A journey to collect 500 20th century novels by women
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 …
My book organization has always been, even at the best of times, a bit on the…haphazard side. Living alone as I have for 12 years, things are where I put them and I understand why they are there, and I don’t need to explain to anyone why things are where they are. For example, before …
You are probably not supposed to eat pumpkin applesauce muffins for dinner…but it’s cold and raining, it’s been a bit of a strange week or two, so I find myself under a fuzzy blanket with a cup of tea, reading Stone Butch Blues and eating homemade muffins for dinner. It’s comforting. The mass shooting in …
It had been just long enough since the last time I had read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf that I had forgotten what Ntozake Shange does to the reader at the end until it was almost upon me – then, like it always does, the moment punched me …
Sometime yesterday between apple picking and used book buying, I started seeing Ntozake Shange’s name popping up in my social media, and I got that sinking feeling in my stomach that you get when a writer you love and admire is popping up in the news. Shange had passed away (in my home state of …
