Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
In honor of my 31st birthday on Sunday, I thought I’d find a Persephone book with a title that made me laugh: It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life by Judith Viorst. Being in the USA, however, I only found the non-Persephone edition, the original 1968 publication of Viorst’s
I wonder if my recent news about my upcoming arrival prompted me to notice this book on the New Books shelf. Possibly. Baby Monkey is a GIRL! and I’m delighted and excited that Raisin will have a little sister. At any rate, when I saw the biography of the two foremost proponents of women’s rights
This is the kind of book that I don’t like to review (because I didn’t really like it and many others in the blogosphere do), so I’ll keep this post short. I liked bits of Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier (1999), and then the author started really irritating me. My main issue was
Melodrama is defined by Merriam-Webster as a work characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization. By creating a world with both excessively good characters and excessively evil characters, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the horrors of slavery is certainly melodramatic. Yet, given her intended audience and the
The title of Lorraine Hansberry’s debut play about 1950s Southside Chicago comes from a classic poem by Langston Hughes, and Hansberry includes it as an epigram to the play. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run? Does it
Ginko Ogino was just sixteen when her mother and older sister arranged her marriage, as was custom in nineteenth-century Japan. When she returned home violently ill three years later, overcome with fever and infection due to gonorrhea, her family was shamed. Her story begins here, though, for during her embarrassing treatment in the male-dominated hospital,
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is an historical essay, so as I began reading, I wondered how relevant it was for me. After all, I don’t feel I’ve been discriminated against because of my gender and I like where I am with my life and the options I have before me. However,
This is a “must read” book. There, I said it. I am a suburban American stay-at-home mom. I have always been well fed and safe. I have 16+ years of education and I could get more if I felt like it. When I was 26, I delivered my first child naturally in a hospital with
Although Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a slim book (124 pages), the issues raised are relevant today. I wouldn’t say Gilman’s writing is stunning or beautiful. The plot is not engaging or page-turning. It is predictable and overly “convenient.” The characters are stereotypes on steroids. But rather than expecting any of those other things,
Here’s a semi-political book I read in honor of the U.S. presidential election today. Now, if only women could rule the world! Why Woman Should Rule the World isn’t just another cliché: rather, in her well-researched social memoir of women, Dee Dee Myers shares what she’s learned about being a woman, both from her experiences
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