I'm reading Nisa, which is the story of an !Kung woman, as told to an anthropologist (I think) who worked with her.

I also picked up Stone Butch Blues at a woman-owned bookstore in Minneapolis. I'm totally caught up in it. I think I'm caught between the view into a world I'm totally unfamiliar with, and the heart-catching way the protagonist is portrayed. There's really a feeling of "I'm a real human being, and you'll have to deal with me that way." And the first chapter, the letter, is brilliant.

I was reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress X, but B is traveling and I let him take it with him, since he's the one who took it out of the library. (And because I am busy reading at least two other books.) Sometimes I am just way too nice. I need to learn to be mean! *grin*

and looking for dd's school handbook, I found a (never-used) calendar of political prisoners, their work and writings by and about them from 2005.

under January, is this poem:

Going into the Prison

the guard growls, What's this?!
Poetry, I answer, just Poetry
He waves me through
with a yawn
that delights me
So I smuggle my words in
to the women,
who bite them, chewing starving
I'm honored to serve them
bring color music feelings
into the sould death
smiling as i weep
for poetry who has such a bad reputation
She's boring, unnecessary, incomprehensible
obscure, effete
The perfect weapon
for this sneaky old war-horse
to make a rich repast of revolution

--Chrystos

two novels:
"Dog Days" by Ana Marie Cox (from wonkette.com) - about a young woman in DC, working on a presidential campaign who gets embroiled in a potential political/personal scandal and what she does to draw attention elsewhere. it got pretty decent reviews but i was underwhelmed by it. trying too hard to be snarky and the central conflict wasn't, well, *important* to me as the reader.

"Apex Hides the Hurt" by Colson Whitehead - which i freakin' LOVED until the last quarter or so. have to seek out the rest of his stuff.

everything else has been gardening books - as a 1st timer, i need all the info i can get!

----------
tenderfoot zine * mamaphiles!

I finally finished House of Mirth. Well, that ending was sort of inevitable, wasn't it? Some of the intervening stuff was a little surprising, though, and it was a beautiful, snarky picture of society at that place and time.

I also finished the Alice Walker, which turned out to be Now is the Time to Open Your Heart -- I couldn't remember the title before. All I can say is that I wished I lived in Alice Walker's world. *sigh*

I also finished a book for partners of people with bipolar disorder. I'll be sharing it with B, but for now it's helpful to me to think about the things they suggest.

Now I'm reading Storms of Victory, by Andre Norton, The Pail Horse, by Agatha Christie, and I've read the whole first page of The Mill on the Floss. I'm also just cracking open some book by Cherryh, whose name I, once again, can't remember. I don't know how quickly I'm going to get along with either The Mill on the Floss or the Cherryh.

Hey, everybody -- if you had to pick just one book in the world to recommend to someone else, what would it be?

I got disgusted with House of Mirth and picked up ... heck. An Alice Walker book from the library. I'm whipping right through it, that's how much I like it. I also got the complete essays of Mark Twain. Theoretically I'm reading The Mill on the Floss, but practically speaking I haven't touched it in three days.

I finished Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin. He has an interesting perspective as an American person of color who was an expat in Europe. Now I want to read Gide, although Baldwin's homophobia on the subject of Gide is distressing. Just what I need, more books on the Wanna list.

I also finished Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. I don't know why this is considered to be such an amazinug murder mystery. I found it boring. To much "here a clue, there a clue" and not enough story. Too technical, and the technical is boring. Not enough foreshadowing of who everyone is -- if you aren't a brilliant guesser, you're out of luck. Death on the Nile is much better. "That very bad star, that star fall down!"

It helped me to survive this week.

Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir. The memoir of a Moroccan woman who was the daughter of a high ranking official who was executed for attempting to assassinate the king. She and her brothers and sisters and mother were then imprisoned for 20 years until they escaped. So haunting.

the only thing i've gotten through lately was the new Carol Goodman. "The Ghost Orchid," it's called. i've really liked her other books but i wasn't crazy about this one - it took me a long time to get into, and it didn't hang together quite as much as the other ones, IMO.

i don't think i posted back in january that i'd read "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. anyone else read it yet? it got so much great press but honestly, i was underwhelmed by it.

guess i'm being a curmudgeonly reader so far this year...

----------
tenderfoot zine * mamaphiles!

I finished A Voice and a Vocation, by Kate Chopin. First of all, I like Chopin better than I like O. Henry. Partly because Chopin is starting to get into feminist issues, while O. Henry wasn't really making any stunning observations about his society. Kate Chopin got into trouble over The Awakening and her publisher canceled out on A Voice and a Vocation. Too controversial.

Besides, I think that Kate Chopin is a better story teller than O. Henry.

Next up, Andre Norton and the continuing of the Chanur saga. And yes, Chanur is better now that I've gotten past rereading the first book and am into my first reading of the second book.

Finished my vast volume (more than 400 pages, small print) of O. Henry shorts, and now I've picked up a book of Kate Chopin's short fiction. I also found an excerpt from "A Room of One's Own," and I want to read the whole thing. Figured out that I was misspelling "Eliot" as in "George Eliot" -- it's only one "l" -- and found several volumes on the shelf at the library, so I'll be reading The Mill on the Floss in the not too far future. If it's any good, who know?

B and I were stripping books out of the collection (oik! giving away books?!) and I found my copy of minding the body: women writers on body and soul. I picked it up and devoured the rest of it (I'd misplaced it halfway through.) Reading this book makes me admire the writers, who are voicing their experiences with great courage, but it also makes me so angry. So very angry. Wanting things to change that will doubtless only change slowly, if at all.

I just finished The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by Tom Spanbauer on recommendation from a friend. When I first started it, I thought, this book is full of sick, terrible things and i can't believe my friend told me to read this. But I started to get interested in the characters and it turned out to be a great book. He did a really great job of turning the whole thing around and really questioning the meaning of perversity as a whole- in any case, I really liked it. It's a wild and crazy western- the main character is a gay Indian man who lives in a whorehouse in Idaho in the 1800's. Surprisingly sweet and fun read.

Been perusing books on databases, content management, & information architecture lately, but I recently read three books by David Sedaris too. He is a funny, funny man, in kind of a wrong, yet totally compelling to read, way...

"Do not forget. Remember and warn."
-- Plaque fixed to the hollow shell of Sarajevo's National Library

Agatha Christie, more Agatha Christie, and some C.J. Cherryh. Don't know about the Cherryh. Soon it will be short story collections -- O Henry and Kate Chopin. I want to find some of George Elliot's work.

Suheir Hammad's on-line journal from Palestine: suheirhammad.com/SuheirHammad/pal_journal.asp

I know, I scoffed at blogs not too long ago. But this one is hauntingly beautiful--and chilling. Lyrical and political at the same time.

Just finished Gail Godwin's The Odd Woman. I like Gail Godwin, but this is one of her earlier books, and frankly her later work is much better.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that I spent most of the book with an overwhelming urge to slap most of the major characters in the novel is indicative of some kind of literary value. I don't usually have that strong a reaction to the things I'm reading.

who was a major mentor and inspiration of Diane Arbus.

This book (of her photos accompanied by a bio of her life) doesn't fire me up as much as Arbus's "Revelations" did. But I do find little interesting details here and there:

In 1949, Model got an assignment to document the women who resided at dude ranches for 6 weeks in Nevada in order to qualify for residency and then filing for a quick divorce. LADIES HOME JOURNAL had sent an advance scout to find a family for their series "How America Lives" and that scout had already chosen a family. Then the picture editor chose Model to go and photograph them:

"So Ruth (the scout) went to Reno & came back with notes on 2 or 3 families. Teh family selected was named Winne, of Truckee Meadows, NV. I picked Lisette as the photographer. She was so anxious to do a great job, and so unfamiliar with our requirements that I gave her all of Ruth's research, including notes on the families who had NOT been chosen. We gave her a ticket & an advance & off she went. About 5 days later, as I recall, the Winnes called the JOURNAL to ask where was the photographer. I then discovered that in her excitement Lisette had ignored the chosen family & had begun working with one of the 'rejects.'"

When she became aware of her mistake, Model went on to photograph the Winnes and fulfilled her LHJ requirement.

I'm sure it says a lot about me that I am very charmed by such an anecdote of excitement and mix-up and just following one's own direction instead of what's been assigned, but it's after midnight (once again) and I should get off-line and go to bed.

I finished a Barbara Kingsolver marathon. Yep, I think I read them all. The best of course was The Poisonwood Bible. I did like them all but my second favorite was Animal Dreams. I don't know- maybe it was the sexy Indian man...

I just finished a collection of short fiction winners of the Golden Spur Awards (Western Writers of America.) I was surprised and pleased to discover that the stories, which were written as far back as the early 50's, are relatively free of racism, although of course they don't at all address the subject of genocide. The exception is the last story in the book, Yellow Bird, An Imaginary Autobiography, written by a Native American about the life of a fictional Native American who lived through most of the treaty-making and breaking and exodus of the Cherokee nation.

I don't know what I'm reading next. I have to go dig in the library basket, because I don't remember what I have. I'm pretty sure I have some Agatha Christie in there, and a volume of sci-fi, but I don't remember what else. Something by Barbara Kingsolver, maybe?

I have a couple of half-read books that I should tackle, too -- I still don't know what happens to the lover in Crescent, for instance. And I've only gotten about a third of the way through Barack Obama's autobiography. Those aren't the only ones, but they're the ones I can think of just at the moment.

I am reading "There is a Season" by Patrick Lane. It is really a moving and beautiful book.
Regina
"Karma is a boomerang"

Recent reads:
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Elizabeth Crane, When the Messenger is Hot
Peter Ho Davies, Equal Love
Maggi Anton, Rashi's Daughters: Jocheved

Hooray for commuting on public transit, or I would get no reading done!