I don't remember the names of either, but one is a YA biography that I got out of the library that was fairly informative, but also studied most of her life and her work vis-a-vis Diego Rivera rather than her life as an extraordinary woman artist in Mexico (the biographer claims in a few places that had Diego Rivera not pushed her away with his own workaholic ways, if he had lavished as much attention, time and affection on her as she had on him, she would never have become the great artist that she has today).

The other concentrates more on her art with biographical information thrown in both to give an outline of her life and to explain what the reader sees on the pages.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

I've finally finished A Conspiracy of Paper. It was interesting, but not really engrossing. It did give a great view of British society from a Jew's point of view in 1720. But the ending was disappointing. I found myself thinking, Is that all? and wishing that the end had been a little more conclusive.

I also found the author's descriptions of Benjamin Weaver and his friend using "philosophy" to solve the case a little annoying. They would chat just a bit and then draw a conclusion, but there wouldn't be enough information to make the conclusion make sense.

I'd recommend it as an historical novel, with the warning that the author stuck close enough to facts that it really wasn't possible to come to a definite conclusion, and things kind of peter out at the end.

Clay's Ark, and Escape from Childhood and Teach Your Own, both by John Holt.

I'm not too far in to Clay's Ark, but I'm engrossed. Octavia Butler has a way of quietly drawing you in without you noticing. If it weren't for the fact that I'm trying to be disciplined about getting some non-computer, non-reading things done, I'd be long done with it -- it's that hard to put down.

Teach Your Own keeps ringing bells. I may have read it before, or it's possible there are stories repeating from the other John Holt books I've read. It's kind of funny, because it's early homeschooling, so he's using "unschooling" to refer to all kinds of stuff that most homeschoolers would now call "homeschooling" rather than "unschooling." "Unschooling" is not as wide a term as it used to be. And it's amusing that the stories he tells about families successfully "unschooling" range from families who really are unschooling to families who are using Calvert, which very few homeschoolers would call "unschooling."

Escape from Childhood is really, really radical -- Taking Children Seriously people would be deep into this one. I don't agree with all of it, and some of it just plain isn't practical, which is a damn shame, but it's helping me reorient myself with regard to the kids, especially P's homeschooling and F's recurrent difficulties.

I'm alternating between Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's "My Life as a Political Prisoner" about her time in the federal prison at Alderson and Isabel Allende's "Ines of My Soul." I usually find Allende gripping and finish her books in a night or, at most, a day, but I'm not getting into this one as much.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

I'm looking to read more feminist works, since I've read almost none. I started out by hitting the library, where I was annoyed to note that, while they have a book of Audrey Lorde's poetry, they have nothing else. I didn't check the inter-library system, though, so I'll look again.

Instead I picked out Germaine Greer's book on menopause, which I haven't cracked yet, and her book The Beautiful Boy. So far, the plates are gorgeous, but the text is so dry I could sop up the melting polar ice cap with it. Plus, I think some of the statements she's making so baldly are unsupported garbage. But I'll keep slogging.

A real find, picked out randomly while I was searching for The Feminine Mystique, was Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. To my distinct pleasure, the editors have put together a set of essays from a really broad selection of feminists. I'm white and middle class, and while I'm bi, I'm also married and monogamous and not out, so I exist in a bubble of hetero privilege. So it's really awesome to be able to hear from other women coming from different perspectives, and to become aware of issues and problems that I hadn't considered before.

I just read Dixieland Sushi, which is an amusing novel about growing up in a mixed Japanese/white family in the American South, by an author who did just that.

I've also just finished The Telling, by Ursula LeGuin. It's a re-read, but I'd forgotten that I'd read it, so it was like reading it fresh.

I have a stack of new books from the second-hand store. Most of them are fluff, except for a biography of Marie Antoinette.

B and I went to the bookstore for a date on Saturday. I was thinking new cookbook (I love to read them for inspiration) or an art book or something in women's studies or something similar, but I kept picking up books and thinking, You know, I don't know that I'd read this more than once, and I can get it in the library, I bet. So we didn't get anything except for a biography of John Adams on CD for the kids' history. I wonder if we could get a biography of Jane Addams somewhere -- I'd like the kids to read about her, especially the girls.

i am reading guerilla gardening by david tracey, makes me wish someone was telling me i couldn't garden here so i could defy them. also retreating into the absurdity of the onion and i just finished a book about handspinning. it was called, not surprisingly, the spining book.

"A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster, for the classics (just re-read 3 Jane Autens thanks to PBS's The Complete Jane Austen and thought I should read something I haven't read before), and re-reading "Bird By Bird" by Anne Lamott for writing inspiration, also just ordered "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" through interlibrary loan, because I've wanted to read it for a long time (to add to my public school inner-conflic and anxiety), but am dreading it because it's very long and I keep checking out interlibrary loans that are long and heavy and I can't finish in the allotted time (e.g., The Omnivore's Dilemma; The Best American Essays of the Century; etc.). GEMINI Mama

I started The Gate of the Cat, by Andre Norton. Usually I like Norton, but this time around she seems oddly incoherent. The book is full of sentence fragments and sentences that don't hang together grammatically, and it's just hard to read. I don't know if I'll bother finishing it.

Octavia Butler's "Clay's Ark." I think that I like this the best of all her Patternist books. Her characters were all believable and even like-able.

I think I have read all of her books. I wish she had written more.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.