What Are You Reading in JULY?

New month, new thread.

I'm about halfway through Deborah Anna Logan's The Hour and the Woman, already it's absolutely astounding, and I haven't even started the (for me) best chapter yet.

Although this is in some ways a "biography" of Harriet Martineau, it's more of a thematic study as well as a study of Martineau's relationship to her times and to the women of her times. (This latter subject, "the women of her times," comes up in chapter five, which I haven't started yet, although of course I've cheated and read the section on Charlotte Brontë. ;->)

Martineau, though a very independent woman, was also fond of "domesticity," and the second chapter uses the metaphor of "the needle and the pen" to approach Martineau's youth (also covered in the first chapter as to her childhood and Unitarianism, which she later abandoned in favor of deistic humanism) as well as to consider her lifelong love for the "domestic" art of needlework, at the same time considering the significance of needlework in women's economic lives as well as references to it in contemporary fiction. The third chapter ("America's Martyr Age") considers Martineau's lifelong abolitionism and her great influence as a journalist in influencing British public opinion in favor of the North during the American Civil War.

The first half of the fourth chapter, which I'm currently reading, deals extensively with Martineau's early work, her serialized Illustrations of Political Economy, which illustrated classical economics (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo) through popular narrative fiction which had a significant influence on the Victorian "social novel." The second half of chapter four, which I'm just about to start, will address Martineau's non-fictional journalism of social reform.

The fifth chapter, as I've already mentioned, covers Martineau's relationships with and reactions toward such writers as Mary Wolstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as activists and social reformers like Florence Nightingale. The sixth chapter, it seems deals with Martineau's letters.

I'll be reposting this (with expansions for chapters four through six) as a review when I finish the book later this week.

I am reading Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. I am enjoying it so far. The narrative is through the eyes of a young British settler on Martha's Vineyard in the 1600s. So far, the themes concern loyalty, love and the question of whether it matters if you worship the ONE GOD or the many gods of nature as the native american indians do.

I love her writing, although Year of Wonders was brutally painful. My favorite is still People of the Book. Apparently Caleb's Crossing is based on a true story also.

k4k

Krazy, I liked "People of the Book," too (not "Year of Wonders" so much). Brooks is a journalist, and that may be why she's drawn to real stories.

CurrerBell, wow! That book sounds really interesting!

CurrerBell, I'd never even heard of Harriet Martineau. That looks very interesting.
I'm reading 2 books by women right now: The Whip by Karen Kondazian about a woman who grew up an orphan in the 1800's leading a very hard life and learning a great deal about horses. After a violent tragedy she moves to gold rush California, lives as a man and gets a career as a wagon driver or whip. I believe it is based on a true story. I also started the first of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy which is about a man who becomes insane enough to question the sanity of war so is sent to a psychiatrist to be curred so he can return to WWI.
I finished Martian Chronicles which was the first science fiction book I ever read. I loved it so much when I read it the first time, Ray Bradbury had such a great imagination, yet he seemed unable to imagine a world with the existence of sexual equality. Every women in the book is passive. What a pity. Of course, he did write it in the 1950's America. I guess he couldn't transcend the culture. Anyway, this is why I no longer read science fiction, I read only feminist science fiction. It's much better on my blood pressure.

I'm reading the marvellous Diary of a Provincial Lady for my A Month of Rereads in July project. Oh, it's good.

A Month of Rereads sounds delightful--like renting a villa somewhere restful and having a nice long holiday with old friends.

I'm reading Angel for the Virago group's Elizabeth Taylor July book. It's an excellent read so far.

Marissa - it is delightful. Here's my book pile! http://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/a-month-of-re-reading-in-july-my-c...

I'm about halfway through Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, off-and-on in between continued reading of The Hour and the Woman. I'll probably get them both wrapped up in the next day or two, considering that the heat wave we've got in the Philadelphia area won't allow me to do any yardwork. <boo-hoo-hoo> But Nightwood's one of those books that's going to require multiple readings, much like (although much more difficult than) The Brontës Went to Woolworths.

Like CurrerBell, it's too hot to be anywhere but hunkered down with a spray bottle of cold water and some iced coffee. We don't usually get enough heat in a Michigan summer to warrant a/c, but I'm starting to re-think that!

Halfway through The Semi-Attached Couple. I think the tone owes more to Thackery than Austen; some of these people are just dreadful. But it does make you think about what a crapshoot marriage must have been two or three centuries ago.

Also finished listening to Cranford, which I enjoyed. The notion of a town virtually run and populated by women was engaging ... and clearly engaged Gaskell. FWIW, this was one of the better Librivox recordings.

10>> Cranford's one of my all-time favorites, just like The Country of the Pointed Firs with its wonderful character of Almira Todd, and the two of them resemble each other in being episodic character studies more so than linearly plotted narratives (although Cranford's a fair bit more linear than Pointed Firs). The Cranford miniseries (although I've only seen the first season) was wonderfully acted, and Eileen Atkins especially deserved her Emmy, but as a purist I don't like the script that slushed in material from My Lady Ludlow and Mr. Harrison's Confessions. Nothing against either of those other Gaskell works, mind you, but they were a distraction from the older women, especially with Mr. Harrison's youthful romance.

I just downloaded The Country of the Pointed Firs. Never read anything by SO Jewett.

12>> Wanna read EVERYTHING by Jewett? For anyone interested, there's the absolutely magnificent Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project run by Professor Terry Heller of Coe College, Iowa. Well, it's not exactly "everything," because there's assumed to be some Jewett material that was only published in periodicals and has yet to be rediscovered, but it's very nearly complete, in contrast with the skimpy one-volume Library of America edition, and even includes Jewett's poetry.

Another writer born and raised in Maine, who as a young girl met Jewett and was very much influenced by her, was Mary Ellen Chase, who for twenty-nine years was an English professor at Smith College, where a residential dormitory is named after her, located right across from or next to the residential dormitory named after her lifelong companion and fellow Smith College professor, the medievalist Eleanor Duckett. Chase's students at Smith included Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Sylvia Plath, and Betty Friedan. Although her tenure at Smith brought her to Northampton MA, her novels were very much centered on Maine. My own favorite is The Edge of Darkness, which (like Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs) is more an episodic collection of character sketches than a linear novel. Personally, I see Chase as something of a bridge between Jewett and today's Carolyn Chute and Elizabeth Strout.

No, I'm from Philadelphia, not Maine, but I've made several photographic expeditions all through Maine and that's given me an interest in Maine literature.

"Wanna read EVERYTHING by Jewett?"

I dunno. Lemme do "Country of the Pointed Firs" first. :-)

I enjoy both Chute and Strout. I was given two or three copies of Olive Kitteridge because several friends read it simultaneously and said I was the title character.

I think I might have better taste in clothes than Olive, and I live in Michigan, but an awful lot of that was on the money.

I'm not sure why I've resisted Jewett; I read Cather a couple decades ago, and I spent a whole year reading everything I could find.

Alas, those days when you could be a professor at a women's liberal arts college and have a lifelong companion seem sadly to be over now.

Anyhow, thanks for that great info!

14>>

If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, "The Scarlet Letter," "Huckleberry Finn," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs."

from Willa Cather, Preface to The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Yikes, hard to imagine anyone conjuring "Huckleberry Finn" in the same sentence with "The Scarlet Letter." I tried reading "TSL" for 42 years and time did not improve it, I'm afraid, though some of Hawthorne's short stories are wonderful.

http://thegrimreader.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-finally-finish-mr-peltiers-tenth.htm...

OMG! There's a new book out this month, Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons. And here I was going to be so-o-o-o good and not buy any more books until I get my school taxes paid at the end of the month. {grrrr} (As if there isn't a new book or two out every month? {sigh})

Here's a sampling of them in an NYR of Books article. Is there anyone else on here that I'm leading into perdition and economic disaster? ;-0

>10 nohrt4me2:: I think it was the introduction to my copy of Semi-attached that said something along the lines of "Eden is not as satirical or as harsh as Austen". But like you, I actually found some aspects of the book to be far more scathing than Austen. Thackeray is a good comparison.

I loved Country of the pointed firs. I'll look out for some of Mary Ellen Chase's work now.

Reading Nothing Happened.

Flannery O'Connor cartoons? Ooh, ahh. Just red and black ink, maybe?

I finished the second in the Regeneration trilogy, Eye in the Door and now get to start on the last, The Ghost Road. I knew nothing of Pat Barker before I started this series. Evidently she had been pigeonholed as a "feminist" writer who maybe couldn't write about men. Boy, did she show everyone. Now I think I need to get some of those early books of hers, so I've ordered Union Street and Blow Your House Down which both sound wonderful. Wikipedia says that it was very difficult for her to get her first book, Union Street, published because it was depressingly about working class British women. She does have a bent for the working class. I'll bet it's great.

20> I haven't read anything by Barker, though I recently found some hardcover of hers in nice condition/price at a used bookstore. I really do want to get around to Union Street, though, because it was the basis for 1989's Fonda/DeNiro Stanley and Iris. Great performances, but the movie was flawed by its pie-in-the-sky ending (and I don't know whether that was some scripting decision or whether it was tied to the novel itself).

ETA: 19> And I did go naughty and buy Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons. Really nice deal, hardcover/dj for just about twenty bucks (with my B&N card). Pretty much just black ink, and many of them nice white on black.

I'm reading Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. It's basically a mash-up of Neal Stephenson with the Arab Spring, and Wilson actually started writing it before the protests even started! It's kind of amazing how prescient some of it is, but that makes sense as Wilson lived in Egypt for a while, wrote for an opposition magazine, and has an Egyptian husband and in-laws! I'm pleased to find her prose fiction as lovely as her non-fiction and her comics writing.

I'm also getting into Marjorie M. Liu's paranormal romance/urban fantasy work-- but there's so much to choose from! Any recs?

Finished Nothing Happened, starting Unusual Company.

ETA 21> The red and black ink was just a joke attempt about O'Connor's stories' palette.

Reading Larry's Party for Orange July... Just started, but it's enjoyable so far.

Within the past couple weeks I read and enjoyed Wild by Cheryl Strayed--a pick for my book club. Then moved onto a historical mystery, Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia Macneal, which was fun but marred by some awkward writing and poor inclusion of period detail (it always was thrown into the text, felt like an info dump). I'll probably read the next book in the series, but without the expectation of exquisite writing.

Now began Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams. I'm not very far in so far, but it's already fascinating. The first chapter is about theory over the past half-century about why humans were the only mammals who evolved with breasts that protude regardless of childbearing. Theory has been dominated by a bunch of male scientists who believe this was a factor of sexual selection--essentially, that our primitave ancestor males just liked boobs and mated with women who had large ones, and thus the trait was passed on to their offspring. More recently, some women scientists and anthropologists have suggested that maybe, just maybe, breasts served a function that benefited women and their children in a way that led to natural, rather than sexual, selection. I'm looking forward to reading more.

24 Larry's Party is a really good read.

This spring I went thru a spell of not reading anything, then I found a really nice copy of Little women which I bought for my grand-daughter. Then I started reading it ( the last time I read it must have been 60 or 70 years ago.) It was so good! I really enjoyed it. Since those early days, Little Men had always been my favorite Alcott, all her books are good!

I'm almost finished Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears for a new bookgroup. I wasn't keen on reading it, but I have actually enjoyed it a lot.

The breast book sounds very good, Sara. Let us know more of those findings. I always think it pays to have women study women. They seem to have a more rational perspective on the topic.

I finished the last of the Regeneration trilogy, Ghost Road, and am so impressed with the way Pat Barker was able to tie everything together from first book to last. What an author! I'm reading a bunch of westerns this month, and the one I'm on now is Territory by Emma Bull. She combines the Tombstone, Earps, Doc Holiday story with magic. I liked The War of the Oaks and am liking this one also, though I have to say her perspective on the Earps differs from Mary Doria Russell.

I've finished Distant View of a Minaret, stories largely about women by Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat, as well as the absorbing and tension-filled The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, which I finished in the middle of the night because I couldn't go back to sleep until I did!

Just finished My Friend Flicka and in the middle of Jane Eyre - both for my Month of Rereading in July.

Yesterday I finished Building Waves, by Taeko Tomioka, which is a novel about the changing lives of women in 1980s Japan.

Now I'm on to Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence.

Just have started reading We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver for my "Orange July" challenge. Very interesting so far!!

I just read Her fearful symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. I thought it was very good, though what a messed-up cast of characters! I have always wanted to visit Highgate Cemetery; maybe I will make more of an effort to go now I've read the atmospheric descriptions in the novel.

Rereading Shirley. It's be wa-a-a-ay too many years, and if I don't get to it now I won't be getting to it until September because of ALL VIRAGO/ALL AUGUST.

A couple of chapters into Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace and thankful I am a woman in the 21st century in the West.

I'm about to start 3 books by women:
Nook - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman a re read
Audiobook - The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
Paper- Girl Walks Into a Bar. . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch who says that because of her looks, (one critic said she looks like she'd been hit in the face by a frying pan) she finds it very difficult to get jobs in Hollywood unless she plays bull dykes or unfuckables.

I just finished Home by Marilynne Robinson and was reminded why it was I never wanted to work with substance abusers. Just reading the book has sent very unwelcome amounts of adrenalin surging through my poor old blood stream. I leaned years ago that actually interacting with alcoholics is more than I can handle.

I had to google images for Rachel Dratch after reading #36. She looks like a very pleasant, perfectly nice looking person, not a great beauty, ergo, "TV ugly."

The idea is that no one will put a really ugly person on TV, so they'll take a regular person, who's probably perfectly presentable with some nice features, put glasses and a sweater on them, and, voila! They're ugly!

In recent years, my husband has been unable to tell actresses apart while watching movies. My theory is that this has less to do with his eyesight than a narrowing of our standards of beauty (along the Bo Derek-Charlize Theron-Sharon Stone axis).

I can't tell Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling apart, either.

Maybe that's a benefit of books. You get to imagine the characters in your own head so you can tell them apart.

In recent years, my husband has been unable to tell actresses apart while watching movies.

Ha! He's not alone. I've been muttering about that for a good 10-15 years now. And there's a category of beefcake that looks like all-samey cloned Spam to me too. Dreadful. I'd prefer watching old and non-Hollywood movies for that reason alone.

That's why British TV refreshes me sometimes--the people look like real people, not some tasteless moron's idea of beautiful. And it's not always the looks as such either. I've seen a few episodes of Midsomer Murders and one thing that struck me is that there would be people romantically involved who not only don't look like adolescents, but are clearly--gasp! gasp!--OLD. And their age isn't played for laughs, it's completely matter-of-fact.

It also annoys me when we are supposed to ignore the actors' typically blandly "gorgeous" looks because they are playing "plain". You know, she's Hollywood-star perfect, but we must go blind and accept that here we have an ordinary girl NOBODY in the movie is ever going to stop, look at, and mention that she could be a Hollywood star, although the make-up will make no concession to the lie!

>38 LolaWalser: One of the running jokes on Will and Grace was about how much Grace, played by Deborah Messing, ate. She was addicted to cake and would go to any function serving it. Judging by her slim and nearly breastless figure, I'm thinking her addiction was a very small one. Why are we supposed to believe that tiny women are fat and those with somewhat unsymmetrical features are ugly?

"I can't tell Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling apart, either. "

I can. Hot cocoa vs. dark chocolate.

I haven't been around lately, but I've been reading faithfully. And I just started Tana French's Broken Harbor. Woman writes so well. But it's so dark (and not in a Ryan Gosling dark chocolate way).

Finished Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler. Ran through it way too fast so slowed down and re-read. It's written in close-up details--don't really know how else to describe it; it's like watching the story through a keyhole--so you have to keep stepping back to see the bigger picture. Noticed a lot of color imagery the second time around, particularly silver, which is appropriate in all sorts of ways.

Not sure I took to "Noon" as much as Sarah Canary or even The Jane Austen Book Club, but some interesting hidden depths.

I plowed through Zazen in a few hours, which I guess is about the end of modern civilization told by a post grad woman in the Northwest. I haven't been so captivated by character in a book in a while. The narration was a little unhinged after several horrible incidents which colored her narration to the point where it was hard to know what was true and what wasn't. But it was really interesting and effective.

I read The ballad and the source and its sequel A sea-grape tree by Rosamond Lehmann while I was on holiday this week. Both stories are told through dialogue and flashbacks, revealing many layers and perceptions as the books progress. The figure of Sibyl Jardine, who dominates the life of the narrator, is an enigmatic, powerful woman, both heroic and monstrous. Highly recommended if you enjoy studies of ambiguous characters.

I just finished an audiobook of The Lace Reader and liked it very much. The author reminded me a bit of Paula Sharp in the way she talked about her underground highway for abused women. I've started The Wednesday Sisters and am liking it very much. This is my second book by Meg Waite Clayton, and I like the way she discusses friendship among women and sexism that is taken for granted. I also started another audiobook by Pat Barker, Another World about, among other things, step parenting, a child almost as rotten as the early Kevin, and memories of WWI.

I just started a book I picked up in the antique shop yesterday (which doesn't mean that it's an old book, it was printed in 2001) titled Women in Purple Rulers of Medieval Byzantium by Judith Herrin. These three empresses governed like men and made historial impacts. They seem to have been forgotten and at least to me, unknown. Since it's about a period of history and women rulers I am unfamiliar with, I am looking forward to it. Has anyone else read it?

Prepping for a re-read of The Brontes Went to Woolworths for ALL VIRAGO/ALL AUGUST, I'm starting Rachel Ferguson's first book, the non-Virago False Goddesses. It's a fairly short read so I should be able to finish it over the weekend.

I just finished a re-read of Shirley @ four-and-a-half****. Personally, I like it a good deal better than Villette and in fact place it third in the canon after Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in either order. Awright, so I'm a little weird.

The Yorke family in Shirley is based on Mary Taylor's family, and if I have time between now and AV/AA to start and finish her novel Miss Miles, I might do that; but I think it's probably going to have to wait until after Labor Day.

I finished my last book of the month last night, The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton. Like The Four Ms. Bradwells one couldn't say it was a great piece of literature. She examines US history through the eyes of women friends and points out occurrences and feelings that we may have taken for granted. Her books are kind of like Feminism for Dummies - entertaining and enlightening.