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 …
I was going to blog earlier in the week, honest I was. But it’s the postseason around here and I’ve been Distracted By Baseball. My mother and I have watched the postseason together most years since I graduated college; the last couple of years, since I’ve gotten cable, we’ve texted snarky comments to each other …
My sister asked me a question the other day that I realized I hadn’t exactly worked into my FAQs, and I think a few other people have put this to me in one way or another since I began collecting books for the library, which is this: am I going to kick any books out …
It’s probably no surprise that issues of literacy have been important to my family for as long as I can remember. My paternal grandmother, after a career teaching English and Latin to high schoolers, taught English as a Second Language (ESL), which was always very important work to her. My mother, after a career teaching …
