It’s the story of three women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, and a fictional immigrant named Freydeh who makes condoms in her tenement apartment. Anthony Comstock’s anti-obscenity campaign effects them all.
The writing syle is very simple-- some reviewers have complained about it, but I didn’t feel it detracted from the story. It’s brain-candy, yes, but quite enjoyable. I’ve always found the Comstock era fascinating, and this is the first novel I’ve ever read highlighting his efforts and the women who fought back against his crusade against reproductive freedom.
I just finished rereading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I think I’ve read it about six times now, but I’ve lost count. It’s the story of a baptist preacher who decides to be a missionary in Africa, so he takes his wife, his four daughters and his Bible to the Belgian Congo.
The story is told from the perspective of the four girls (16-year-old Rachel, 15-year-old twins Leah and Adah, and 5-year-old Ruth May) and describes the family’s struggle to survive during the Congo’s fight for independence in the early 1960s. It’s a fascinating story and incredibly well written. I highly recommend it.
I don’t read much non-fiction, but I couldn’t put this book down – The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.
Sometimes I’ll read a review and think “I don’t need to read this – the reviewer told me all I need to know”. (I know – that’s dumb – but I’m old and running out of reading time.) The two top reviews at Amazon do a good job summarizing the book, and the causes and effects of the Dust Bowl, but you’d be shortchanging yourself if you didn’t read the whole thing. It’s heartbreaking.
And there are a couple of paragraphs in the epilogue about subsidies for cotton farmers and the overuse of irrigation from the Ogalalla Aquifer that will really piss you off, if you care anything at all about the land between the coasts.
I’ve read a lot of good books lately. I recently finished Travels in West Africa, which is Mary Kingsley’s memoirs of a few African trips. She was one of those absolutely crazy English ladies who wandered around the world in an indominatable fashion in a billion petticoats doing things as if they weren’t terrifying and life threatening and being really funny about it. She’s got an amazing sense of humor and she’s just an amazing person. I think she was the first white woman to climb Mt. Cameroon (certainly she’s the only one from her party who bothered to make it up to the top) and she spends most of her trips alone with various groups of native guides nearly getting killed all the time. (She’s looking for interesting fish and native religion mostly.) She has a great respect for the African people and doesn’t much care for missionaries.
Not long ago I finished a really good book I’d never heard of before: What Happened to Henry by Sharon Pywell. It’s about a girl-then-woman whose older brother becomes a little “odd” after their baby sister dies. See, he’s got a Japanese man living in his head…the protagonist and her younger brother spend much of their lives looking out for Henry, but he’s happier than either of them.
It’s incedibly well written for a first novel, and well deserving of the 5 star rating it currently enjoys at Amazon. I’m looking forward to her new book that comes out in May.
I am just finishing Why Michael Couldn’t Hit and Other Tales of Neurology of Sports by Harold L Klawans a professor of neurology at Rush Medical College in Chicago. Never knew how interesting neurology could be but linked to stories of great sports figures it made terrific reading. I intend to hunt down his two previous books now.
I just finished The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. Reading Atwood makes me uncomfortable at times: she’s brilliant, a truly stellar writer, don’t get me wrong. I can’t recommend any of her books enough.
But there’s so much bitterness in her writing I have to put whatever book of hers I’m reading down at points. I admit I haven’t read a lot of Atwood, but I can’t remember any character of hers that’s been genuinely tender or sweet or gentle.
Yet her characters are vivid and real, and her descriptions leave me breathless.
I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz yesterday. An ex gave it to me years ago and I never got around to it. Then recently I read Wicked (revisionist re-telling of the Witch of the West’s life story) and became obsessed with the original cast recording from the Broadway musical so I finally grabbed the source material.
I just placed The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth on the shelf, with much sadness that the book had ended. Great, great book. It started getting a little more transparent at the end, with some of the twists and turns more easily guessed at than before, but still I enjoyed it greatly.
I just read the synopsis of this, and it made me think of Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap. I give this one three stars out of five-- not the best I’ve ever read, but somewhat entertaining.
