The Girl Who Was on Fire is what I’d consider “literary criticism light” — it’s not so theoretical that it’s dense or hard to read, but it’s not simple enough that I’d already considered all of the arguments in the essays. I really enjoyed exploring the series again through a more critical lens — a lens I couldn’t find myself when I read and reread the books.
Book Review
Two Sentence Summary: At the age of 72, Mary Delany invented the art of collage after seeing a geranium petal fall to the table. This is the story of how she got there.
One Sentence Review: The images of flowers and beautifully descriptive writing make this book an enjoyable read, even when some parts of the story feel extraneous.
Why I Read It: I think the cover really grabbed me when I first saw it, and I loved the idea of reading a book about a person who found her calling late in life.
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is a memoir — series of essays, really — about a woman told through the relationships with the men in her life. Through essays about her son, father, first husband, second husband, friend, and the Satanist that lives downstairs (among others), Diana Joseph explores what its like to be a women based on the different relationships she has with men.
When I read Jennifer Pozner’s Reality Bites Back, a feminist critique of reality television, I finally felt like I was reading a book that got what I’ve been trying to say. And although the book is focused specifically on reality television, I think Posner’s methods of analysis and conclusions can apply equally well to other forms of popular entertainment.
I’ve been in some sort of funk the last couple of weeks. I mostly blame it on the weather — we had a few nice days, and then Mother Nature decided to smack everyone in the face with a sleeting/raining/snow storm on April 19 that caused my car to get stuck. In April! I was not at all pleased. But even with that, it’s just been an out-of-sorts week or two, so earlier this week I was looking for a book to pull me out of the funk.
I had a lot of options, but I ended up grabbing a copy of Erin Blakemore’s The Heroine’s Bookshelf, which I’ve had on my shelves for awhile now. A book about literary heroines seemed like the kind of book that could potentially cheer me
In the summer of 1945, Marjorie Hart and her friend Marty, two sorority girls from the University of Iowa, decide to go to New York to find work for the summer as shopgirls. They are turned away from all the top department stores they visit, yet through a little bit of luck and a lot of pluck, they are hired at Tiffany & Co. — the first women ever hired to work on the sales floor. Summer at Tiffany is the story of that surprising summer.
One of my very favorite things is sitting down and planning to read just a few chapters of a book, but getting so wrapped up in the story that I just end up finishing the whole thing.That’s what happened to me yesterday with Melissa Coleman’s memoir This Life is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone. I started it after I got home from the Farmer’s Market in the morning, and four hours later I was finished with the book and left with no coherent sentences to explain how amazing it was, just a few words I jotted at the end of my notes: “Ominous, elegant, honest, relevant, evocative… just beautiful.”
One Sentence Summary: A powerful smallpox epidemic in the United States at the turn of the century brought out complicated questions about public health and civil liberties that we are still grappling with today.
One Sentence Review: While I thought the focus and topic of Pox were interesting, the book read frustratingly slowly for me.
One Sentence Summary: “What is the apocalypse comes gently, this memorable book asks, not with a bang or blaze but with the silence of refrigerator no longer buzzing and the ‘fuzzy dandelions of candlelight floating past the curtains’?” — Rebecca Tuhus-Durrow, The New York Times Book Review.
One Sentence Review: Wildgren’s book is set in a slightly unfamiliar Madison, which was one if the most interesting aspects for me, but leaves me unsure about what others might think of the book.
While I suspect there is at least one more group — people who actually have no interest in poetry — I consider myself to be a person in Orr’s second category. I’ve read poetry, and I have some poems that I enjoy, but I don’t feel like a poetry conversationalist nor someone who could intelligently recommend poetry to another reader. In that sense, I think I was an ideal read for Beautiful & Pointless, which I nerdily read in one sitting on a Friday night (I know, I lead an exciting life).
