Have I mentioned I am not an Anne McCaffrey fan? Well I’m not, except for the Acorna series. That, I like. Probably because the first one I “read” was on audio and it lured me in, but after half dozen (or more) of these, I’m still enjoying them. Acorna’s Children was just what I needed after a string of non-fiction. It just doesn’t get any better than inter-gallactic unicorn type creatures saving the universe, particularly when the heroes tend to be women and children.
I requested As Seen on TV from the inter-library loan system when we were attempting to listen to Ann Patchett’s book, Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with Lucy Grealy. TW was not impressed with Truth & Beauty or with Lucy Grealy but I was interested. We never got past the first CD of Truth & Beauty but As Seen on TV was easy to read.
TW laughed her way through the first chapter or two and said Lucy Grealy should have been a blogger. She’s write. The first story was true blog, the others not so much. Her political rants, thankfully not many, were a little boring and I found myself just wanting to get on with it. The rest of the book, well worth reading.
I do find myself wondering if I really want to read her auto-biography or not. It’s on the shelf right now, maybe I should just leave it unread and be happy with the short stories. I’m afraid, after I read her biography, I won’t like Lucy nearly as much as I do right now.
It’s important to remember that Lesbian Images was written 30 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then. Sometimes I think we’ve come too far, but that’s another blog entry entirely.
Jane Rule takes a look at lesbian characters in literature. From The Well of Loneliness to a Colette to Orlando with some discussion of books like The Price of Salt and Rubyfruit Jungle. She does a fairly good job of contrasting the characters with the authors who created them, as well. I think maybe I need to read The Well of Loneliness again, and more Colette.
I’d like to see a similar stufy of lesbian images done with literature from the 1970’s to today. Anyone want to take that on?
Wilson, a secular humanist, speaks to a Southern Baptist Pastor about the need to save “The Creation“. Creation meaning nature.
Very interesting but also just a wee bit depressing. Around here we joked a bit about the potential loss of fish by 2048 but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Depressing. Particularly since Wilson suggests a one time payment of just 30 Billion could solve the majority of the world’s problems. 30 Billion isn’t a whole lot of money, compared to what the US is spending on the war in Iraq…
Depressing.
I really enjoyed The Painted Drum but the first section was a little slow. Up until she found the drum. I could have done without the storyline with the artist and his daughter, it just didn’t do anything for me. The stories about how the drum was created, and the backstory to that, and then again how the drum was used later – now those were good.
Maps for Lost Lovers started really slowly. So slowly that TW gave up on it early and never finished it. I, on the otherhand, stuck with it and I did finally find myself enjoying it.
It’s a little long. The relationships are muddled. But it was interesting and I did find myself caring about many of the characters and interested in what they were thinking. The end, tying up the loose ends of the “murders” and all of the “minor characters” felt out of place and unnecessary. Sometimes it is better to leave some loose ends, this was one of those times I think.
Maps for Lost Lovers Read More »
Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West reads like a high school text book. A wee bit boring, particularly considering the subject matter. There were some interesting stories, samples from newspaper articles and obituaries and the photos were excellent.
If you’re looking for some deep and meaninful account, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for some straight forward, easy to read text then you’ll find it in Soild Doves.
Adrienne is blogging again and she blogged another list. What the heck, I’ll play.
1. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma – Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
39. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
45. Ulysses – James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial – Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis – Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
53. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
55. USA – John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague – Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
60. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
63. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
67. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
75. Herzog – Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River – V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark – Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
88. The BFG – Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
90. Money – Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda – Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories – Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential – James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement – Ian McEwan (I tried but it made me sleepy so I quit)
98. Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald
OK I’m in at just under 60%. Hmmmm, interesting list.
Crocodile Soup is a weird lesbian coming of age sort of tale. I didn’t find it as weird as weird as TW did, which makes me wonder. Am I weird because it made sense to me – or is TW weird because it didn’t make sense to her?
Dysfunctional family, of course. Gert and Frank are twins. Both have some serious emotional issues, though Frank’s are just a wee bit more serious than Gert’s (and Gert’s may be more related to the dysfunctional family and her twin brother’s issues than anything else). They live in a haunted historical home. The ghost, of course, is a poet. A woman poet. A lesbian woman poet. And she drives Gert a little more nuts than her family is already driving her.
Interesting. And yes, a little weird, but not THAT weird.