Women

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers

2008, Books in Bed, Fiction, Queer, Women /

My expectations for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers were not great. TW seemed “ho-hum” about it and she said it was sad. I peeked at the first few pages, shrugged, and dug in.

Next thing I knew, it was 10:30 and I had read 3/4 of the book. It was a super-fast, very easy to read book. You’d think that wouldn’t be the case since the narrator is a Chinese woman who speaks broken English – or maybe that’s what made it easier TO read. Basic broken English easier to read than proper English?

Anyway, I liked it. It’s not a favorite and I wouldn’t buy it, but I liked it. And I didn’t find it sad at all.

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Have I done this meme?

2008, Books in Bed, Meme, Women /

I’m cleaning out my feedreader and trying to block out some really bad synchronized swimming music and I see I saved this post from kperfetto from ages ago… 100 most influential women in books meme. Weird that I don’t seem to have done this meme. I wonder why. Let’s do it now, just to kill time and block out the suck.

I found this meme at the wonderful the hidden side of a leaf. These are one-hundred of the most influential books written by women. Bold the books you’ve read; bold the author’s name if you’ve read something else by her (I added “TBR” – to be read — to books I want to read):

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying 

17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife
37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved
51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession
59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

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Barefoot:A Novel

2008, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Fiction, Women /

Barefoot is chick lit and it is also cancer chick lit. Always a good combination. What I appreciated about this one was the fact that the other two women, the cancer free women, were in more trouble than the chick with the cancer. Awesome. I mean, in a novel it makes for awesome reading.

You don’t spend the whole book commiserating over the poor mom of babies who has cancer. Instead you’re distracted by the pregnant chick whose husband is a dirtbag, the young professor who not only slept with her student but damaged a Jackson Pollack and the teenage boy whose mom killed herself when he was 12. Awesome.

Also it was a little bit long. And it didn’t have chapters. It was divided by month – June, July and August and then Winter. And those summer months were long, long, long. I need chapters, darn it.

Looking for good cancer chick lit – Barefoot will fit the bill.

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Sequestered Hearts

1 Comment / 2008, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Favorites, Queer, Women /

When I picked up Sequesterd Hearts from TW’s side of the bed and asked her if she’d finished with it, she asked me why I was going to read it. I couldn’t figure out why she asked until I realized she thought it was just a trashy romance novel. It is a trashy romance novel but it is also a trashy lesbian romance novel and that’s why I wanted to read it. We lesbians just don’t get enough trashy romance in our lives, ya know?

And it was good. Fun and not depressing, and it could have been very depressing since one of the chicks is an artist recently diagnosed with MS.

I’m glad I read it.

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Me and Mr Darcy

2 Comments / 2008, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Don't Read This, Fiction, Women /

Oh brother. Why did I read Me and Mr Darcy? Oh yea, I wanted something quick and easy and light. Well this was all of those things. It was also pretty boring, pretty predictable and pretty ridiculous.

Do Jane Austen or Mr Darcy fans enjoy this sort of thing? Sassymonkey? I am pretty sure you read this but don’t remember whether you liked it or not. I sort of doubt that you did.

Yuk.

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Biting the Apple

2008, Books in Bed, Fiction, Queer, Women /

Hey! Biting the Apple was good. Surprisingly good. I was a little bit afraid it was going to be like the Mt Joy book I read last month, not that it was bad but imagining that book with a lesbian twist seemed kind of frightening. But wait, now that I’m really thinking about it – there are some strong similarities between the books.

The beautiful high school goddess turned author/personality/inspiration has a guy from high school willing to drop everything when she gets into trouble and help her out.

Interesting. Now that I think about it.

Anyway, it was good. I enjoyed it.

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The Double Bind

2008, Books in Bed, Fiction, Women /

Ya know. It’s stuff like this that makes me vow never to read another book by an author again. HMPH. Was that ending really necessary? No. It wasn’t. I don’t care that some people probably loved it. Thought it was the perfect “double bind“. I thought it stunk. Right up until the last 20 pages, I was loving the book.

I like(d) Chris Bohjalian’s books and his blog. It will be a long time before I read either. I don’t trust him anymore.

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Breathing Underwater

2008, Books in Bed, Fiction, Queer, Women /

Where did Breathing Underwater come from? I know I saw it on a blog and was pleasantly surprised that my library had it. (Another example of oddness – they have this obscure lesbian stuff but not Lauren Willig’s books.)

Anyway, it was a very fast read and more than a little odd. The drowning thing – crazy. But then again, the whole town is crazy so I guess it only makes sense. I liked Lily, bless her heart. I liked that they brought in the black lesbian to help her sort herself out. I’m glad she figured out that she and Rae didn’t want the same things.

I think I liked the book. But I didn’t love it.

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Peony in Love

2 Comments / 2008, Books in Bed, Favorites, Fiction, Women /

Way back in January when I created my From the Stacks challenge my mom sent me email (or maybe we talked on the phone?) and started questioning the books on my list. In doing so, she asked whether I had read this or read that and my response was either “No, should I” or “Duh, you don’t read my blog, do you?”

Peony in Love was one of the books she asked about. No, I hadn’t read it. Hell, I didn’t even know Lisa See had a new book. Once I found out, I reserved it. TW read it a couple of weeks ago, I finished it last night.

It was good. Not as good as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan but still very very good.

Lovesick girls. Women poets. Ghosts.

That ghost thing, particularly the hungry ghost thing, was an excellent idea for the lovesick girls/women poets story line that this book follows. Brilliant.

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