Women Unbound

So the Women Unbound reading challenge is finished. I must admit, that  like many participants, no doubt, I started off with more energy that I could maintain. I did, however, manage to read lots of books, even if I didn't blog about them. I did blog about a few, but lately I am finding it hard to find motivation to blog at all. Of course, I am also finding it hard to find time to read.  But I did complete the challenge, which is nice, although I am a Bluestocking, rather than a Suffragette.  ( I think, really I lost count!) That is because I was reading books by men as well, and a few young adult novels, in order to keep up with the kids' books, so we can talk about those. Actually, I wonder if I can include Halo, by Zizou Corder. It is about a young girl, raised by Centaurs, disguised as a boy in the war with Sparta, and there are some Amazons thrown in for good measure. Nice adventure book with a female lead.  So I think I will count it.  Thanks to the women who organized the challenge. I am already thinking what reading challenge I will do next year, although I may decide life is challenging enough. :-)

Joyce Sutphen

So the poetry book that I asked my mother to get for me arrived. It is Joyce Sutphen's 2010 collection, First Words.

I must say that I am really enjoying it. I haven't read it all yet, but it resonates within me on many levels. There are poems recollecting her childhood, poems about her parents, poems about her children. And I just guess that I am in a space where I can look at all of these things. I am now old enough where I can look at my childhood and adolescence without the anger that I felt for a long time. I was adolescent for a very long time. I blamed everything on....whatever there was. I didn't grow up on a farm like Joyce Sutphen did. I didn't have an idyllic childhood, I just had a normal childhood. There were good things and bad things, and I like remembering the good things. Like cookies with coloured sugar on them, playing tennis in the street, making a situpon at Brownies, and feeling that I could go anywhere on my bike.

Being a liberal minded teen in midwest America was crap, but we will save that for another day's recollections.

For today, here is one of the poems, called Krinkletop Cookies

What was nice about that recipe
was that it didn't require eggs
and that it was something my mother's

mother's grandmother made. "Krinkletops,"
we called them, close to what my great-great-
grandmother called them in the Old World.

I always measured the sugar first
(white, scooped from the bin),
then added lard from the crock

and dark molasses poured out
in a mahogany ribbon.  Then flour,
sifted with ginger, cloves,

cinnamon, and soda to make
a sweet and spicy smell, which was
another nice thing about that recipe-

that and the pleasure of rolling
dough into balls (dipped in sugar
and pressed down on the cookie sheet)

and seeing the righteous hills
rise up and collapse into rows
of cracked and krinkle sugar deserts.


When I read this, I remember rolling cookies into dough balls myself, and realizing what it meant to roll them about the size of a  walnut. For some reason, I thought that that  knowledge made me grown up. :-) We had a walnut tree in our back garden, so why I didn't know what walnut sized meant was a mystery. Maybe it was because to me, walnuts were big green things that fell off  of that tree. (The tree had boards nailed it so I could climb, and it also had fuzzy caterpillars every spring.)

I remember making Snickerdoodles, rolling them in sugar and cinnamon.
I remember making sugar cookies and flattening them with a glass that had been dipped in sugar.
I remember flattening out those rolled dough balls with a fork, making a criss cross design, and sprinkling on the green and red coloured sugar for Christmas bake sales. We were always baking for bake sales.

I remember pumpkin cookie cutters for Halloween, Raggedy Ann and Andy cookie cutters for fun, and heart shaped cookie cutters for Valentine's day, and more red sugar crystals on the hearts.

I miss the coloured sugar.

Gladys Reunited by Sandi Toksvig

A review for Women unbound. Sort of.

Read this a few weeks ago, but haven't had time to blog recently -which is a shame, because I do think a lot, and wish I could record my thoughts. However, it is hard to write when one is lactating, gardening, cooking, falling down the stairs, driving, reading, knitting, crocheting, playing games and visiting. :-) So life isn't boring, just my blog is. :-)

I absolutely love this book by Sandi Toksvig. I haven't got time to write all the reasons I like it, but here is a bit of info. It is part travel diary, part nostalgia holiday, part cultural observation. Sandi Toksvig spent part of her childhood in the States, and this book is about her going back to find a group of women with whom she had been close in high school. It is lighthearted in parts, and can be read to just pass the time.

It is also about her search for her own identity; Danish? American? British? And this is the part that meant a lot to me. I have now spent half my life in America, and half in England. I feel fundamentally American, and yet not all. I am brash, loud, direct, confident, and fat, which means I am very American. I am also apologetic yet superior, which means I am British. :-)

At the end of the book, Sandi applies for her British passport. And although I haven't the time or energy to write more of a review, it has inspired me to do the same. :-)

John Taylor Gatto article

Go read this    http://www.countercurrents.org/gatto090210.htm
And then go read everything he has ever written. And then read John Holt. And then take your kids out of school because schools are horrid, crushing places where you learn how crap life is, and that you should do as you are told and don't learn how how to fulfill your potential or be a content human being.

Love In a Headscarf by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

I am not sure whether this counts as a womens studies book or not - for the purpose of Women Unbound. It is non fiction, a diary type book but not academic. Introspective- yes; Intellectual - no; which is fine because it more about the author's spiritually lead journey of self discovery more anything. 

I am glad I read it, but I am not sure I enjoyed it. There was a lot of repitition, but I think that is because what the author had to say was so important to her that she kept saying it. The other problem I had is that although I want to try to understand her, I have no faith. I do not believe in any god, so it is hard for me to relate to her journey. Except I do have a deep sense of personal morality, and try very hard to live my life authentically, honestly and with integrity, (don't I sound pompous?) so that a lot of what she writes does make sense. I do think that what she writes is sometimes profound, (it is also sometimes trite,) and that there are a lot of things that would be familiar to anybody who has done any sort of therapy, self examination or 'trying to find oneself.' It is just that her self examination happens within the context of her faith. 

The books starts out about a young Muslim woman who is beginning to look for a husband. It is not about a woman desparate to pair up, but who acknowledges that that is what most of us want, so why not admit it and go for it? She explains the process as it happens in her culture very clearly, although I did feel that I was sometimes in an Islamic Studies lecture. I don't think there is anyway around that as a writer. There were things I didn't know, and she was informing me.

Her family and community are very involved in the process of helping her to meet eligible young men. She tells of many meetings some of which just made me cringe. What a process to have to go through! Apparently there are a lot of rude young Muslim men out there...but then again, maybe their families are coercing them into the process of looking for a wife as well. I found it rather telling that she eventually marries a man she has met at an event where they obviously share a common interest.

But the point of the book is not her search for marriage, as she tells it. It is more of a search for who she is, which is a question that she has to answer in order to answer  the next one, "Who do I want to marry?" She is not a woman waiting for a man to define her. She does talk a bit about her choices, and feminism, and how so many people seem to think that her role as a Muslim woman, and her decision to wear hijab means that she is either oppressed or a religious fanatic. This is something that seems to come from within her community as well as without. And it is something with which I quite agree.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I find it ridiculous that western society would see the hijab as a sign of oppression, but not see page three girls in the same light. Both pictures illustrate a history of sexual control of women. In some cultures where religion is the dominant force, women are oppressed. They are forced to cover up, so as not to be sexually available to men in general. But men still control them. In some western cultures, women are expected TO BE sexually available to men. This is called sexual liberation, but this kind of freedom is not liberty in any true sense. Being able to make the choice about your actions is closer to liberty than being free to conform to your culture's expectations regarding your sexuality. However, I do acknowledge that there are accusations of  indoctrination from feminists, that women make some decisions because they have been brainwashed. I don't accept that. Or rather, I do accept that, but think it is less important than feeling as though you have made your own choices. The important thing when you make a decision, is how you feel about it. Our choices are based on our own experiences, and others should not deem to tell us why we think what we think. I recently read an article in the National Geographic on the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, in other words, the Mormons who practise polygomy). A lot of women choose that life. They choose it because it offers them something. It doesn't benefit everybody, and problems arise if somebody wants to leave, but is prevented from doing so. Again, it comes down to choice. I find it very easy to believe that Shelina would choose to wear hijab, and could still be a thinking, whole human being, who is not oppressed.

Anyway, back to the book. One of the things which I found to be an important point in this book, was Janmohamed's ability to seperate culture and religion. I hate the fact that mainstream western media presents us with a narrowly defined view of the rest of the world. Muslim women are those ones dressed in black, living in the desert, crying to Allah because another bomb has just gone off. While this is a tragedy, it isn't the only reality, any more than those Amish women dressed in black and white riding in horse drawn buggies in Pennsylvania are the only reality for Christian women.  Or the ones dressed skimpily in too high heels, getting pissed on a Friday night is the only reality for young urban women.

I actually found a lot of what she had to say important. "...the rules of my culture had told me to pursue marriage at all costs and to subsume my own mind and instincts to the process. Instead, I should have trusted my fitrah, the inner conscience that the Creator has put into each of us to recognise what is right, and to assert what is our due...My right was to be treated with courtesy. My culture has belittled the self-respect I should have had for myself. On the other hand I saw that my religion offered respect to me, telling me to trust that voice inside myself." p 98

Having said that, I am still not sure about this book. I think it probably could have been half the length and said the same thing. Perhaps her intent was to lure in the reader with a hint that the story was about romantic love, and then sort of introduce her message. I don't particularly like her writing style, which is not really a style at all. I found myself jumping over paragraphs and skimming a lot, as it did get a bit boring at places. It is all the thoughts that she had on her journey, presented to us as it was a journey. These thought were all part of her process, but we each have different journeys to make, and reading about somebody else's was a bit tedious.  I probably would have preferred her to present her ideas in a more direct and concise manner. But then again, that's just me. :-)

Loving Che

This is another one of those books that I just happened to pick up at the library, and which turns out to be wonderful. Perhaps it is because I had no expectations, having never read anything by the author, Ana Menendez. I picked it up thinking it would be good for the Women Unbound reading challenge, and because we had just watched the films Che part 1 and Che part 2.

It is the story of a young woman who has grown up in Miami, raised by her grandfather, who fled with her from Cuba. After her grandfather dies, she tries to find her mother. The novel is not about the search, or the yearning, but is about the stories of the two women, her and her mother Teresa.

The book begins and ends with the nameless young woman. The middle of the book is Teresa's story. Ana Menendez does a wonderful job of giving these women their own voices. And the language is beautiful. The prose is very poetic, romantic, fluid, without being mushy or sentimental. I really enjoyed reading it just because the words were so nice to read.

I don't want to give too much away, because I want to recommend this book. It is a quick read and leaves you with some things to think about, as you don't really know what to believe at the end. There is not much political discussion, which seems odd in a book about Che Guevera, but the revolution is there, in the periphery, which almost makes it more real.

I will definitely be having a look for some more Ana Menendez works.

The Independece of Miss Mary Bennet

     So the first book I read for my Women Unbound reading challenge was The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough.  I  quite like Colleen McCullough, as one of my favourite short novels is The Ladies of Missalonghi.  And this one sounded great as it was picking up where Pride and Prejudice left off. Well, actually it picks up 20 years later; Darcy and Elizabeth have 5 children but are not happily married, Kitty is a rich widow, Jane and Bingley are happy enough,  Lydia is a drunken whore basically, who is widowed during the story, while Mary has been left to look after Mrs Bennet, since the death of Mr Bennet.

The story starts off rather brusquely. Mrs Bennet dies in the first couple of pages, and Mary is immediately taken with the idea of being independent and doing her own thing.  I think one of the problems I have had with this book is that we don't have enough of an idea of how miserable Mary's life has been. A chapter on life with mother would have been a good idea to remind us of how detestable Mrs Bennet had become. And then a general realisation for Mary that she could change her situation was needed. But instead, we end up with what amounts to a girl's adventure story.

If you are looking for a light read, and like Jane Austen and happy endings, then you may like this story. I think it is perfectly entertaining should you want to be entertained. But because I had higher expectations, which came from the title of the book, I was slightly disappointed.  Most of the characters are not recognizable. There are too many things which are simply unbelievable and too many coincidences, and too much of a nice wrapped up ending.

Elizabeth and Darcy appear to hate each other, Darcy regretting ever marrying her and detesting their only son. But in the end they love each other again and have even discovered a happy sex life for the first time in their marriage. Darcy realizes that he has a worthy grown up son and realizes he loves his family so much that he gives up his ambitions to become Prime Minister. Jane doesn't mind that Bingley has a 'mulatto' lover and child when he goes away to the West Indies to see to his business. Actually, we never see him in the story. Darcy has a black half brother (Ned) whom he loves but does not acknowledge until the end. Turns out his father was really a blaggard and a thief (literally) whose gold turns up in the end of the story, having been hidden in the hills by a crazy zealot who just happens to kidnap Mary.  Of course the kidnapping of Mary is perhaps the most OTT thing about this book. She sets off on her adventures, to travel and to write a book about the poor and immediately gets robbed and left for dead, then found by Ned, only to be kidnapped by the crazy zealot (forget his name and book has gone back to the library); but it is all ok because there is subsidence which means she can escape from her cell at just the right time. Oh, and then she can go and marry the man who has fallen in love with her, Angus, who just happens to be the same man she reads in the newspaper who writes anonymously about radical ideas.  All too neat and tidy, in spite of the inappropriate lanquage and actions, ie Mary and Angus having sex before they were married and after she says she wouldn't mind getting married if they didn't have to have sex. Oh yes, and the 4 Darcy girls are all cured of their little annoying habits as well.

I suppose the book was very Jane Austen in the happy ending bit, but not very Jane Austen as it definitely was not a story of manners. There were lots of references to sex and sexuality which made it more modern, but it wasn't even a book about sexual independence or sexual awakening, like Kate Chopin's The Awakening. They just said rude things and behaved in ways that didn't go with their characters. I was rather hoping for a more introspective novel, about womens situations, about poverty and class, about identity. I wasn't expecting it to be more Jane Austen, but rather an evolution from Jane Austen's characters. Instead it left all the good bits of Austen, and went off somewhere rather odd.

Read it on holiday, but not if you want something revelatory or thoughtful.

Hmmmmm.....

Just finished reading Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man and I am left wondering why. It is a good enough story, but never really gets off the ground. Maybe that is the point, because Alex-Li's life never really gets off the ground. But now that I have finished it, I feel cheated, and disappointed. Was going to go back and read White Teeth, which I gave up on the first time I tried. Not so sure now. Maybe I will go straight for Mrs Dalloway again, and get started on some Women Unbound reading. Or maybe I will use my time to actually finish knitting something!!!

Resolutions

My New Years resolutions are to read more books (women unbound) and to knit more garments. But since I am typing this with one hand with a baby in my arms, I wonder how I shall do either of these? :-)

knitting and sitting

I am not knitting anything at the moment because I can't sit down. I have had a boil on my bottom, (comical, yet oh so painful) for some weeks now and finally went to the hospital to have it lanced yesterday. Since I cannot knit lying down, I have been reading.
The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffennegger)
The Book Thief (Markus Zusack)
Gabriel's Gift (Hanif Kureshi)
Wish you were Here (Mike Gayle)
The Distant Land of my Father (Bo Caldwell)
I believe there was a Bill Bryson in there, and Orson Scott Card, and some Jane Austen, all being reread.
So at least my brain is working, even if my bum isn't. :-)