A journey to collect 500 20th century novels by women
A few weeks ago, a Chicago poet and activist that I very much admire, Eve Ewing, tweeted out a picture of a typed letter from Gwendolyn Brooks with the caption “Your faves are problematic.” Immediately my heart sank. What had beloved writer Gwendolyn Brooks done? Did she espouse some awful belief that we didn’t know …
Oh, quirky little British books! How I love you! I inadvertently read two of them over the Christmas holidays: The Love-Child by Edith Olivier and Living Alone by Stella Benson. I didn’t even mean to read them back to back, it just sort of happened that way. I’m not even sure how I became aware …
So, I didn’t spend the entire holiday watching Little Women – I read some strange books too! Strangely strange books. The other two – The Love Child by Edith Olivier and Living Alone by Stella Benson – I definitely enjoyed and will talk about in a later blog post. Right now I want to talk …
Continue reading Children Are Strange When You’re a Stranger
January 2nd is always tough – dragging yourself back into the grind of winter. I always find myself hanging onto the holidays for as long as I can. I still turn the lights of my tree on until Epiphany is over, darn it! I always related to Jo March’s sentimentality. She might have been the …
Towards the end of the Masterpiece Theatre 2018 version of Little Women, I started to warm up a bit to Maya Hawke’s version of Jo March. She wasn’t exactly transcendent, but she was certainly stronger in the role by the end of the series than she was in the beginning. I really felt I had …
Warning: Little Women Spoilers Ahead for the next couple blog posts! Well, it’s Christmas break, so the week has been filled with caroling, candlelight services, delicious ham and lasagna (courtesy of my brother-in-law), and (I’m slightly abashed to say) cookies and shortbread for breakfast every day. This is also the week that, for most of …
My parents raised my sister and I with a love of live music – technically, my folks started going to concerts together before they really even started dating (my grandfather gave my dad and his then-girlfriend a ride to the Crosby, Stills, and Nash show that my mom was attending with her best friend - …
I sincerely thought when I began writing this blog (and buying seriously obscure books) that I’d be stumbling upon diamond after diamond in the rough: excellent, overlooked books just waiting to be discovered and blogged about by yours truly. Well. Diane of the Green Van ain’t it. Diane of the Green Van, by Leona Dalrymple, …
I’ve been sitting around all week trying to think of what to say about the wonderful Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, a Lambda award-winning novel first published in 1993. I couldn’t decide how to possibly summarize what a wonderful job Feinberg does of giving an honest, simple, true voice to pre-Stonewall LGBTQ communities, to …
I am ashamed to say that, for most of my life, I didn’t consider the remarkable women in my family to be all that remarkable – I thought of them as just doing what women do. My grandmother on my father’s side not only got a college degree, but all of her sisters did as …
