the novel.

The Birth House takes place mostly during World War II (though it does travel back in time some and the final chapter takes place during World War II). It is the story of a shipbuilder's daughter, Dora Rare, who is taken under the wing of the town's Cajun midwife and taught her trade. The bulk of the book centers around the conflict between the new, hospital-driven male model of medical care for birthing women and the traditional, home and midwife-based female model, but it also branches into other conflicts between men and women, and the ways in which Dora and the rural women around her asserted their independence and agency. Issues including women's suffrage (in the U.S.), temperance, education, and spousal abuse are all addressed.

The book is a quick and interesting read (it took me two evenings). While it is probably not something I will go out of my way to force all of my friends to read, or read again, it is definitely worth reading and I enjoyed it very much.

Last month, I posted about my irritation with the Bitch interview with Jennifer Baumgardner, the author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. I was very disappointed with the interview, but at that time said I'd still read the book, as maybe she had more to say than she'd let on.

Once again, I'm disappointed.

The book is just as bad, if not worse, than the interview was. Baumgardner honestly seems to see a special place for herself and other bisexuals (or at least bisexual women, she has very little to say about bisexual men) in the gay (specifically lesbian) community. Not only does she expect to be welcomed as queer, regardless of her partnership status, but she seems to think she's a really special kind of queer, even "queerer" than lesbians, or something. Which is both infuriating and kind of amazing in its narcissism.

I usually have a pretty strong stomach when it comes to fiction. In television and movies, I can handle most anything and am not really bothered by violence, gore, or abuse. Because I don't see pictures when I read, this is even more the case with books than with visual media--give me the nasty stuff, I can take it.

Jon Cinch's Finn, however, bothered me. The book is not supremely graphic in its gore, but it does contain multiple murders, one of which includes body dismemberment, and the sexual abuse of both an adult and a child, and something about how these scenes were written stayed with me. So before I say anything else, take that to heart--it's violent, and the violence, for whatever reason, stuck with even my hardened heart.

That being said, it's a hell of a book.

Yesterday, Jenny of Triumphantly Jenny posted a brief review of the book Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, Basically, the book is photographs of objects that artists/literati/etc. give significance to and short essays about why. An interesting idea for a book, I think, and an even better one for blog fodder. So I went around my house last night and looked for significant objects to photograph. In doing so, I learned that there are very few objects that have a lot of significance to me--mostly objects are just objects--and those that are significant are generally representative of larger concepts. But anyway, I'll post a few over the the next few days.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was a Sassy girl. Though I was a wee bit young for the demographic, being only nine or ten when the magazine started publishing and sixteen or so when it stopped, I loved my every issue of Sassy. It spoke to me. It taught me. It understood my freaky teen aged self.

And, according to Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, I was very much not alone. They posit that there are a whole nation of us Sassy girls, including luminaries like Bitch founders Andi Zeisler and Lisa Jervis and Bust creator Debbie Stoller, all of whom credit Sassy as a major influence in their work. And the book, as much as being about Sassy, is about us.

As I mentioned last year, it has for a few years now been my Thanksgiving time custom to send a care package or two to enlisted folks via anysoldier.com. I was about to head on over there to get some lists to fill this year, but then heard about a different project, Operation Paperback. Operation Paperback is a troops-supporting endeavor as well, but it is specifically to send gently used books to soldiers living abroad. I can definitely appreciate why books would be a great comfort when you're so far away from home, as well as being a source of entertainment (my understanding is that extreme boredom is one of the biggest problems for soldiers) so I'm going to do that this year instead.

I know I've said this before, but I in no way equate wanting to make this season a little bit brighter for those people who are unfortunate to be stuck on the ground in this stupid fucking war with supporting it. I can both be intensively, obsessively against them being there and want to make being there as easy for them as possible. And, if you are so inclined, so can you.

Big big news!!!

Can I Sit With You? is a book! For sale! In time for Christmas!

Got a kid in your life who could use some empathy about his/her social situation? BUY THIS BOOK. It's good stuff. For a good cause.

In this suggestion, Maggie directed me to LibraryThing, where, if one is so inclined, one can catalog and categorize one's books, as well as getting suggestions based on what you have, writing reviews, etc. Even I am not up to the level of time-wasting it would take to add every book I own, but I did add all of those I have read in the past year, with the intention of keeping it up as I read. My bookshelf is here. I like this more than my previous way of tracking my reading, if only because I don't have to alphabetize it myself. Now if I could just find a way to keep a "to-read" list on it, I'd be all set.

(The image is of the cover of the paperback Cavedweller. It shows a black and white picture of a small house overlooking a field of caves, with the title above it on a red banner.)

I've told you before how much I love and admire Dorothy Allison. Both her non-fiction work (Skin, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure) and her fiction (Trash, Bastard out of Carolina) is extremely impressive on an intellectual level, as well as deeply moving on a gut level. So I expected no less from Cavedweller, her second novel. And I'm sure it is only because I went in to reading it with such very high expectations that it was disappointing.

Cavedweller is a very good book. It's just not as good a book as Allison's other books.

Does it ever happen to you that something is recommended to you very highly and then you finally read or watch it and it sucks so very much that you think maybe you made a mistake and got the wrong thing? Well, that's what happened to me with Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Over and over people told me how great this book was and how much I would love it. And then I suffered through reading (well, listening to, actually) the whole damn thing, and it never got any good at all.

The first and most pressing problem with On Beauty is that I had no sympathy for any of the characters, save Kiki, and got very little insight into her. The major character, Howard, is a repulsive human being. And I get that he's supposed to be, and that the book seeks to expose liberal academics as racists and narcissists, but good Lord it's hard to keep at a book where you hate everybody! Howard is only slightly worse than any of his three children, who also play large roles in the story. It's not even that I hate them so much as just don't care about them in the least. If you don't care about the characters, it's hard to care what happens to them.

Inspired by my friend Jenny and her bibliophile record keeping, I give you my 2007 book round-up.

In 2007, I read a total of 75 books. I didn't finish 10 of them (13%) and am still reading 2 of them (3%). 29 of the 75 (39%) were audio books. 23 were fiction (31%), 52 (69%) were non-fiction.

And, following Jenny's lead:
Biggest surprise: Sarah Vowell
Biggest letdown: The Emperor's Children, Sellevision
Favorites: Skin, Above Us Only Sky
Most Overrated: The History of Love, The Emperor's Children
Books I could not finish this year included:
Two carry overs: The Traveling Death & Resurrection Show and The Worst Hard Time
A few that I should have finished but didn't: Jo Freeman's book about the 60s, the Daughters of Bilitis book

Now, if someone can suggest something like Goodreads but for movies, I'll be set...

I read Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent this weekend. I felt crappy all weekend, unable to even concentrate on TV, headachy, allergy-ridden, and wanting to nap, and I still read the entire book without even considering that I could be doing something else. That's how compelling it is.

Vincent's story starts with one of the first births she attends, in 1962, as a nursing student at Duke. She spends several hours with a young black woman who wants to give birth without drugs (uncommon in 1962) and who has had two previous children at home, attended by her grandmother (also uncommon). Though the woman's labor is unlike the others Vincent has seen (she makes a lot of noise, sings, yells, and walks around), she can see it is working and tries to keep the other hospital staff from noticing so drugs won't be forced on the laboring woman. Of course, since Vincent is a mere student and the woman is poor and black, a doctor eventually forces her into what sounds like twilight sleep, but the experience changes Vincent forever.

I just finished The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance by Sharon O'Brien. It's very, very good.

The book is partially O'Brien's memoir, partially a memoir of the last three generations of her Irish-American family, and partially a book about depression, both in general and O'Brien and her family's specific experiences. This medley of subjects work perfectly. O'Brien ties her own depression not only to her upbringing, but to genetic inheritance, and makes a strong case for these things being intertwined. She moves back and forth between herself, each of her parents, her siblings, and her more distant relatives, as well as moving geographically between Ireland and several towns in Massachusetts and update New York, weaving a seamless tale that is both enlightening and heartbreaking.

You'd think, with as often as I am sick and as much of my life as I've spent sick, I'd have it down. But I don't. I'm so bored. My head is killing me, such that very much TV or reading is a problem. I hate crosswords and Suduko and all that. I simply cannot sleep any more right now. I'm too tired to do anything that requires standing up. I paid some bills today, and though that felt like a huge victory, it was exhausting.

Perhaps I really should take up embroidery.

A couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I bought a set of Little House books at the GW for $2. I just read Little House in the Big Woods while taking a bath. What do you bet I'll be all the way up through The First Four Years before I ever start being able to breathe out of my nose or taste food again?

As I mentioned, I am re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. The idea to do so came to me a while ago. One of the places I hang out online is a very popular "natural parenting" board. I stumbled upon a conversation about these books there one day, and was surprised to read that many of the folks there wouldn't read these to their kids or let their kids read them, due to their "racism" and "violence." These were my absolute favorite as a small child (my mom read them to me, then I read them myself when I was old enough, and I always play-acted my favorite scenes), so I was really surprised. However, what you see as an adult and what you remember from childhood are different things.

Then along came a full, new set at the Goodwill, for just two bucks. I couldn't resist. Then came sickness, and that always makes me want to read kids books.

And now I am most of the way through The Banks of Plum Creek (though I admit I skipped Farmer Boy--who wants to read a book about a boy?). Though I am not yet finished, I would definitely let my kid read these books.

I am working on compiling a list of critical work on Buffy. It's definitely in-progress. Leave suggestions in the comments?

A bit back, I wrote this entry sticking up for TV. I argued that TV is a morally-neutral medium like any other, and it is how you interact with it, what you choose to watch and how actively you watch it, that makes watching it better or worse than any other use of your leisure time. I have been thinking more about that since I wrote it, and last night I came across something in a book that I thought spoke to my point very well.

In Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer there is an essay by Mary Celeste Kearney (a faculty member right here at UT!) about Sarah Michelle Gellar as a teen "cross-over" star and what that means in the late 90s, when the teen market demographic is huge and when a star's presence is not limited to television or movies, but television and movies and the Internet (and music and video games and...). In the essay, Kearney mentions that when the WB started showing Dawson's Creek, they also opened up an online space where viewers were encouraged to go after each episode and fill out private or public diaries about how they felt about the episode, their thoughts, etc. Folks, in my liberal arts education, we called that a reading journal. You know, to encourage active reading? Sure, 90% of those Dawson diaries were probably full of comments like "Dawson iz so hawt! OMG!" but just the fact that kids were logging on and writing anything is a start. After all, do you really think there is nobody who was hooked on Pride & Prejudice because they had Darcy-lust? Come on.

From the Noble Savage.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. The rules:
bold = what you've read,
italics = books you started but couldn't finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you've read more than once
underline = books you own but haven't read yourself

My friend Jenny sent me a link a few days ago to this blog post, "100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man's Library." Challengingly, she wrote, "care to try a female version?"

Oh do I.

But, to begin, let's have a look the books that post lists as "the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man."

OK, next step. These are the books from the man's list that I'd put on the woman's list as well:

1. The Republic by Plato
2. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
6. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
7. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
8. The Politics by Aristotle
9. Hamlet by Shakespeare
10. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
11. The Stranger by Albert Camus
12. The Bible
13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

So I started this year with a bunch of goals, most of which are boring, but one of which was to read an average of a book a week and watch an average of a movie per week. So 52 books and movies for the year. The year is just about 1/2 over, so how have I done?

A check in at All Consuming shows me I am on track for movie watching, having watched 37 films so far this year.

Goodreads tells me I am not in quite as a good shape for books, having finished only 22 books so far this year (of the 30 I've started).

Best book so far: Tie between The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance by Sharon O'Brien and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.

Best movie so far: Juno

In celebration of the beginning of the Olympics, I finally picked up a book I've had around and meant to read for a long time. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters is journalist Joan Ryan's expose of the treatment of young figure skating and gymnastic Olympics hopefuls in the 80s and early 90s. Though it seems somewhat outdated, having been written when the Harding-Kerrigan scandal was still news, the book is no less chilling twelve years later as it was when it was written.

Basically, the book is about legalized and accepted child abuse. Girls who are thirteen, twelve, nine, being forced to train through injuries, berated for their weights, pumped full of drugs so that they can keep going, encouraged to leave school, and even assisted in their eating disorders, all for the sake of a slim chance at participating in the Olympics. Joan Ryan's book is sympathetic towards the girls themselves (she talks mostly to former skaters and gymnasts, not those who are currently participating in their sports), but pretty relentless in going after their parents and coaches, particularly legendary gymnastics coach Béla Károlyi. These people, Ryan argues, value winning far over the health and happiness of the girls they parent or train, to the long-term detriment of those girls.

Each story featured in the book is more horrific than the last. Teen gymnast Julissa Gomez was encouraged to perform a vault she was not comfortable with, fell and broke her neck, and spent the rest of her short life completely incapacitated, unable to move or speak. Christy Henrich, who trained at Al Fong's gym with Julissa until her accident, became an anorexic while she was training as a gymnast and the disease eventually killed her. Both of these stories are just examples of what could happen to any gymnast, at least the way Ryan tells it--nearly all the women with whom she speaks remember being pressured to train or compete when they are injured or not comfortable, being scrutinized for her weight, and taking drastic measures to stay unnaturally small and thin. The skaters to whom Ryan speaks face similar pressures, though their sport is not quite so dangerous. In her discussion of skating, Ryan also spends some time exploring the class dimension that became so apparent in ice skating when Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were both trying to be America's sweetheart.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this book is long on anecdotes and short on evidence. Ryan explains at the outset that she is focusing mostly on the women who did not make it to the gold, the girls whose sacrifices did not pay off. While this may seem to skew the story she tells, it seems fair to me given that the media mostly does focus on the winners. Certainly when reading this while everyone is gearing up for the summer Olympics it seems like the story that doesn't usually get told.

Looking at this year's roster of "women's" Olympic gymnasts, the stories in Ryan's book scare me. Though the U.S. team is a bit older than they were in the 90s (mostly of the team are in their late teens), they are so small. The current age for Olympic eligibility is 16, and some members of the Chinese team (the U.S.'s biggest rival) were scrutinized for possibly being under that age. Nothing seems to have changed.

And yet, will I watch? I don't know. I can't imagine feeling good about it. I believe these girls deserve better. Even a girl who brings home a gold medal deserves better. She deserves a childhood.

Got this over at Frog's. These are 75 must-read books, as per Jezebel. The ones in bold are the ones I've read. The ones in bold italics are the ones I actually liked.

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson


• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf


• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton


• White Teeth, Zadie Smith


• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allenden


• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion


• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym


• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath


• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys


• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri


• Beloved, Toni Morrison


• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert


• Like Life, Lorrie Moore


• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen


• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë


• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin


• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley


• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor


• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx


• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker


• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston


• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee


• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong


• Earthly Paradise, Colette


• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt


• Property, Valerie Martin


• Middlemarch, George Eliot


• Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid


• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir


• Runaway, Alice Munro


• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers


• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston


• Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë


• You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates


• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott


• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill


• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr


• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou


• A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith


• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie


• Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison


• The Secret History, Donna Tartt


• The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley


• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker


• The Group, Mary McCarthy


• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi


• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing


• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank


• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley


• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag


• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez


• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck


• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel


• Three Junes, Julia Glass


• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft


• Sophie's Choice, William Styron


• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann


• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford


• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell


• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin


• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant


• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera


• The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn


• My Antonia, Willa Cather


• Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez


• The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West


• Spending, Mary Gordon


• The Lover, Marguerite Duras


• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy


• Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen


• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes


• Three Lives, Gertrude Stein


• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons


• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith


• Possession, A.S. Byatt

Yikes. Not terribly well-read, am I?

This photo shows The Grapes of Wrath burning burned in a crop-picking town in California in the early 1940s.

As you may or may not already know, this week is the American Library Association's Annual Banned Books Week. Every year during the last week of September, the ALA does events and outreach to fight book bannings and promote freedom of information. What WINOW reader can't get behind that? As a little banned books week exercise, I thought I'd take a look at the list of 2007's most challenged books and see how many of them I've read (the ones I've read are in bold):

1. "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
   Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group


2. "The Chocolate War," by Robert Cormier
   Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence


3. "Olive's Ocean," by Kevin Henkes
   Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language


4. "The Golden Compass," by Philip Pullman
   Reasons: Religious Viewpoint


5. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," by Mark Twain
   Reasons: Racism


6. "The Color Purple," by Alice Walker
   Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language


7. "TTYL," by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group


8. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," by Maya Angelou
   Reasons: Sexually Explicit


9. "It's Perfectly Normal," by Robie Harris
   Reasons: Sex Education, Sexually Explicit


10. "The Perks of Being A Wallflower," by Stephen Chbosky
    Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

Guess I'm going to have to try harder. I do slightly better on most challenged books of the 21st century list, though:

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier
3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck
5. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
6. "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers
7. "It's Perfectly Normal" by Robie Harris
8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
10. "Forever" by Judy Blume

How about you? Have you read a banned book lately? This week would be an excellent time to pick one up!

I've been thinking for several days about what I want to write about poverty for Blog Action Day 2008. I started writing a personal story about poverty at least 10 times, but honestly, that doesn't feel the right thing to do today. I want to actually offer a resource, rather than just talking about myself like I always do. So, being as I've had some success in the past offering lists of recommended books, I thought maybe I'd use my Blog Action Day platform to offer a brief poverty studies book list. Hope it's helpful.

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
   No surprise here. A lot of people consider Steinbeck's 1939 novel about the Joad family's journey to California during the Dust Bowl the best book about poverty ever written, and I can't disagree. This is a fantastic book, trite as it may be to say that, and I think it should be required reading.
2. Homecoming and Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voight
   These are children's novels about four children, the Tillermans, who, led by eldest sister Dicey, make their way across the country to find their grandmother after their mother abandons them. Homecoming gets them to their grandmother's house, Dicey's Song is about them living with her. Both books are, in part, about living in poverty, and even though I read them in elementary school, they've stuck with me. I can still remember the passage in Dicey's Song about Dicey and her grandmother eating at a restaurant and Dicey's concern at the meal's expense. Excellent stuff.
3. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
   Though this book was widely acclaimed, I know a lot of people who really didn't like it, saying Ehrenreich, even after her experiment, doesn't actually understand the working poor and makes stupid decisions and assumptions in her book and the experiment she writes about. I don't 100% disagree with this assessment, but I still think this is a brave and important book. The fact is that most people who have never themselves been poor have no idea what it's actually like, or why poor people might make the decisions that they do. Ehrenreich gives some explanations. Would I like it better if these explanations could come from someone who has actually lived in this situation and isn't just trying it on as a journalist? Sure. Do I think people would listen as well as they listened to Ehrenreich? No.
4. The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler
   Shipler's book has much the same task as Ehrenreich's, but instead of building a fictional life in order to have "working poor experiences" himself, Shipler extensively interviews a bunch of working poor families and mixes their first-person stories with an academic analysis of the life of the American working poor. The only really bad thing about this book is that it is outdated (it was published in 2004, but even since then things have changed radically, and the research was done for years before that). I'd like to see an updated version.
5. Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America by Lisa Dodson
   This is another book built much like Shipler's, mixing first person accounts of poverty with academic analysis. What makes it more interesting to me, though, is that it addresses the interplay between poverty and gender. Again, the book's major failing is being out of date, as it was published in 1998.
6. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
   Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is one of the most amazing and most difficult novels I've ever read. Poverty is only one of the things its about, but it is in many ways the most salient. Just as Bone's tale of the violence of men is a call to feminism, her tale of the violence of poverty is a call to class activism.
7. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
   Jeannette Walls' memoir is mostly about her childhood, growing up very poor with negligent and unstable parents. Walls' family was at times homeless, often hungry, and usually without running water or electricity. She recalls middle-of-the-night dashes from collecting landlords and page after page of experiences that make the reader's skin crawl. It's a hard book to read, but a good one. I only wish Walls' discussion of how it feels on the other side of that poverty, as an upper middle class adult with a world of both gratitude and guilt, was more prolonged.
8. Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
   bell hooks as written a lot about the intersection of race, class, and gender. This book is a conflation of memoir and social theory, and although it's a bit tough to read, it's completely worth it.
9. Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood by by Jay MacLeod
   Ain't No Makin' It is one of those books that I read and never forgot. I read it for intro pol sci my first year at Reed, and I've come back to it in my mind often since then. MacLeod wrote it about the kids he encountered while working as a counselor in a program for low-income youth. It focuses a lot on way poverty is spirit-crushing even at a very young age, and on the obstacles the kids have stacked against them. Once again, this book is out of date (and out of print), but it's still a good read if you can get a copy.
10. Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class edited by Michelle Tea
    The final book on my list is an essay collection written by women who grew up working class. The topics of the pieces range pretty broadly, from discussion of class jumping to explorations of how much worse poor people are treated in day to day life.

Obviously there are a lot more books about poverty that are worth reading. These ten are just the first best ones I could come up with. Please feel free to leave other suggestions in the comments, and thanks for reading my Blog Action Day 08 post!

I'm a reader. Always have been. And I'm also a big organizer and maker of lists. So, of course, I love Goodreads. Are you on Goodreads? If so, make me a contact! If not, sign up and then make me a contact!

I use Goodreads to keep track of what I am reading, when, and how I like it. You can see this on the blog down on the side bar. My goal for 2008 was to average one book per week, so 52 books. Right now, I'm at 44 for the year, including 2 I am currently reading and 6 I didn't finish. Probably not going to make that goal. Oh well.

I am not a multi-book person. I like to read one thing at a time. However, I do have one book and one audio book going at any given time, as I listen to the audio book in situations when I can't read (like on the bus or at the gym). Here's what I've got going now:

Personal History by Katharine Graham
I bought this autobiography of Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post during Watergate, several years ago at the Goodwill. I'd heard only good things about it (I think it won a Pulitzer?), and I love memoir and autobiography in general. I never picked it up, though. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I read Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time. In that book, Nelson reads Graham's autobiography and enjoys it. So it inspired me to dig my copy out and pick it up.

I'm only about 100 pages into it (it's a pretty long book, about 650 pages I think), and so far I'm unplussed. At my current point in the book, Graham is still in college at the University of Chicago, and it has just been page after page about how rich and fucked up her family was. Which is fine, I guess, but I'm ready to move on and have her actually do something. I'll try to stick with it for at least a bit longer--I know the bare bones of her story and I'd like to see what she has to say about the parts that actually were interesting--but if I have to flip through many more pages about her mother's art world connections and Republican party campaigning, I may jump ship.

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Acts of Liberation by Elizabeth Berg
My iPod is currently playing this short story book by Elizabeth Berg. For several novels now (Open House, We Are All Welcome Here), I have kind of liked Elizabeth Berg. I don't love her, but I find her books enjoyable and slightly off-kilter. So, when I saw she had a recent short story collection out, it sounded like perfect gym listening. Goodreads describes this book as "exhilarating short stories of women breaking free from convention." That may be a bit strong, but that's mostly what it is. Cute stories about women doing things they aren't supposed to do. A lot of them are about women who are struggling with age and/or weight-related issues, and it's handled pretty well. Their is nothing mind-blowing here, but it's funny and easy to listen to. So it is perfect gym listening. I have two and a half stories left, so I should probably finish it in the next few days.

On Deck:

To read: American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu

To listen to: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, read by Tim Robbins

Update: I just listened to the second to last story in Berg's book, "How To Make an Apple Pie." The book is so-so, but that story is fantastic.

OK, it's Wednesday, so let's talk about books!

First, I finished The Great Gatsby. I was underwhelmed. I think what disappointed me was that I started it thinking I'd finally learn about the missing pieces of a story I basically already knew, just from references to it in other things. Well, turns out there are no missing pieces--I really already knew the whole story. There's just not too much there. It reads like something intended to be serialized and make money, not like a Great American Novel. I've definitely read other Great Novels of the same time period that were much better (Sister Carrie comes to mind). That being said, I did like Tim Robbins' narration, and the letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the end, read by Robert Sean Leonard, are really interesting. Next I'm taking a little break and listening to David Sedaris' new one, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

And I am still slogging through Personal History. I mislaid it for a couple of days, so I haven't read much on it for a bit, but it is getting a bit more interesting now that Graham is talking more about running the paper herself (I'm currently in the mid-60s). Sure seems like a lot of build-up just get to to Watergate, though, which is where I (and, I'd expect, many readers) most want to go.

While I couldn't find the Graham book, I started A Walking Fire, a novel by Valerie Miner suggested to me by a friend. It's a Vietnam-war era retelling of King Lear. I'm only a chapter or two into it, so I don't have many thoughts yet.

All of that, however, is just preamble to what I really want to tell you about today. I spent a little chunk of time last week doing some editing for a book that is set to be released via Lulu this week. Do you all remember me telling you about the fantastic Can I Sit With You? Well, it was so successful that the wonderful creators, Shannon and Jennifer, have put together a second installment, Can I Sit With You Too? I've read the stories and I'll tell you--it's definitely worth buying. It would make a great Christmas present for adolescent family members or friends. The best part? The proceeds all go to SEPTAR, the Special Education Parent Teacher Association for Redwood City, California. Watch the Can I Sit With You website to see when it will be available, and to preview some of the stories that are included.

So, what are you reading?

It's here!!

Can I Sit With You Too? is the second collection of stories from the Can I Sit With You? project (www.canisitwithyou.org). These new tales represent an even wider range of schoolyard experiences, including best friend disappointments, new kid fears, harsh discrimination, living with disabilities, and emerging sexuality. By sharing moments from kindergarten through high school, these stories once again remind us that we are not alone: chances are, if it happened to you, it happened to someone else, too.

Buy Can I Sit With You Too? Right Now!

I need some book recommendations, folks! I'm going to be vacationing for a week at Mark's parents' place in Minnesota, and I am hoping for lots of reading in front of the fire time. My preferred genres are biography/memoir, well-written history, and quality fiction. Suggestions?

This is my reading list for the beautiful beautiful upcoming vacation. If I didn't pick the book(s) you suggested, please don't take it personally--it was likely just that your suggestion(s) were not available at my library, or I'd already them.

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel
Bella Abzug: An Oral History by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
Gospel Hour by T.R. Pearson
The Professor's House by Willa Cather

Inspired, as always, by my book-loving friend Jenny, here are my 2008 reading stats:

I read a total of 52 books this year. Since my goal was one per week, I more or less made it. Except that the 52 counts the 9 books I didn't finish or the two that have progressed into 2009. More depressingly, this is down from 75 last year! I read only 69% of the books this year that I did last year! 28 (54%) of the books were non-fiction, 24 (46%) were fiction. This is also a change from last year, in which I read only 31% fiction and 69% non fiction. 14 of this year's books (27%) were audio books, down from 39% last year.

Sad state of affairs. I definitely need to make reading a priority again in 2009.

My biggest surprise of the year was Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It was so hyped that I expected it to be terrible, especially given the pre-conception I picked up somewhere about Didion as shallow and vapid. It's actually probably the best account of grief I've ever read.

The year's biggest letdown was Ariel Gore's How To Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead. I like Ariel Gore's non-fiction quite a lot, in general, but I got nothing from that book.

My favorites of the year were Alison Bechadel's amazing graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Sharon O'Brien's, The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance.

The most overrated book I read this year was Zadie's Smith's god-awful White Teeth. I didn't even finish it. Terrible. Worse, even, than the horrible book I read by her last year. I'm so done with Zadie Smith.

There were quite a few books I couldn't or just didn't finish this year, but the most memorable one is The Worst Hard Time, which I didn't finish last year either and finally gave up on for good this year.

The books I most recommend this year are definitely Fun Home and The Year of Magical Thinking.

Books that carried over from 2008 to 2009 are Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent, which I am liking OK, but going through fairly slowly, and Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, which I am listening to on audio book and enjoying quite a bit. I expect I'll finish both of those.

This year, I maintain by one book/week goal, with the caveat that I want to actually *finish* one book/week. And if I could read more fiction, that would be good, too.

As I've written about here before, I'm not a huge fan of those lists of books one supposedly needs to have read to be considered "well-read." In part, that is because those lists tend to be really really whitemanocentric. In part, it is because looking at them makes me feel woefully poorly educated. But something I *do* love is an interactive spreadsheet. So, when I saw Arukiyomi's 1001 Books spreadsheet, I couldn't resist.

Turns out I've read 72 of the 2008 edition of 1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die, or about 7%. Of the 208 books that were replaced between the 2006 and 2008 editions of the list, I've read another 13 (about 1.3%). So, total, I've read 85 of the 1209 books I ought to have read--about 6.5%. To get through the entirety of the list, assuming everybody stops writing anything worth reading and I live to be an average age, I need to read about 23 listed books a year.

Not gonna happen. There are lots of books on that list I have no desire at all to crack. However, there are also some that are probably worth reading. To get started, I'm going to try to tackle five of those in the remainder of 2009.

The nominees?

Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Doesn't sound like a bad list, does it? Anybody up to do this with me?

Laurie has a great post over at BlogHer today about books and the places they can take you--both metaphorically and physically. Her piece, in turn, was inspired by Sandra Foyt's How to Plan A Read Across America Road Trip. Basically, both entries are about the places reading books inspires one to go, or at least to dream about visiting.

Laurie writes:

Since I discovered this idea I've been thinking of cities and regions I love that have amazing literary history, that have inspired me to seek out the voices writing about them - New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, London (I'm an Austen fan - I could go for a country tour, no problem.) Hemingway made me see and taste Europe almost like I was there, and when I go back, I should probably bring A Moveable Feast for a re-read.

Like Laurie, I'm enamored with the idea. Maybe a trip to Ireland would be just the thing to finally get me to read James Joyce? Again like Laurie, nothing has made me want to see Spain like Hemingway (in my case, The Sun Also Rises). I'd even be willing to re-read Anna Karenina (well, maybe), if I could do it in Russia.

Imagine re-creating Humbert and Lo's American adventure while reading along with Lolita! Or taking a slow drive from Oklahoma to California with The Grapes of Wrath? Anne Rice put New Orleans in my imagination forever, but I'd also love to see Faulkner's Mississippi and Zora Neale Hurston's Alabama.

The hallmark of a good book, for me, has always had to do with how I react to the characters. Weak plot points are not an issue if the characters can make me love them (or hate them, or pity them, or lust after them). But in the best books (and not just books, but songs, movies, etc.) location serves as a character or characters all its own. Would To Kill a Mockingbird have worked set on the Midwest? What about a Southern Sometimes a Great Notion? Could a tree have grown in Detriot instead of Brooklyn? I think not. The places in which these books are set are not just backdrops--they are essentials. The stories don't work without them.

One of the truly great things about reading books in which the location is as compelling as the characters is the way it makes you consider places you otherwise wouldn't--not always positively. I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to Newfoundland before I read The Shipping News, and Ami McKay's The Birth House made me think about Nova Scotia in a way I certainly hadn't before. While driving through Kansas a couple of years ago, my mind often returned to In Cold Blood. Europe has long been at the top of my must-see list, but The Poisonwood Bible absolutely made me want to go to Africa.

Books also help me return to the places I do know. I picked up Marion Winik's Above Us Only Sky for the first time not because it looked particularly interesting (though it turned out to be fabulous), but because the essays are set in Austin. Some of my favorite books are set in Oregon: Katherine Dunn's Geek Love; Ken Kesey's books; and of course Beverly Cleary!

Given that I'm about to move across the country, again, to a place about which I know very little, I guess now would be a good time to find some books to guide me. Anybody have a favorite set in Northern Virginia?

And what about you? What books take you places? Where would you like to make a fiction-inspired visit?