A journey to collect 500 20th century novels by women
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 …
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 …
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 …
Well, there’s no real two ways about it – it’s been a tough couple of weeks for those of us in the states. Regardless of where you fall in politics, or if you try to avoid politics altogether, it’s been hard to avoid the press leading up to the Kavanaugh hearings and the national discussion …
Octavia Butler, where have you been all my life? Well, I actually know the answer to that question: you were in the science fiction section of the bookstore, a section I never went into. Why did I never go into that section, though? If I had ever thought consciously about it, I would have thought …
Since I’ve become a bit of a clearinghouse for books, friends have starting taking notice, especially when they’re in the process of downsizing or clearing out shelves. I became the recent lucky recipient of a whole box of gorgeous books from my friend Teri’s collection. Not only are the books awesome, but they were received …
I had a friend, an avid reader, who said something several years ago that stuck with me. It may not sound very enlightened, particularly if you’re predisposed to enjoying 20th century women’s fiction. I don’t like to name names…well, it was Brian Forte, but let’s call him “Frank,” to protect his reputation. (He doesn’t read …
Continue reading “Frank” and Lauren Groff and Susan Sarandon and Octavia Butler
