Rainy Day Reads

I read this for the Feminist Orchestra book club and I must say I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I’m just not that into short stories as a genre, I think. It takes a while for me to get into a story and a short story is just too…, well, short for me to really get into it.  All the stories of this book are about not only women, but black women, who experience oppression based on gender AND race. I thought this perspective was interesting, but I think I would have been more engrossed if it had been told in one longer story, rather than a burst of short stories.  I thought most of the stories had an interesting point about either race or gender or both. I think the one that made me think the most was the one about porn. This story tells of a black man who enjoys porn magazines with white women. That makes his (black) wife feel like he doesn’t care for her at all. So he tries to buys magazines with black women, but that doesn’t really help, because while the whit...

This was the April pick for The Feminist Orchestra Bookclub (links below). The book is based on a a couple of lectures that Woolf gave in 1928. It basically talks about the lack of women in literature and why that is.   The main point is that any person would need a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year in order to be able to write without being disrupted and without having to think of making money to live. If these two things had been available to women throughout history there is no reason women should not have written as much “great literature” as men. But unfortunately women have historically been deprived of these things and as a result there are very few women writers.  She also writes a little about how men are afraid of women, and want to keep them down, in order to keep themselves at the top of the literary food chain, so to speak. And I think that was true in her time. Women were just beginning to get the opportunities of men as far as working, voting and ...

This book was the first pick for the Feminist Orchestra BookClub started by Jean on Bookishthoughts on Youtube. It consists of essays from 25 women under 30 on various aspect s of feminism. Interspersed are quotes from other people on the subject, so you really get a lot of different viewpoints throughout this book.   I enjoyed reading this book. The essays are quite short and between essays there are a few short quotes, so you can get through a lot of pages in a short time. I found most of the essays interesting and relevant, but there were definitely some I connected to more than others. As for the quotes, there were a few, where I didn’t really see the connection to feminism, but mostly they were quite poignant.  The essays tackle a number of different subjects form out-and-out sexism, acid attacks, religion and feminism, rape jokes, why we still need to fight, the underlying sexism in language, how girls are conditioned to care about “beauty” etc. All the es...