For Feisty Feminists

I’m gearing up for two big projects starting in November: one is National Novel Writing Month, requiring 50,000 words in the month of November. The other is Cannonball Read II, which requires only 52 books in a year, but short reviews will not be tolerated. Expect thoughts on each book beyond ‘That was an interesting read’ and ‘meh’. I have an ideal in my mind that I will also read some criticism of most books I read.

Here’s a partial list of books I will be reading for Cannonball Read, Part II:

• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpa Lahiri
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog
• The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History by Timothy Corrigan
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (re-read)
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler
• Song of Solomon (re-read) and A Mercy by Toni Morrison
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

That’s just from my hold list at the library. It should be a fun year!

A year ago, I undertook a challenge: to read one hundred books in a year. As of sometime before midnight last night, I finished. Suck it, jerkballs.

I read a wide range of books - a lot of P.G. Wodehouse, a lot of novels, some crappy pop feminism books, finally finding a streak of good non-fiction at the end (bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Joanna Russ, and Shulamith Firestone). The repeating authors include P.G. Wodehouse (11), Neil Gaiman (6), Margaret Atwood (4), bell hooks, Douglas Adams and Ian McEwan (3 each, and I can’t explain why I read a third McEwan novel after being less than enthralled with the first two), Edith Wharton, Sarah Vowell, George Pelecanos, Paul Auster, Max ‘Zombie’ Brooks and Christopher Buckley (2 each). Oh, and Charlaine Harris, as author of the Sookie Stackhouse (aka True Blood) series, and Harper Connelly mysteries with 13. Shut up!

Also, a whopping 61 of the books were novels!

I loved doing this project, and I am starting again - though this time it is only 52 (good because I got a little too focused on just finishing books! now! towards the end) with the caveat that you have to write a few paragraphs review (bad, I procrastinate and don’t write the reviews, good, thinking about what I’ve read).

Anyway, the biggest point of this post is the following: I have ranked the books I read according to category of goodness, and loosely in order of quality (descending). Please make suggestions based on my (fairly obvious) likes and dislikes as illuminated by this list. Also, please engage with me in conversation about the books. ‘Why is this here?’ and ‘Why did you like x book so much?’ are appropriate and welcome questions; ‘If you don’t like z book you are a stupid turd’ or ‘this book is clearly better than that book’ with no explanation are neither appropriate, nor questions, and will be ignored.

Good reading to all!

My Personal Canon - books I want to re-read again and again, they contain something elusive between the covers that is greater than the sum of the parts. These are books that could largely be considered ‘classics,’ and are also personal favorites.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Right Ho, Jeeves and The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
• ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘Good Country People’ from A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
• No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
• The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John LeCarre

The Greats - books that I would wholeheartedly recommend to almost anyone, they are well-crafted but didn’t quite make ‘favoritest ever ever’ status.

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
• The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
• the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon
• Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman
• Wodehouse - the Jeeves and Wooster novels (The Inimitable Jeeves, Jeeves in the Offing, Thank You Jeeves, The Catnappers, The Mating Season, Jeeves in the Morning, Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)
• Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
• Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
•  Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
• Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Pretty Good - check out these books if you are interested in the subject matter or author.

• The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone
• Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
• The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
• The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri
• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
• Timbuktu by Paul Auster
• Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies by bell hooks
• Naked by David Sedaris
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Sex is Not a Natural Act by Leonore Tiefer
• Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
• No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley
• Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
• The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
• The Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
• Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
• The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker
• I am America (and So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
• Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
• Healthy at Every Size by Linda Bacon
• Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby
• The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Not Anything to Write Home About - I don’t regret the time I spent reading these, but they wouldn’t come up in a conversation about books I recommend. There’s a lot of non-fiction in here that is either not that provocative (to me) in subject matter, or not that well written; a lot of the fiction is stuff that other people seem to like a lot more than I do, so there must be something appealing that just isn’t for me.

• Stardust by Neil Gaiman
• Drama City by George Pelecanos
• The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy
• Scorsese by Ebert by Roger Ebert
• Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets by Cadillac Man
• Moab is My Washpot by Stephen Fry
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
• Wodehouse - My Man Jeeves (short stories)
• So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
• Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
• Faith of My Fathers by John McCain and Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama (that’s right, they are tied).
• Grave Sight, Grave Surprise, and An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris (The Harper Connelly mysteries)
• Wild Life by Molly Gloss
• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
• The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
• Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant
• Saturday by Ian McEwan

Meh - only if you are a die-hard fan of the author or obssessed with the subject matter.

• Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
• Weight by Jeanette Winterson
• Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
• Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond
• A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris
• It’s a Jungle Out There by Amanda Marcotte
• World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• You Unplugged by Scott W. Webb

Avoid at All Costs

• The Female Thing by Laura Kipnis

bell hooks is a simply phenomenal writer, and I do not think I can give her justice here; these books deserve a full review at some point.

Also, I finished 100 books in a year! A round-up post will come by sometime soon, so stay tuned.

In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Michele Wallace takes an uncompromising look at sexism in the American civil rights movement. Her first section, ‘Black Macho,’ looks at the way the movement continually put down black women as a result of the repeated attacks on black men by whites, that were eventually interpreted as attacks on black masculinity. There’s the famous quote from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice that the “only position for black women in the movement was prone,” and his detailing of ‘practicing’ rape on black women and children to rape white women - in order to hurt men.

Tangent: it is a continuing point of sadness and frustration for me that someone, from famous men like Cleaver to men I have known in real life, can rail against their own oppression but fail to recognize when they are not just being ignorant, but firmly planting their boot on the neck of someone else who has been oppressed.

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The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution is, for some radical feminists, the bible of their theory. Firestone is fierce in her analysis, and it is hard not to nod in agreement to such notions as “sex class is so deep as to be invisible.” (Sex and gender here are sort of the same thing, as it was written before feminists and gender theorists started discussing the two separately).

As I was nodding along to Firestone’s thoughts on sex (what I would probably now call ‘gender’), I suddenly got to a chapter called “Down with Childhood.” The basic premise is that children, like women, are not treated as human beings by our society; they are put on pedestals, sure, but that is just a sort of comfort to them so they don’t realize their own oppression.

This is where it gets a bit sticky with me and my own thinking. You see, I can recgonize oppression of women - I experience it. I experienced the oppression of children once, but my brain is revolting saying ‘Aren’t children fundamentally different? Come on! They do kids things and can’t take care of themselves.’  Just when I think that, Firestone clues me in that children were only recently - in the past few centuries - treated differently and played children’s games and had children’s activities. They used to play chess versus adult opponents starting around four or five. For Mozart to have written an opera at 14 and five concertoes before 20 was not unusual (although the quality of the compositions was) - kids just did those things, the only difference was their clothes were smaller. You start thinking about all the ways we mark kids as different, treat them as less than human beings, and you feel like you are going down the rabbit hole - to undo it would mean undoing all of society.

Undoing all of society is exactly what Firestone proposes. While I can’t agree with the undoing of everything, I think her analysis is spot on.  I think we have a long way to go in terms of true - as opposed to nominal - gender equality. But Firestone’s thoughts on children and childhood? We’re not even ready, as a culture, to recognize the ways in which it is true, and how we treat children as less than human and deny their autonomy.

This is a wonderfully crafted book, even if there are hardly any - possibly not one - character with which to identify or sympathize. O’Connor’s short stories are memorable in terms of both the characters and the story developments, such that I can vividly remember each of the stories even though I read some of them back in January. The stories never go in an expected way, but wind and turn to strange places. I greatly admire O’Connor and this book, even as I hold it at a bit of a distance.

Sarah Vowell’s books are a combination of personal essay, history, and civics lesson. The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a collection of short stories I had lying around, and it was engaging enough to lead me to pick up Assassination Vacation, which has been recommended to me quite a few times. Assassination Vacation is definitely the better book. It details Vowell’s travels around the country to visit historical sites relating to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. She explains the history involved - both the large themes, and small funny details, like Edwin Booth, the famous actor brother of John Wilkes Booth, picking up a plaster cast of some hands at a party, then rapidly setting them down after he found out they belonged to Lincoln. (Edwin Booth had consistently tried to distance himself from his assassin brother).

Vowell sometimes lapses a bit too much into personal detail for me; the story of her friend’s disappointment at the Seward plaque is amusing, but sometimes the stories become too tangential and distract from the topic - and amazingly, I did want to know more about Garfield and McKinley after reading the book. The fact that a non-history buff like me would be interested in learning more after reading it should tell you something about the quality of the book.

This book was about what you would expect - the humor of The Colbert Report in the form of a book. Basically, ‘Stephen Colbert’ (the fictional persona he takes on to host his show) explains his worldview to us. You will find this funny and/or annoying (and whatever else you find it) to the same degree you do his show - I found it funny, if childish and silly.

Edith Wharton’s novels about early 1900’s New York society are delicate things, plots slowly unfurling among high society events where a glance, a choice of word can have great meaning. Want to know what happens in the first few chapters of The House of Mirth? The heroine, Lily Bart, sees an old friend, and they have tea at his house. That’s it, for about 50 pages - and it’s sublime.

Wharton knows that these small social interactions have great meaning, and she provides all the details. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart tries to gain a foothold in society through marriage, but comes up against the mores of society. In The Age of Innocence, the recently engaged Newland Archer falls in love with his fiance’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, because of her refusal to live by society’s rules.

In both books, Wharton manages to criticize the society she is portraying while maintaining empathy for the characters. Both are well worth reading, but I preferred The House of Mirth because of the feeling of dread for Lily’s future that I felt throughout (even though the ending seemed a bit preposterous). That Lily should be unable to secure a place for herself is true to the reality of many women of that time. While The Age of Innocence is a fine novel, it didn’t grab my attention as quickly, nor did I understand exactly why Newland fell so hard for Ellen. Regardless, I recommend both books strongly.

This is one of my favorite books, and the only book I was re-reading for the Cannonball Read. I love the magical realism style, and I love the way Garcia Marquez uses it in this book; after establishing the first generation of the Buendia family, he moves swiftly through the next four generations, and the effect leaves me almost breathless. The story slips through my grasp, like grains of sand, and I want to hold on to it at the same time I feel propelled forward. I don’t think I will ever fully understand this novel, but I will always love it.