A few years ago I went through a period of collecting books from The Women’s Press. They have a great catalogue, and I loved – and continue to love – their commitment to publishing interesting and challenging women’s writing across a broad range of categories. In short, they’re awesome.

I stopped, due to the growing size of my ‘To Be Read’ pile and growing guilt about buying more books to add to it.

Now that I’m older and wiser, well… I’ve got over it. The pile is no smaller, but I’m still reading my way through at my own leisure and I’ve got to say that books from The Women’s Press tend to look interesting and bump themselves up the TBR list anyway. Besides, I like feeling like I’m supporting The Women’s Press, and am a fan of the old-school black and white striped spines. So I think it’s time that I get back into the collecting game!

To mark this decision, I’ve just picked up a copy of The Women’s Press edition of Vida by Marge Piercy, which looks like a great depiction of politics and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s. I think I’ll enjoy it.

Do any of you find that you have publishers that you warm to more than others? I find that I increasingly do. Which seems like as good a place as any to mention the new Persephone Forum, for discussion of the Persephone Books catalogue, one book at a time. I look forward to seeing people’s thoughts, and reading some more Persephones myself!

Having registered for the first ever UK Feminista Summer School I quite naturally turned my attention to my Feminist reading this year …only to realise that I hadn’t actually done any. In fact, my non-fiction reading has been terrible all round this year. Anyway, hoping to ease myself back in with something relatively light, I turned to the trusty Seal Press, and the only Seal book left on my shelf unread; Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image, a collection of thirty-eight personal essays by various writers about the issues they have with their own bodies, and their relationship with the beauty standards that society sets out.

In fact, the purpose of the book, or rather the ideology behind it, seems to be best summed up in one of the essays, where Amelia Richards, in ‘Body Image: third-wave feminism’s issue?’ argues that

Body image is significant as a rallying focus because it speaks not only to the converted but also to the “I’m not a feminist, but…I’m tired of measuring myself against an impossible-to-achieve beauty standard contingent. It can catalyze our dormant or displaced activism, primarily because it’s both a cultural and a political issue…[as]…Even young women who don’t identify as feminists offer heartfelt and complex emotions on the topic

something which I have certainly found to be true, at least in my own experience. Nevertheless, the book is not at all narrow in focus, and very few essays seem to cover ground that has already been gone over earlier in the book, and of those that do, the writers are often offering different perspectives on the same issue.

In fact, as usual in these kinds of essay collections, the contributors are varied by age, race (or rather, ethnicity, as the book is very much US-centric), and sexual orientation. Unusually for Seal Press books, however, this essay collection also contains two essays by men, one of which, ‘Size queen’, gave a really interesting perspective on the pressures to have the ‘perfect’ body that the author felt were directed at men from within the gay community in the US. However, the other essay in Body Outlaws by a man was one of only two essays in the whole book that made me profoundly uncomfortable, to the point that I really had to struggle to finish them.

I have to say, I like having my own views challenged when I am reading non-fiction; it’s my main reason for reading books like this, where you can encounter a diverse range of opinions. Nevertheless, the essay ‘Cro-Magnon Karma’ really got under my skin. I think, however, that it was at the point the author rationalized his own behaviour in not only looking at other women, while he was with his wife, but also commenting on their “amazing” bodies to her, by saying

For longer than Western society has taught men that there are required physical components for masculinity, it’s taught them that the manliest men score the most desirable women. According to this set of standards, guys whose wives and girlfriends aren’t attractive in society’s eyes are less powerful and masculine than guys whose women are trophies.

To be fair, the writer does point out that this is ridiculous thinking, and that he really shouldn’t be judging the woman who is his life partner, or his own masculine identity, by how ‘hot’ she is, but then he keeps fricking doing it! I have to say, I pretty much lost interest at this point, although I did read the essay to the end, and, apparently, it was all his wife’s fault, because she left him for a more “masculine” man when she was in her twenties, and only came back to him once she’d peaked. I might be doing the author an injustice here, but I don’t think so.

Beyond that, the only other essay that really made me uncomfortable was ‘Parisian Peel’, which affected me more through its quite graphic description of one of those incredilbly painful cosmetic ‘procedures’, where people have acid put onto their faces to peel away the top layer of their skin, than anything else. Beyond these two essays, however, I thought it was a well-balanced collection from a group of intelligent people, and several essays really made me question some assumptions I didn’t even know I had been making, such as the essay ‘Veiled Intentions’ by Maysan Hadar about her decision, as both a Muslim woman and a feminist, to cover her hair, and ‘Appraising God’s Property’ by Keesa Schreane, in which the author discusses her decision to remain a virgin until she is married. While neither writer entirely convinced me of their positions, they certainly gave me pause for thought.

Having said this, the book is not at all academic, but, rather, a very personal collection, and I suppose, therefore, that every reader will have their own reaction to the individual writers. It is also worth noting the limitations of essay collections like this; the broad focus can be counted as both a positive, in the fact that it allows such a diverse range of writers the opportunity to get their point across, and a negative, because nothing is covered in much depth, and there isn’t much scope for further research, beyond the bibliograpy at the back of the book which, despite being quite comprehensive, seemingly offers only more of the same.

Overall, though, the book was exactly what I was looking for, something that was going to give me something to think about, as well as a starting off point for working my way through some of the other books in my library. I just plan on making my next feminist read something with a bit more depth, and a stronger academic focus.

So, it’s been decided: The Lacuna is the winner of this year’s Orange Prize.

I confess to having only read one book on the shortlist, Wolf Hall, and that was before it was actually shortlisted. It’s not that I don’t like the Orange Prize, because I really do, I’ve just never been good at reading shortlists.

So total kudos to some of the book bloggers who’ve been trying to read the whole blooming longlist, and very nearly as much to those who’ve been reading the shortlist. I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, folks!

In particular, I’ve been following Kirsty at Other Stories, Buried in Print, and last but not least, Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria who already has her own choice for the winner up. I’ve really enjoyed all of their thoughts over the last few weeks, and it was on the recommendation of various book bloggers that I went out and bought The White Woman on the Green Bicycle last week, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Having said that, I’ve been excited about The Lacuna since I first knew it was coming. I’m not wealthy enough to go around splurging on hardback books, but now that it’s out in paperback, I have my very own copy of the Orange Prize winner ready to read! Others may read the longlist, still more may read the shortlist, but I shall take on the momentous of challenge of reading the – really rather long – winner. Wish me luck!

I have a long-standing love of silly comedy; top of my list would come Monty Python and, of course, the inestimable Blackadder. Looking for a short, funny read on my bookshelves, then, it was almost inevitable that I would turn to The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, with its tagline declaring it ‘a Blackadder for the high seas’. I won’t lie, it doesn’t quite come up to that standard for me, and, in any case, with it’s cast of ridiculously stupid pirates, almost equally stupid scientists (including a young Charles Darwin), wicked clergymen, and a lot of monkeys, it has more in common with Monty Python, by my reckoning. Still, it is pretty funny, if you like that kind of thing. Which I do.

The plot, such as it is, is this; the Pirates, bored with their life of ham, grog, and arguing over what exactly the best bit about being a pirate is, they are easily tricked by a long-standing adversary into attacking the Beagle, thinking it’s a Treasury ship. Of course, it’s not, and the Pirates end up agreeing to help Darwin, whose theory of evolution apparently consists, at this point, of believing

that a monkey, properly trained, given the correct dietary regime, and dressed in fancy clothes, can be made indistinguishable from a human gentleman. I believe he would cease to be a monkey, and become more a …a Man-panzee

and whose brother has been abducted by the Bishop of Oxford, who has some pretty hinky schemes of his own going on. Suffice it to say, it carries on in much the same way, and the pirates soon find themselves in London, attempting to foil the dastardly Bishop’s plans. It’s hardly intellectual stuff.

In fact, I quite often found myself getting exasperated with the constant puns, but whenever I got to the point of putting the book down, I’d find myself laughing out loud at something, and it would keep me reading for another few pages, up to the point where I would start to get exasperated again, and then the whole process would start all over again. It’s not high literature, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but, after reading quite a few books recently that, however good they were, ended sadly, it was nice to read something that was simply silly, light-hearted fun.

I don’t know if I will ever read the other three Pirates! books that Gideon Defoe has written, but I think reading The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists was a great way to spend a couple of sunny hours in the garden, and is the perfect way to refresh your reading palate, so to speak, after writing essays, and reading nothing but “serious” literature for a while.

With some books I find that I react to them in quite a visual way, which often seems to be because I’m emotionally involved in the book and find it particularly evocative. It’s quite a personal reaction. Manja by Anna Gmeyner is one of those books that’s done that for me.

I missed out on Persephone Reading Week recently, mostly because I hadn’t heard of Persephone books until I read about them in relation to that project. When I became clued-in as to what it was all about, though, I looked through their fascinating catalogue and skipped out to buy a copy of this book.

It’s about a group of 5 children in Germany in the inter-war years with the book alternating between focus on the group of friends, and the adults who form part of their world and their own stories (starting with the conception of each of the children). The eponymous Manja is at the heart of the group, and the book in a more general sense. It’s a book that really resonated with me. I do think that it’s wonderful, although hard to read.

Really what I want to do, though, is a little experiment: a ‘visual response’ to the book. I’ll preface this with the immediately obvious fact that I am no artist, not even a little bit. And I’m not trying to be: I don’t think you can create high art from an hour or so of ‘picture collage’ and a few Google image searches (or maybe you can, but I really can’t); but I don’t think that stops us from trying to explore our own relation to a book through the medium of pictures!

So here goes…

After tinkering around in Photoshop for a while, this is what I came up with. It’s just touches of the colours, the images, the structure that I took from the book. It’s somewhat representative, for instance with the inclusion of ‘the wall’, which is where the children gather, but it’s far from a replica of the story – no spoilers!

As you’d expect during the period in which this covers (1930s Germany), the young boys are part of Hitler Youth. This has always been an aspect of Nazi Germany that I’ve found sinister and distressing. This is a picture from the German Federal Archive of a branch of Hitler Youth meeting with Goring on his birthday. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-16515 / unknown / CC-BY-SA)

There are a few locations that are really important in the book, and one of them is a bridge which features several times. I don’t know what it looks like, but I don’t think it was wholly unlike this: the Ludendorf bridge, near Reimagen taken from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s just a few of the things which continued to have an impact on me after I put the book down, but perhaps it’s a little insight into the tone of the book. At any rate, I enjoyed it!

Studying The Cherry Orchard towards the end of last year, I found out that, in some quarters, Chekhov is actually more highly regarded as a short story writer than he is as a playwright. There were even comparisons to Guy de Maupassant, arguably regarded as one of the most, if not the most, accomplished short story writer ever. With that in mind, then, there was really no contest to which book I would choose to read first when the Penguin Great Loves collection arrived in my letterbox; hands down, it was going to be the selection of Chekhov’s short stories, A Russian Affair, and so I set to reading the short volume with gay abandon. Only to be horribly, horribly disappointed.

I will accept some of the blame for this; my expectations were far too high. The stories in A Russian Affair are also, to be honest, by no means bad. They are, like Chekhov’s plays, well-written, and full of touches of ironic humour, ridiculous characters, and genuine pathos. Having said that, the similarity with the plays was actually one of my main problems with the book, as, like with the plays, I found it incredibly difficult to sympathise to any great extent with any of the characters. While this doesn’t really impinge upon my enjoyment of the plays, however, where my interest in finding out what happens to various people, and the comic depiction of their various foibles, carries me along, on the smaller canvas that a short story provides it really lessened the enjoyment I found in reading the book when I couldn’t dredge up any empathetic feelings for the characters.

The second problem I had with the selection of stories in A Russian Affair was that it almost became like reading the same story again and again; there is a male central character, he falls in love, or thinks he does, something makes him reconsider or holds him back, and he moves on or disappears. The same depressing pattern, over and over again. Similarly, there was something about Chekhov’s characters that almost made it seem as if they had been popped out from a mould, and I found that quite irritating. Part of me feels like I am being too harsh, but looking at the book again, only two out of the five stories even offer a variation on a theme; the other three seem to end in almost exactly the same way.

Nevertheless, I refuse to post an entirely negative review, and, despite all I have said, A Russian Affair doesn’t deserve one. As I said before, Chekhov’s writing is wonderfully clear and unsentimental, and, even though, for me, that tone didn’t work for these “love” stories, I could see it working well in stories with a different theme, and I would not rule out reading more Chekhov short stories in the future. I am also willing to admit that this collection may well have suffered from a comparison with the generally excellent books that I read in May. Nevertheless, A Russian Affair is not a book I will be recommending to people, but if you’re a passionate fan of Chekhov’s plays, and, unlike me, you really feel you connect with his characters, then there is probably much you will enjoy in this thin volume of stories. It just really wasn’t for me.

In place of a Wednesday Waffle, I want to point out a great post on Racialicious today on literature of colour, and I recommend giving it a read.

I personally think it’s fairly clear that the reading and writing of literature is not free from questions of race (or other political issues); creativity does not happen within a social and cultural vacuum, and expectations and assumptions inform the activities of both writers and those responding to their work.

Having read through the comments as well, I would certainly second the commenters in recommending Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which is an excellent novel touching on these themes. Having said that, I haven’t yet read anything of Toni Morrison’s that I didn’t love, and I’m still wanting more. So I think I’m going to take some time out to send a little book-love to her today. Can’t wait until I find her most recent novel in a charity shop (bookshop books are going to be out of my price range for a while)!

I’m sometimes a bit fussy about reading classic, well-known texts. I feel that there’s so much pressure on me to like them, to take something meaningful from them, so I really do have to be in the right mood for such a book. If I’m feeling in the slightest bit contrary (which is the case most of the time), it’s just not going to happen.

This is why it took me a while to read The Second Sex (which I read when I was 21 after having had it on my shelves for a good three years), and it’s why I didn’t read bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman until last week, after a couple of years of having my copy.

While written in 1981, this book still feels like a powerful and relevant part of feminist writing. The text – which draws particularly on American society and history – deals with the ways in which both racism and sexism have worked together to oppress black women. In this light, feminism as practised by white, middle-class feminists who are keen to keep racial and feminist struggles clearly delineated and separate (as were many black male civil rights campaigners) weren’t able to capture the different ways in which sexism impacts women of different races and classes.

Certainly while I acknowledge that the specifics of the book can be seen to be American-focused, the principles of the book have far wider applicability, and inclusion and respect for others’ viewpoints – including really hearing what those with other perspectives have to say – is something that it is worth continuing to keep working at within the feminist community. In particular, one of the excellent points that can be taken from bell hooks is that it’s neither possible nor desirable to separate ‘sexism’ from other forms of prejudice and hatred that operate in contemporary society and politics. This is something that we need to keep on focusing on within our own feminism.

I’m well-aware that as a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, white feminist I have a huge amount of privilege, but as I keep learning and reading (and there are some truly excellent blogs and books out there) I become more aware of the interconnections. The issues aren’t separate. For instance, sexism operates very nicely, hand-in-hand, with gender dualism and enforcing of gender roles on men and women (the only two appropriate options in this worldview): this obviously has a very specific impact on those who define, in whatever way, as LGBT. While I may reject sexism, I fit a lot of stereotyped notions (on the surface, at least): and that sexism is not something that I can separate out from the double-whammy of prejudice that hits others. It doesn’t really work to reject one aspect of this prejudice and leave the rest. We need to keep taking it on back a step, getting to the roots of it. There, I think we’ll find, that cisgender prejudice, homophobia, ableism, racism, and many other things, truly are feminist issues.

The writing in Ain’t I A Woman is incredibly forceful. There are several passages that continued to resonate with me after I’d put the book down – and I finished it a week ago! – and that I hope will keep me thinking. In a chapter entitled “The Imperialism of Patriarchy,” hooks writes:

As people of color, our struggle against racial imperialism should have taught us that wherever there exists a master/slave relationship, an oppressed/oppressor relationship, violence, mutiny, and hatred will permeate all elements of life. There can be no freedom for black men as long as they advocate the subjugation of black women. There can be no freedom for patriarchal men of all races as long as they advocate subjugation of women. Absolute power for patriarchs is not freeing. The nature of fascism is such that it controls, limits, and restricts leaders as well as the people fascists oppress. Freedom […] as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be a complete reality when our world is no longer racist or sexist.

Equally, in a chapter on “Racism and Feminism,” in which hooks examines the racism of white feminists:

Every women’s movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been built on a racist foundation – a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement. The first white women’s rights advocates were never seeking social equality for white women. Because many 19th century white women’s rights advocates were also active in the abolitionist movement, it is often assumed they were anti-racist. […] In contemporary times there is a general tendency to equate abolitionism with a repudiation of racism. In actuality, most white abolitionists, male and female, though vehement in their anti-slavery protest, were totally opposed to granting social equality to black people.

An important part of feminism is continuing to challenge: not just sexism that is external to us, but the privileges and prejudices that may be internal to us. This is a challenging book, and it should be, and it’s a book that should be read. Working against racism (beyond and within the feminist movement) demands more than including one black woman as part of a panel discussion, it’s about a fundamental reworking of our approaches to feminism and racism, and that’s an ongoing process. Part of that, for me, is going to be to continue reading blogs, and books such as this. As this is the ‘famous’ text, it’s easy to forget that bell hooks wrote other books, but she did, and I certainly plan to look some more out.

This book is applicable for the Women Unbound challenge.

Courtesy of Feministing, I just can’t resist posting this video of utmost genius featuring the Bronte sisters as action powerhouses, fighting sexist oppression of the publishing industry with book boomerangs! Marvel as they take on sexist publishers everywhere!

I don’t think you can truly appreciate Jane Eyre until you’ve seen… Brontesaurus!

It’s another waffle! It’s been all go at this end lately, so I’ve actually read a couple of books that I just haven’t had a chance to review, but a nice waffle is a pretty good way to wind down on a Wednesday night.

The next book on the list is… 564!

I picked up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise in a charity shop a while ago and it’s been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile. Abelard and Heloise had a relationship way back in the early 12th century. Abelard was a well-known teacher, theologian and philosopher in the Middle Ages and Heloise was initially his pupil, but notable for her own intelligence, and had a particular gift for languages.

As with all well-known love affairs, it was not to be, and when separated after their secret marriage they became a monk and a nun respectively (Heloise later became an abbess).

This is a collection of their letters from early in their relationship, continuing for many years. The interest really lies in the force of their personalities and intelligence. There’s something quite appealing about being able to follow through a series of letters between two people exploring ideas. And I confess that a big part of the interest for me is Heloise. Abelard is undoubtedly a fascinating character, but women’s intelligence and their contributions during that time are very much sidelined in historical writing, and Heloise’s life and sharp mind is particularly fascinating.

Incidentally, if anybody is interested in reading about women in the Middle Ages, I really enjoyed Henrietta Leyser’s book Medieval Women: Social History Of Women In England 450-1500: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500.

It’s actually a really interesting period of history and my reading around it is quite sketchy, particularly fiction: I can’t think of any fiction set in the medieval period! So I’m going to open the floor up and see if anybody has any good recommendations?