TW bought Memories Flow in Our Veins: Forty Years of Women’s Writing from CALYX at Wild Iris on Independent Bookstore Day. Thank goodness because, as I previously mentioned, we had no books to read. Heh.
I really enjoyed this collection. The poetry was particularly good.
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I’m a Michelle Tea fan. My Michelle T. is a Michelle Tea fan. The two Michelle’s have a lot of personality traits in common. So, I was excited to read How to Grow Up and equally excited for my Michelle T. to read it.
I don’t think either of us were disappointed.
Speaking for myself, I don’t exactly love all of the traits the grown up Michelle Tea has but I have a lot of respect for how she DID grow up and the fact that she owns her grown up addictions and decisions.
PS. Mutha Magazine is fabulous.
I never know what to expect when I read Emma Donoghue – I either love her books or hate them and it’s often the ones everyone else loves that I do not love. Frog Music turned out to be a book that I really enjoyed though a lot of other people seem to have not enjoyed it nearly as much. Whatever.
She did a nice job with the story of Jenny Bonnet and a nice job with Blanche’s story, too. I liked it.
When you’re 53ish and reading Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl you find yourself wanting to give away all of your crap and move to Philly and hang out with your punk/goth kid and listen to all of the punk/goth music for awhile and do nothing else at all.
And then you might feel like after your kid is sick of you and you’re sick of Philly that it would be a good time to move onto the Pacific Northwest and hang out with another kid and see if you can figure out where all the cool indie musicians hang out and just listen to whatever it is that might be cool now.
At which point you realize that you don’t actually know what kinds of indie music might be cool and whether there is any cool indie music going on anywhere because you’re old now and you have all of these responsibilities and you have dogs, for godsakes (though Carrie has dogs, too, now… which by the way, the almost last chapter of the book comes at you from nowhere and you won’t be prepared for what happens and it might make you feel kind of ill and stuff… just warning you. You should still read the book… where was I?)
Oh yea, which then causes you to think maybe you should just put the book down, turn Sleater-Kinney up really loud and make a zine, which causes you to laugh your ass off because you can’t even manage to write anything decent on your own blog (or anywhere) or paint in your art journal or really do anything except work and think about mortgages and crap.
Which causes you to kind of be annoyed that you missed all of the cool stuff that happened in the 90s because you were busy raising kids and working, working, working — always working.
Whatever. You still have Sleater-Kinney to listen to. And there are some old zines on your bookshelves (or if you’re me, they’re packed in a box but will be back on your bookshelves someday…assuming the mortgage all works out, lol.) And you can listen to your goth/punk kids’ music any damn time you want and even sometimes listen to her playlist for her DJ gig. And… that will be enough. Mostly.
Read Carrie’s book. And listen to some Sleater-Kinney.
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It’s pretty interesting to read (or re-read, in my case) Peyton Place now. Such a scandalous book 60 years ago, now … not so much. Even more interesting to re-read it after reading Unbuttoning of America (which is what led me down the Peyton Place path. lol.
I totally enjoyed reading it — probably more this time around than the first time 35ish years ago.
I’m so glad I read Saint Mazie. It was a great book and she was an awesome character (woman, since the book is partially based on a real person.)
We need more people like Mazie in the world.
I wish I remembered where I saw A Cup of Water Under My Bed, some list, somewhere. Whatever, I probably wouldn’t have read this had it not been on a list that interested me – and I’m glad I did read it.
Daisy Hernandez is a great story teller and this is one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long, long time.
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I read Peyton Place in the late 70s or early 80s and only barely remember it, so I’m not sure why I grabbed Unbuttoning of America off of the library shelf. But, I did and I’m glad. It was excellent and has inspired me to re-read Peyton Place. I highly recommend this book, whether you’ve read Peyton Place or not.
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Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante is one of my favorite Maggie Hope novels. I love Maggie in the US! I’m a little worried about the next book, though — Maggie’s sister, her mother, her father, it’s all a mess.
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Oh dear, I’m way behind on tracking my books here. I’d be even further behind if I’d actually been reading as much as I normally do. Silver linings?
The library cart was mostly empty so I turned to my shelves … and had trouble figuring out what to read because when we Kondoed our books, my little shelf of mixed TBR was integrated into the full library. Oops. Blue was easy to get to so I started there and decided a little pulp fiction was in order.
Now, Voyager was awesome, as most old pulp fiction is. I’m glad I read it. I also kind of want to watch the movie again. It’s been a zillion years since I’ve seen it.