Space Station Mir

28. Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks As part of my attempt to fill in the gaps of my education and become a better and better-informed person, I asked a friend to recommend me some books on feminism. She kindly lent me this book and recommended it as the best introductory guide to feminism that she knew of. While I consider myself a feminist in that I support equal rights for women, I admit to knowing next to nothing about the historical and present feminist movement, and I want that to change. I found hooks' book to be a helpful starting point as well as a trigger for starting to change the ways that I think. hooks defines feminism as "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." This is not a definition I had heard before, though it certainly makes sense to me. This definition forms the core of the book and what hooks believes feminism is and should be. She focuses on feminist movement to end sexism in education of males and females, in the...

I took a trip to the library today and took out a few books. I was in a non-fiction, self-improvement mood, but I didn't want to be too ambitious either, so my selections may seem a little incongruous: The Origin of Species is on my "Reading to Continue Learning" list, and I hope to continue through more recent research, but I wanted to start with the basics. Jonathan Safran Foer is one of my favorite authors, so I was bitterly disappointed when I learned that his new book was non-fiction. I've already read Fast Food Nation , so I figured this would be redundant, but I was thumbing through in the library and it captured my interest. Gay Gavriel Kay is another one of my favorite authors, and I thought I deserved a nice fictional break after the more didactic tomes above! I restricted myself to just three, so hopefully I'll read these quickly and let you know what I think. Happy Memorial Day weekend!

27. The Believers by Zoe Heller The Believers has been on my TBR list since I read this detailed review . To be honest, I'm not really sure how I feel about it, after looking forward to it for so long. The novel tells the story of a Socialist family in New York after the famous lawyer father, Joel Litvinoff has a stroke. I especially enjoyed the mother Audrey, who is, as Myers says, "perhaps the most memorable and perfectly realized bitch in fiction." She's cruel, unyielding, tactless-and familiar. This particular breed of cruelty reminds me of matriarchal figures both from fiction and real life, women whose survival strategy is to insist on having everything on their own terms, screw everyone else, especially their children. We get glimpses into her humanity when her oldest daughter Karla remembers her mother once showing her a picture of herself as a fat child and confessing that Karla got her tendency toward obesity from her. Audrey continually harps on Karla...

26. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick Philip K. Dick is another one of those SFF authors that I've been meaning to get to for a while. My boyfriend read this one first, and would not deviate from his one-word description of it as "weird." It was recommended to us by a man at the information desk at our local Barnes&Noble when we had a Groupon and asked him to suggest SFF classics. The Man in the High Castle is better classed as alternative history, but I don't doubt it's a classic and it is a winner of the Hugo award. Germany and Japan won World War II. A terrifying prospect, as is a book written entirely without articles. I am not sure if this is completely true, but it is at least lacking articles most of the time. As a former (and possibly future) ESL tutor, primarily for Japanese and Korean clients, lack of articles is not as scary or baffling to me as it might be for some people. I think Dick makes an interesting statement by having English re...

Yesterday, I wrote in my review of Gloriana's Torch , "I think fictional protagonists are one of the more successful strategies for grounding a novel in a historical period." I would like to expound on why I have found this to be so. 1) The reader has no expectations for the fictional character. Therefore, the author is free to characterize him or her as he or he chooses, without falling into the snare of contradicting the personalities of historical characters or running up against readers' preconceived notions of them. 2) The author can place a fictional character in any life situation or historical event that is convenient for the author's purposes and there is no historical contradiction. 3) A fictional character can have more in common and more appeal to the modern reader than a historical character might. For example, a fictional character could have anachronistic opinions about women's rights or minority rights without causing contradiction with a hist...

25. Gloriana's Torch by Patricia Finney If ever there were a title and cover calculated to catch my eye, this was it. A close-up variation on the Armada Portrait and the title in a large font jumped out at me from the shelves of the library in the small town where I'm staying. As it turns out, this is the third book of a series set in Elizabethan England, a series breaking the genre barrier between mainstream historical fiction and the alternative history that's generally classed with SFF. Finney's protagonists, David Becket and Simon Ames/Anriques, spies for Walsingham, and Merula, an African woman who I believe appears first in this novel, are fictional. I think fictional protagonists are one of the more successful strategies for grounding a novel in a historical period, and Finney uses it to advantage. She also portrays historical figures like Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester, Raleigh, Robert Cecil, and Elizabeth I. However, it is the unique viewpoint of her fictional...

24. The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory For a long while, I considered myself an avid Philippa Gregory fan. The Other Boleyn Girl is one of my favorite books and I also loved The Queen's Fool and The Virgin's Lover , both of which I analyzed for a thesis-type project my senior year in high school on portrayals of Elizabeth I in fiction. Then I read The Boleyn Inheritance . The concept was very interesting, a novel told from three points of view; those of Jane Boleyn or Lady Rochford, Anne of Cleves, and Katherine Howard. Somehow, this structure didn't do it for me, the characters seemed more stereotypical and less realistic, I didn't like the constant skipping between views, and I just didn't feel that it provided much insight into these three women, except for maybe Katherine Howard. That turned me off Gregory for a long time, until now. I originally planned to read this book as part of my directed study on early modern women writers and the portrayal of early mo...

I am a college graduate! I felt proud to hold my degree in my hands and I barely want to let it out of my sight. That said, I've been a college graduate for over a week now and am officially unemployed. In the meantime, I'm applying to jobs and studying for the GREs (in case I want to go to grad school, haven't decided yet but leaning in that direction) and contemplating some changes to the blog. I'll probably be changing things around soon, and hopefully things will get more interesting and generate more traffic. Stay tuned!

22. Guardians of the West by David Eddings 23. Polgara the Sorceress by David and Leigh Eddings I decided to extend my Eddings kick and raided my university library accordingly. I graduate in a few days, so it feels like my last chance to get the most out of the library resources. In reality, I will still be able to check out books after graduation, though using a more cumbersome system, but my access to certain subscriptions (notably JSTOR) will cease, which will make me very sad. In any case, Guardians of the West is the first book of the Malloreon , and I was at first pleasantly surprised to discover that it simply takes up where the Belgariad left off. In retrospect, this may not have been the best idea. The first three quarters of the book or so are basically recountings of events that happen over a number of years, so it misses the immediacy of the earlier books. It's great to see what happens to the characters, and the best part about it is the banter between characters...