Bookishgal

I could have sworn this came later in the year last year, because I thought I posted about it here, rather than at the other abominable site where I had my blog.

No matter! It’s Read an E-Book Week! It started yesterday, March 7th, and goes until March 13th. If you go to the E-Book Store on that website, you’ll see some of the participants who are offering books for the week. Some of the e-books are free, while others are, as the site says, “deeply discounted.” Many participants are offering a different free download each day during the week.

Many thanks to Graham Storrs, at whose website I discovered that it’s E-Book Week. And by the way, Graham’s got a science fiction e-book of his own on sale right now: TimeSplash. Go read an excerpt here, and then run, don’t walk, and buy a copy or two!

Okay, you may laugh. And you younger women may roll your eyes a bit, while male readers may be horrified. I just thought of one of my very favourite female authors, in honour of Women’s History Month.

One of my favourite female authors, ever, is feminist writer Dale Spender. I consider one of her books to be my virtual Bible of Feminism: Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them. Sound inflammatory? Oh, you bet, and with good reason! Honestly, I defy any younger woman to read the book from beginning to end and not experience a high degree of anger. In fact, I would make this book required reading for any younger woman in my society, especially those who think we “don’t need feminism” any more. (Drinking the kool aid! Wake up!) (Ahem. Sorry.)

Women of Ideas was one of the books that completed my exit from fundamentalism, and the fundie view of “women’s place” in the world. I finally understood what hogwash I’d been brainwashed with. Never again. Never again.

Ms. Spender starts with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and works her way methodically through other women writers like Angelina and Sarah Grimke, George Eliot, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir — the list is endless — right up to the 1960s and 1970s (the book was published in 1982). She reprints many of the writings, which show the progress of women’s thinking about equality and about the arguments men were using to portray women as inferior beings in the society. Then Spender describes the context, the reaction to those writings, and what the male-controlled society of each writer’s time did to try to suppress the insights each woman developed.

I first read this book in the 1990s, when magnificent progress had already been made to bring women’s issues into the public eye. There were countless women’s magazines, female writers, changes to laws, all sorts of markers of progress that had made women in the North American cultures among the most free and equal in the world (even knowing there was still more progress to be made). What stunned me was the discovery that there were as many women’s magazines and publications in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century as there were in the 1990s!

So why had the feminists of the 1960s had to start from scratch, and reinvent and rediscover everything that the feminists of the nineteenth century had already discovered and learned? Because the male-dominated society had wiped the historical record clean. All those writings of the previous century — unheard of and unknown. It was as if the women who had exploded all the myths about women’s inferiority had never existed, and had never written. Betty Friedan and those who came after her had to learn everything from scratch, and begin at the beginning again, rather than building on knowledge that already existed.

And if it could be done once, it could certainly be done again. Women’s history and learning and understanding is never safe. Anti-women philosophies never rest, in their attempts to diminish and delete women’s history, and women’s rights. They never rest. No advance that women make can ever be taken for granted, but has to be actively maintained and pushed forward, or it will quietly and carefully be removed again while women aren’t looking. History has demonstrated this, more than once.

Ms. Spender chronicled all this. And it made me so furious that sometimes I had to put the book down for a few days just to let myself cool off. I had one experience where I was in the middle of the book, riding up an escalator behind a man in a suit, who looked very self-important and commanding. And I swear, I had to grit my teeth and hold myself back from punching him in the kidneys. A total stranger!

That was when I made the humourous vow: “Never read this book when you’ve got PMS.” Ha!

But believe me, despite that one day, it wasn’t PMS that made me angry — it was the historical facts. And what makes this book as valuable now as it was in 1982 is the fact that the attempts to roll back women’s progress never stop. I see it happening again, as advertising and the general cultural attitude seems to be using women’s bodies more than ever, to sell products, to please men, and to convince high school girls and even ten-year olds that they have no value whatsoever except as adjuncts to some boy or man. What they say in history lessons or whatever is very different from what they do, and our poor younger women have no idea how they’re being manipulated.

This makes me want to punch the people behind those campaigns — almost certainly men — in the kidneys again. And the Religious Right, which has piles and piles of money, is not innocent in this campaign to Put Women Back In The Kitchen With Babies, Where They Belong. I know this from having been one of them for decades, but I also just listen to how my two nieces talk, to know that women’s equality will be undermined as quickly as the fundies can manage it, if we don’t resist them. And my poor brainwashed nieces would help suppress women because their fundie males say it’s “God’s will.”

I’m waiting for the Third Wave of feminism to begin, and I will jump into that pool with both feet. And I’m hoping that Women of Ideas will be reprinted and used again, as young women rediscover — again — that they are people in their own right, and better not be messed with.

As far as I’m concerned, Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them should be required reading for everyone. Men included.

I didn’t realize that March was Women’s History Month until I saw it mentioned on the Penguin USA blog. What they’re doing there is asking people to name their favourite women writers in the Comments section of their blog.

Anyone who’s talked books with me for any length of time will already know my favourite female author — my favourite author, period. Dorothy Dunnett is my favourite fiction author of all time. Even if I were to lose my home, my cats, and all my other worldly goods, you wouldn’t be able to pry the Lymond Chronicles from my clutching hands.

I’ll have to mull over my other favourite female fiction writers. I love a great many of them.

When it comes to non-fiction, my hands-down favourite would be Margaret Macmillan, author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, the book about the months-long conference held after World War 1, during which the three great powers divided the world up among them, creating most of the world political problems we’re still wrestling with almost a century later.

These two, Dunnett and Macmillan, are at the very top of my favourites list, male or female.

Now, this was a Jack Reacher book I could really get into!

You may recall that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with Nothing to Lose, the first novel (although it was chronologically the twelfth) that I’d read about Lee Child’s famous Reacher character. I felt that he functioned as more of a symbol of the American loner than as a real person. And that if a person really was the way Reacher was in that book, he would in fact need serious psychological help. What I rather wished for was that we could actually know Jack Reacher as a person, even just a little.

When I found The Enemy in the library, I was pleased because it was four books earlier than the other book I’d read, and I hoped perhaps we’d learn more about Reacher, indeed that he might seem even a bit more human.

Having the book written in the first person, from Reacher’s own point of view, begins things on the right foot. We get into his head a lot more. And it just gets better and better. While the guy is still pretty much his own man, in this book he is in the military and gives it some allegiance, interacting with many military personnel throughout the story. He has relationships with family members (a mother and brother), and we actually get the impression that he experiences genuine feelings through all these interactions. And there isn’t quite the same “Reacher against the world” feel as in the other book.

Not that he, and his associate Lieutenant Summer, aren’t facing a supreme adversary, as the title of the book suggests. At first it appears to be a small-scale military cover-up of an accidental death and eventually two murders, but Reacher and Summer gradually uncover a tug-of-war that seems to be going on between factions in the military as the Cold War ends, an internal war that wages at levels extending all the way up to the Pentagon itself. Once Reacher and Summer begin their investigations, they soon realize that they have to carry them through to the very finish, no matter whose toes they step on, because to drop them halfway through could mean the end of both their careers, even though finishing the investigations could mean the same thing.

I never found myself thinking, “Do I want to keep reading this?” the way I had in the first few chapters of Nothing to Lose. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next, and what new twist the investigation would take. Reacher seemed much more human in this book, and it was easier to feel empathy for him. The Enemy also felt much less claustrophobic, because it ranged through several American states and even took the main characters to Germany and France once or twice.

So I loved The Enemy, and understand why it would have been easier if I’d read this and the earlier books first. I still wonder what on earth happened to this man to make him into the near-automaton he was in the later book.  Obviously I have to read all the rest of the Reacher books, don’t I?

Okay, this is a silly experiment. But I eliminate hundreds of spam comments on my blog every week, and I’ve decided to watch how this one goes. I am very happy with WordPress’s Akismet spam catcher, which stops pretty much 100% of the loathesome stuff, so my readers never see it.

However, I’m going to okay every single spam comment on this post.  Partly to show you what every blogger in the world has to endure from these parasites and vultures, but also just for the sheer entertainment factor. Some of them are so inappropriate to the actual post they are stuck on that you just have to hoot.

A word of advice, though: if you watch this post, to see how much of the garbage collects, do not click on any links.

The very fact that these spammers could post links to cialis websites on a post about books shows how unscrupulous and money-hungry they are. Plus it’s very likely that some of the links will infect your computer with viruses or malware.

So let’s watch what happens…

It’s hard to say why I didn’t find The Darwin Conspiracy as compelling as I hoped I would. Or rather, I think I actually do know why I wasn’t quite satisfied as I read it: I was a little disturbed at how Charles Darwin was portrayed in it.

There are three narrative streams in the book: 1) the one following Darwin’s experience of his life-changing voyage on the Beagle, 2) a first-hand account in personal journals by Darwin’s youngest daughter Elizabeth, or Lizzie, as she tries to investigate some disturbing discrepancies in her father’s account of that voyage, and 3) a modern-day narrative of the investigations of scholars Hugh Kellem and Beth Dulcimer, as they read through these journals and various letters, trying to find out what Lizzie discovered.

The solution to one of the mysteries was a bit telegraphed ahead of time, so it was rather a relief to realize it was something of a red herring for the ultimate mystery of the book. Yet that mystery, when the answer was finally revealed, cast doubt on both Darwin’s character and on his scientific discoveries.

And that was what bothered me. I know it’s not uncommon to read historical novels that cast doubt on the integrity or track record of some famous individual who is generally thought, now, to be a great person. But in Darwin’s case, it just feels not quite right. Maybe it’s because there’s still so much resistance to his discoveries and all the science that has since backed them up. It’s like, subliminally, I’m thinking to myself, “Good grief, don’t give them more ammunition, even if it’s fictional!”

So my unease may have way less to do with the actual book, and more to do with my weariness with the pervading and irrational resistance to recognizing Darwin’s scientific accomplishments.

Still, author John Darnton, a journalist and editor at the New York Times until 2005, did an excellent job of describing Darwin’s life aboard the ship and during his explorations, as well as the very proscribed life Lizzie had to lead in the times in which she lived. Lizzie, indeed, was the most alive and interesting person in the book. The modern-day characters, Hugh and Beth, seemed in some ways a little less real, yet their sleuthing led to some very interesting places. And Darnton’s story is at least a plausible account of why Darwin waited 22 years before publishing On the Origin of Species. (Even if I don’t really buy it!)

I may have a few personal reservations, but this was still a pretty good book, and I’d still recommend it to someone who’s interested in the life and times of Charles Darwin, or just a display of the general attitudes and opinions of people living at that time.  And watching what may indeed have been Darwin’s own thought processes, as he engaged in his specimen collecting and drew near to the fateful Galapagos Islands where everyone’s lives would be changed forever, is a goosebump-inducing  imaginative exercise.

And once again, I’m doing the Tuesday Teaser, which I’ve been so sporadic at in recent months. My excuse this time was a bit o’ surgery a couple of weeks ago. But I’ll try to do better now.

You undoubtedly know the drill by now: you grab the book you’re currently reading and you open it to a random page. Choose two (2) sentences from that page to use as teasers (but with no spoilers), to try to entice others to want to read the book.

This meme is hosted by MizB at the Should Be Reading blog. Head over there to see other people’s links to their own Teasers, and to leave your own.

So without further ado, here’s mine:

“…and then he fixed me with a frightening look and said, in that singular singsong, those horrible words, ‘So that’s how it is, eh, Mr. Darwin?’ After which, he laughed; a low-pitched, hollow, evil sound.”

- p. 149, The Darwin Conspiracy, by John Darnton

This is from a book about two modern-day scholars trying to uncover a mystery connected to the voyage of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, and what might have happened there that affected his family, and especially his daughter Elizabeth, for the rest of their lives. This Teaser is from a section the scholars are reading from a secret journal they’ve found, written by Elizabeth. In it she’s describing a visit she made to Robert FitzRoy, who had been the Captain of the Beagle, as she tried to find out what had actually occurred on the voyage.

I’m writing mostly about books I want to read, just now, rather than those I’m reading, but this is one I really, really do want: The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, by Raj Patel.

Patel once worked as an economist at the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and after what he saw there, about how the world food system is organized and how it exploits (and often destroys) almost everyone, he quit those organizations and became an activist working against them. A couple of years ago, I wrote about his visit to Toronto where he discussed his book, Stuffed and Starved. (”If we are what we eat, we’re in big, big trouble“) What I learned then horrified me so much that I really began supporting local farmers’ markets and buying as much local food as I could.

Now he’s got his new book, The Value of Nothing, and he goes still further in his push to reorganize the production of food so that the producers on the ground are honoured and paid properly, and no longer expend their life’s blood to feed gigantic mega-corporations like Cargill.

An interesting list from his book is found in his own post, Cheaponomics, where he shows that several things we believe should be really cheap ought to cost way more than they do. This is because that’s what the price would be if we factored in all the real costs of creating such products as bottled water or cell phones. As he says,

…in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive

I want to read this book, in a way, because it makes me afraid. But I feel like I need to know these things, and that somehow we have to force governments and megacorporations from going what they’re doing. I don’t know how possible that really is. Patel seems to think it can be done. Some days the best I can do is rely on his hope for that, since I can’t muste any.

Must.read.this.book.

This is a book I really want to get. Chronicle Books has produced what looks like a wonderful illustrated version of a great Hindu epic, Ramayana: Divine Loophole, this one created and illustrated by Pixar animator and storyboard artist Sanjay Patel.

You know the two major Greek mythological epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey? They could take lessons in greatness and epic sweep from The Ramayana and the other, even more massive Hindu epic, The Mahabharata.

The Ramayana tells the tale of the Indian prince, Rama, who is exiled to the forest for 14 years with his wife, Sita, and his brother, Lakshmana. Rama is one of the ten incarnations of the god Vishnu. Each time this god incarnates, he comes to earth for the purpose of saving it from some huge threat. In this case, it’s the threat of a ten-headed demon-being named Ravana, who endangers the earth through his flouting of dharma (i.e. the divinely ordained right way of doing things).

As the three exiles wander the forest, they encounter divine sages, many demon creatures, an army of monkeys, and Hanuman, the monkey god who serves Rama and can carry a mountain on his back. Eventually Ravana kidnaps Sita, forcing Rama to bring the monkey army to do final battle. After he gains the victory, and Sita proves her fidelity to Rama, the exiles return home and Rama at last gains his throne.

If you enjoyed the look and feel of the Samurai Jack animation, or the wonderful Sita Sings the Blues video by Nina Paley (which tells the Ramayana story in animated form), you may be as excited about Patel’s book as I am. I love the very stylized look of these illustrations, and of course I love the story itself.

I’ve lost count of how many different versions of the Hindu epic, The Ramayana, that I have. As a graduate student, I not only TA’d an undergrad class studying this epic, but I was simultaneously taking my own grad-level class studying the same thing. I spent my whole final semester at university completely immersed in this story, and have kind of collected versions of it ever since. But I am just keening to get Patel’s book and give it pride of place.

You might hesitate about a book where the narrator approves of foot-binding, believes women are worthless unless they bear sons, and thinks the highest female virtue is for a woman to serve and obey her husband without complaint. But the narrator, Lily, lives in a small village in China in the mid-18th century, and in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, she describes the culture she lives in and tells the story of her life.

That is, her life and the life of her best friend and pen pal, Snow Flower. The story begins with the two girls at the age of about six, when they are officially contracted to become laotongs. In Chinese society at the time, such a relationship between two girls was meant to last their entire lifetimes, transcending any other relationships they had with parents, siblings, husbands, or their own children. Marriage was always a duty contracted with a stranger, arranged by a matchmaker, but the laotong was one’s beloved friend through all life events. And through nu shu, the “women’s writing” invented centuries ago by and for women in the Hunan province of southern China, the two heart partners could share their true thoughts and feelings with each other.

The story follows Lily and Snow Flower as they grow up, have their feet bound, go through the matchmaking and betrothal process, and finally become wives and mothers. They are from two quite different economic classes, and face some amount of disapproval from their in-laws as they continue their relationship, but it is so important to them that they refuse to break their contract with each other. They sustain each other through many difficult times, until a misunderstanding comes between them and they must somehow work their way back to each other.

Even apart from their story, the book provides fascinating details about how people of the villages lived in that time period. The beliefs and customs that surround women are heart-breaking to those of us living where women are now almost equal to men in our society. Yet the women in this story bear up under those beliefs, and even find strength in many of the customs. Even the horrific practice of foot-binding – where the instep is broken and the toes are also broken and curled under the foot, so the foot span is made to be no longer than three or four inches and walking is very difficult – is seen as a privilege, a right of passage that turns a child into a woman and sets her on her journey toward marriage. The smaller her “lily feet” turn out, the more desirable and marriageable she is.

We are shown the whole process. But we also see the strength of the women in the village, and how their inner world of the household sustains the men who believe they are in control of everything. And we watch the subversive nature of the nu shu, which is used to create the rituals and songs the women observe among themselves, that add to their strength.

I’d have loved this book anyway, just because it showed me the real lives of these women, and I was fascinated by the culture and customs. But the tale of Lily and Snow Flower is a deeply human story, sometimes sweet and sometimes bittersweet. You want to smack Lily upside the head sometimes, but she gains a hard-won wisdom by the end.

Lisa See has Chinese-American heritage on her father’s side, and gained her interest in the history of Chinese women through spending a lot of time with her father in Chinatown in Los Angeles. For this story, she travelled to the villages that are featured in the book, to research nu shu and understand the women’s culture.

This research is likely what makes this story so intimate and real. And a joy to read.