The One Hundred

Waterstones have launched their buy one get one free promotion on 100 of the biggest books of the year (not in size, rather in success). I'm kind of ambivalent about this idea, because although Waterstones has been instrumental in increasing sales for many of these books (I'm thinking specifically of all the promotion it did for 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo') these books are now big enough to stand on their own two feet. Do books like 'Nation' really need extra publicity, what with the legions of fans who already follow the authors? It's quite likely people will be aware of them and will buy them as Christmas presents without Waterstones shining a further spotlight on them.

Wouldn't this promotion be much more wonderful if Waterstone's concentrated on pushing books that aren't already so visible to the public? Personally nothing kills my bookstore experience quite like seeing tables full of books I've already heard about from a thousand different sources and especially at Christmas I want something exciting and new to lift the intense depression caused by battling through shopping crowds (I always visit the bookstore last, so I only have to go to the bus and so can carry heavy books, seeing more books to explore would brighten up my whole shopping experience).

I really want to create an alternative to Waterstone's list, a list of 100 books that haven't received gigantic amounts of publicity ever, but are ultimately just as awesome as the big books. Would you like to help me make such a list (sure you would, book bloggers love a good list)? I'll pick the first 10 books to go on it and then you can add the next 10 in the comments, then I'll add your choices on to the list. If 10 people show up and comment we'll quickly have 100 books spotlighted here in a small way.

The only rules are:

Books can be published in any year
They must have received low levels of whatever kind of a publicity you deem important (reviews, ad campaigns, awards etc) - this is not exactly a scientific list with well defined criteria, let's say the book just hasn't gone stratospheric
Books can be in any genre and for any age level, they can even be neglected classics that have always flown under the radar
Books must be awesome to read

So we begin in no particular order:

'Spaceman Blues' - Brian Francis Slattery
'Chameleon' - Charles R Smith
'What they always tell us' - Martin Wilson
'Mistakes were made (but not by me)' - Carol Travis & Elliot Aronson
'Empress of the World' - Sarah Ryan
'Because I am Furniture' - Thalia Chaltas
'Captivity' - Debbie Lee Wesselmann
'The Little Lady Agency' - Hester Browne
'Facts for Visitors' - Srikanth Reddy
'Seige, A novel of the Eastern Front' - Russ Schneider
'August: Osage County' - Tracy Letts
'Amulet Vol 1' - Kazu Kibuishi
'Touch Magic' - Jane Yolen
'Not Becoming my Mother' - Ruth Reichl
'Crazy Beautiful' - Lauren Baratz-Logstead
'Standing up to the Madness' - Amy Goodman and David Goodman
'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' - Langston Hughes, illustrated by E.B. LewisTuck
'Everlasting' - Natalie Babbit
'The Amazing "True" Story of a Teenager Single Mom' - Katherine Arnold
'The Winner of Sorrow' - Brian Lynch
'Excellent Women' - Barbara Pym
'Slaves of Solitude' - Patrick Hamilton
'Frost in May' - Antonia White
'The Gone-Away World' – Nick Harkaway
'Summerland' – Michael Chabon
'The Last Gentleman' – Walker Percy
'The Thief Lord' – Cornelia Funke
'Old Man's War' - John Scalzi
'The Magus '- John Fowles
'After' - Francine Prose
'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' - Anne Tyler
'The Borrible Trilogy' - Michael de Larrabeiti
'The Thief' - Megan Whalen Turner
'The Old Wives' Tale' - Arnold Bennett
'Winter Wheat' - Margaret Walker
'Daddy Long Legs' - Jean Webster
'The Ginger Tree' - Oswald Wynn
'West with the Night' - Beryl Markham
'A Very Long Engagement' - Sebastien Japrisot
'Elizabeth in Her German Garden' Elizabeth Von Arnim
'Love in a Cold Climate' - Nancy Mitford
'Dogsbody' - Diana Wynne Jones
'The Golems of Gotham' – Thane Rosenbaum
'As for Me and my House' – Sinclair Ross
'Not Wanted on the Voyage' – Thomas Findley

(Current total 45)

Feel free to disagree with others selections, make sure to contribute your own picks and please wait a few days for me to start linking up to where you can buy these brilliant books for Christmas!

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Over the last few months there has been a major resurgence of interest in Wilkie Collins’ work. If Collins was a disbanded pop band (more like ‘The Police’, than ‘The Nolans’), people would be booking concert venues right about now, but as he’s a Victorian author he gets a kickass blog tour instead. Today I bring you the eighth instalment of the not for profit, just for fun, Wilkie Collin’s tour, run by Rebbeca Reads, founder of the Classics Circuit. I’ll be reviewing Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’, which is a tale of madness and greed that all begins with one accidental meeting.

Walter Hartwright’s decision to walk back from his mother’s house places him in the path of a distressed young woman walking the road, alone after dark. The woman, dressed all in white, pleads for Walter’s assistance and he helps her to find a cab to London. After she has left him he overhears two men asking after a woman in white, who claim his mysterious acquaintance has escaped from an asylum.

With one of those amazing coincidences that Victorian writers were so fond of, the family of Walter’s new employer are acquainted with the young woman, who turns out to be Anne Catharick, a girl who spent time at Limmeridge House as a child. Laura, one of the young pupils Walter has been engaged to instruct, bears a shocking resemblance to the woman and seems to be the object of Anne’s fascination. When Laura receives a letter warning her not to marry Sir Percival Glyde, the baronet she is engaged to Walter and her sister Marian deduce that Anne has sent it. Walter’s love for Laura means that he is drawn into an attempt to uncover the mysterious reasons behind Anne’s distrust of Sir Percival. He and Marian set out to discover the true nature of Sir Percival. The investigation will place the three young people in serious danger.

The full plot of this book is quite frankly, gloriously insane. ‘The Woman in White’ is over six hundred pages long and Collins is determined to pack meaty plot chunks into every part of it. There’s the thrilling and strange encounter within the first twenty pages, then socially inappropriate romance begins to grow at about the fifty page mark and from then on its one long party with lunacy, deception, secrets, plots and greed right up until the end, where Collins follows the tradition of other greats such as Dickens and Bronte, by making sure his readers are treated to a fire, an attempted rescue and a death. All the shocks, surprises and twists produce exactly the reaction Collins hoped for as readers are jolted and thrilled.

Then there are the slower points in the novel, where Collins describes and develops his character, or creates the atmosphere. These descriptions are technically very good, for example, here Collins sets the scene with a strong sensory description:

‘The dead leaves which had whirled in the wind before me, when I had heard of her marriage engagement in the morning, whirled in the wind before her, and rose and fell and scattered themselves at her feet as she walked on in the pale waning sunlight. The dog shivered and trembled…’

but personally I found myself zoning in and out of these passages. Some parts I passed through without really knowing what I was reading and some parts dragged my attention back to the substance of the words on the page. I put this down to the fact that the novel is rather overloaded with description and my brain just couldn’t cope with it all the time. The descriptive domestic passages, where Walter talks about his time with Laura at Limmeridge, or Marian observes the pain of Laura’s marriage are also the parts of the book where Collins explains societies views on women so perhaps my ticked off mood distracted me from the characters speeches about how they were feeling.

When I read the book I had a hard time deciding whether the sexist views found in ‘The Woman in White’ were Collins’ views, or his attempt to satirize and critique society’s dominant views. On one hand, ‘The Woman in White’ obviously shows that locking your wives up for being an inconvenience, or because you want to steal their money is not acceptable behaviour. Collins champions the right for sensible women to have freedom of movement, without fear of persecution and Matthew Sweet, the author of the introduction believes this was in response to a real life incident that occurred in Collin’s social circle. Baronet Bulwer-Lytton, whose production ‘As Bad as we Seem’ Collins acted in was the real life inspiration for Sir Percival Glyde:

‘Rosina had separated from the Baronet in 1836 on very bad terms…As a result of this affair, Bulwyer-Lytton had Rosina abducted by force by two hired thugs and committed to Wyke House Lunatic Asylum in Brentford…Collins use of a plot about an ageing balding, sour tempered baronet who incarcerates his sane wife in a lunatic asylum greatly pleased Rosina, who wrote to Collins to say she could provide him with material from her own experience that would enable him to create the most dastardly villain in literary history.’

However, Walter Hartwright, who is the main narrator and the man who collects and binds together all the accounts, displays a subtle condescension towards women in many ways, such as assuming that only men will be reading the novel and patronising Laura. This is interesting since on the surface Walter is very much a women’s ally, taking Marian into his confidence and aiding the oppressed women in the story.

So what did Collin’s think of women? Well, after reading a comment on Stefanie’s post about reading ‘The Woman in White’ I’ve learned that he was a committed social reformer, who campaigned for women to be allowed to control their own property after marriage and wrote a detective story featuring the first female detective. Hurray! I expect Marian’s remarks on her own sex show Collins reflecting the views of the times, as anyone who has read a bit of George Elliot will know, some women did not have much concept of sisterhood.

The introduction to my edition of ‘The Woman in White’ raises the interesting idea that:

‘Lies are told; texts invade other texts. The bundle of documents that we are handed might be a full and true account of the Laura Glyde Affair. On the other hand, these papers might be the self-justifying trickery of their editor, the middle-class upstart drawing-master who, by the book’s conclusion, has his feet comfortably under the table at Limmeridge.’

Taking this as a central theory perhaps Walter should be viewed as a less sympathetic character who meddles with the others manuscripts and inserts his own views on the world into the accounts of others. Perhaps he is the reason Marian so often curses all other members of her own sex. Might Collins have been trying to suggest that the views about women are not his, but those of his meddling main character, who represents society? At the same time, Marian Harcourt is obviously a strong female character, whose utterances against women may be taken as arch and sarcastic. However, Marian is such a strong female heroine because she struggles against traditional female feeling and is slightly removed from femininity because of her appearance, she is able to be such a force in the story precisely because she is more like a traditional man than a traditional woman. Is Walter’s perception of her coloured by the fact that he is not comfortable with strong women? I don’t know, it’s a theory, but it’s one I can only hold on to by thinking very hard and so I tend to think it might be a bit flimsy.

Despite the fact that my level of interest fluctuated during the novel I believe ‘The Woman in White’ deserves a massive second coming, because it’s technically accomplished and achieves exactly the effect Collins hoped for, thrilling, shocking and enthralling readers. Enjoy the rest of the tour and please let me know what you thought of ‘The Woman in White’ in the comments.

Theatre Weekends

Last week I mentioned that I was off to the Courtyard theatre in Stratford to see the RSC production of ‘Twelfth Night’. It was an absolute treat to watch. I don’t know why but whenever I go to see an RSC version I’m always afraid that they’re going to overdo the props, they never do, but the initial staging always seems like they might. This time there was a huge fibreglass wave set up at the back of the stage, a big background of turrets and cliffs and a seating area created from carpets and cushions and once again I thought it was going to be prop overkill, but of course they had just the right amount of scenery to suggest different locations and when one aspect of the stage dressing was the most important to the plot the others just seemed to melt away from my consciousness, so I wasn’t distracted. There is this fantastic scene where trickster conspirators hide in a tree and the stand hands had rigged a very precarious looking topiary tree, with room for three people and hole for them to pop out of for comic effect, which provided probably the best scene of the night. The people hauling on the ropes to keep the tree for toppling over must have been very strong.

The best performances definitely came from the two female leads, Viola and Olivia. The actress playing Olivia got really into this slightly ridiculous, love sick role which made her both incredibly funny and the kind of character you wanted to cheer for at the end. The best male performances came from actors playing smaller parts. The actor playing the Fool transitioned from high emotion, depression and hilarity easily and Antonio, the ship’s captain almost broke my heart when he thought his friend had betrayed him. Of course Richard Wilson, was a fine addition as Malvollio, but James Fleet, who was Sir Andrew mumbled a bit and was a little hard to hear.

Last weekend I went to a more local theatre with a friend to see the touring production of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. This year has been full of theatre trips, I think I’ve been seven times so far (three plays, two musicals and two stand up shows) which is much more than I’d usually go during a year. I was a little disappointed by the first half of this production, although it picked up after the interval (I don’t know if it was the interval wine, or the fact that everyone knew Lydia’s unthinking delight in her shot gun marriage was coming up, but the audience laughed much more and the actors seemed to relax). Considering that the Bennett sisters are the focus of the whole thing I thought they got shoved into a corner, in favour of the rather more famous actress playing Mrs Bennet . Kitty and Mary had even less to say than usual, although Mary did get to play all the violin interludes, Lydia’s marriage comes from nowhere, there is not even a hint of a flirtation with Whickham and it seemed as if Jane was barely ever on stage. The stand out performance was easily Mr Collins who had perfected a prat bow and a greasy tone of voice. I’d place it below the BBC adaptation (I know it’s not fair to judge all performances by that standard, but I can’t seem to help it) but far above the recent film, starring Keira Knightley (boo). It did make me eager to reread the novel, to see what order the events in the novel happen, as I think my memories are very influenced by the anniversary edition.
In bookish news I’m almost finished with Marc Levy’s ‘The Children of Freedom’ and am shocked by the terrible picture of betrayal at the heart of the French resistance. I know there’s still one more character who will definitely die before the end of the war, but will there be any more?

Oh and remember those depressing bookshelves in my office building? Well I’ve started populating them! I’ve only dropped off two crime novels that came free with magazines so far, but perhaps they’ll inspire someone else to add novels, or interesting non- fiction. Apparently those bookshelves are the buildings library system which makes me appreciate all the hard work that goes into creating a proper libraries.

Stop by tomorrow for my stop on the Classics Circuit, where I’ll finally tell you what I thought of ‘The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

The Folded Leaf - William Maxwell

‘The Folded Leaf’ is one of those books I might not have found without blogs. Danielle, of A Work in Progress’ posted about it earlier this year and her description of the relationship between the two main characters Spud and Lymie lodged in my mind. The novel is a coming of age tale, written with an adult audience in mind, rather than teenage readers (like ‘Catcher in the Rye’, or ‘Firefox: Confessions of a Girl Gang’) and it’s narrative is created out of a quiet, sincere intimacy that immediately appealed to me:

‘Spud Latham, who had nothing to do and was in not hurry to go home, since it wasn’t home that he’d find when he got there, stood in front of his wooden locker and twiddled the dial. He was in the throes of another daydream. The school principal, on looking back over Spud’s grades, had discovered that there had been some mistake; that they should all have been S’s, not C’s and D’s. So he had the pleasure of coming home and announcing to his incredulous family that he was valedictorian of his class and the brightest student in the history of the school.’

Lymie Peters lives with his father in a boarding house. He’s sloppy, studious and no good at games, in fact that’s the first thing the reader learns about him. While the boys at his school don’t hold his physical fitness against him, it is an acknowledged fact that whichever team Lymie is on, during physical education lessons, will lose and Lymie always feels like an outsider, although he knows that with a little work he could become part of a group. Spud Latham has transferred schools and as the new boy he’s also an outsider. He’s physical, extremely neat and comes from a secure, nuclear family, he is the exact opposite of Lymie. When Lymie first offers him friendship, after Spud saves Lymie’s life in the school swimming pool, he rejects it, but later a prank played on them results in a moment of boy bonding and they become inseparable.

I think Spud’s first rejection of companionship really illustrates his character. He’s suspicious of friendship, always ready to be snubbed and finds emotional relief in fighting. He’s also blind to much that is outside his own experience, for example believing that Lymie’s unwillingness to treat him when they eat out stems from a miserly tendency, rather than the fact that he has to support himself without help from his father. Spud is the main cause of the problems that come between the boys in later years, when Spud refuses to believe that his girlfriend Sally, and Lymie are just friends. It’s quite clear to anyone reading the book that Lymie is only interested in Spud and has spent the majority of his life keeping his feelings of jealousy in check, as Spud meets other friends, then falls in love with Sally. I think because the reader sees so much of Spud through Lymie’s eyes and because Spud is also a bruised, unsure character despite all his advantages, it’s possible to come away with a sympathetic view of him, but his blind spots create episodes of such severe meanness that it’s hard to forgive him. I thought that the harshest thing Spud ever thinks is that he prefers to sleep alone, when the fact that he and Lymie sleep in the same double bed at their boarding house is so important to Lymie.

William Maxwell examines friendship with tenderness, but also with a kind of terrifying ferocity that expresses itself in very final expressions of feeling. In college Spud spends hours denouncing Lymie to a fellow boarder Rheinhart and eventually Rheinhart tells Lymie ‘He’s jealous of you…He comes over to the house sometimes when you’re at the library and he sits in my room and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you.’, when Lymie confronts Spud ‘To his horror he saw that Spud was smiling.’ and as Lymie leaves he claims he has forgiven Spud, but Maxwell as omniscient narrator lets the reader know that ‘Actually, Lymie didn’t forgive Spud anything.’ . There is no room for the characters to be persuaded to think differently, nor any room for the reader to hope for reconciliation between the characters. With every one of these type of lines the reader feels Lymie and Spud becoming increasingly cut off from each other.

Maxwell seems convinced that deep friendship is inevitably tied up with envy and rage, as is sexual attraction. Early on in the book Spud fights with a blond boy who he then befriends and despite his love for Spud, Lymie often expresses envy, which manifests itself as occasional episodes of rather ridiculous violent anger. It initially seems like a bleak message; people can’t be friends with people who have different strengths from them, without ending up despising their friends, but by the end of the book it feels like Maxwell is maybe talking about how low confidence has led Lymie to over emphasise Spud’s good qualities. He includes a heavily symbolic dream close to the end of the novel to show that once Lymie is free of Spud’s enchantment he is able to become a better version of himself. Despite the blurb’s hints that ‘for Lymie, still mired in guilt and self-doubt, the end of their intimacy is more than he can stand’ the ending is ultimately positive and I was glad about that, even while I wondered how many other challenges Lymie might have to overcome in his future.

Much of the action is presented in chapter long vignettes, so something will happen and in the next chapter the action will have moved a little away from this episode, which is partly because Maxwell has to cover quite a few years of the boys lives. This technique also allows him to step away from the main characters quite naturally and focus for one chapter on a secondary character. The result is wonderful short portraits of a few characters, although really these chapters aren’t necessary, as the characters play little part in the main story. These character sketches are strangely emotional additions to the novel, despite their short length and they made me feel much more engaged with the smaller characters, like Reinhart and Professor Severance. It might sound odd to say that I enjoyed the author’s digressions from the main relationship, but sometimes digressions are a necessary element of writing.

Remember to leave a link to your own review in the comments if you have one.

Other Reviews

A Work in Progress

Book Daydreams

Having a couple of bottles of wine, with a friend is probably not the smartest idea when you have to go to work the next day. It is also probably not the best idea to say ‘Shall we just have one more?’ as the bell rings. I have not exactly been productive today, but our terrible coffee place did teach me that Fanta Zero does in fact taste just like regular Fanta.

This is what is written on the post it pad on my desk:

(hopefully you can see it is a book list, it's kind of blurry)

‘Expressologist’ – Kristina Springer: the heroine sets up couples based on coffee choices, which is not quite as deep as Penguin’s idea, but quirky enough for me to read it

‘The Texicans’ – Nina Vida: I am a sucker for a not very good pun in a title

'Pretty Dead' – Francesca Lia Block: Awesome cover, that reminds me of the ‘Hard Candy’ artwork, oh and vampires

'Bait' – Alex Sanchez: Powerful sounding young adult novel, which comes recommended from a ton of great bloggers

'An African in Greenland' – Tete Michel Kpomassie: Are you not intrigued by how and why he is in Greenland?

'Gray Horses' – Hope Larsson: A grown up horse book, told in graphic form

'Spell of the Tiger' – Sy Montgomery: I was hooked when I heard that maneating tigers will never attack from the front, so people used to wear masks on the back of their heads andafter a while the tigers got wise!

'To Bed with Grand Music' – Margharanti Laski: A Persephone reprint, that offers and different perspective on life at home during a world war (yes I have forgotten which one)

'Moral Clarity' – Susan Neiman: If I’m honest I’ve forgotten what this non-fiction book is about, but Stefanie at ‘So Many Books’ was excited about it and I remember being interested when I read her post. I have a whole notebook of book titles, I can’t possibly remember what they all relate to and that makes choosing a few books to put on my Christmas list more exciting.

Have you been dreaming of books when you should have been doing something else? Any dire consequences (for example, if you’re a farmer you might have tried to milk a chicken)?

Making Money - Terry Pratchett

‘Making Money’ is the sequel to Terry Pratchett’s ‘Going Postal’, which followed Moist Lipwig, aka notorious con man Albert Spangler, after his hanging doesn’t quite come off right and he’s offered a new life by the ruler of Ankh Morpork, as long as he agrees to take a job reforming the postal system. I thought ‘Going Postal’ was the freshest Discworld novel for some time, with the addition of a really new set of characters, rather than characters who are slightly different retreads of personalities that Pratchett has written before ( Tiffany Aching, I’m looking at you). I was excited about this book, but also quite afraid of being disappointed. I think every reader has had that terrible moment where a sequel book just doesn’t live up to the first book and as much as you love the characters you can’t continue down the road with them. I was so bedazzled by Moist and his love interest Spike at the end of ‘Going Postal’ that I was getting really keyed up about this book possibly being terrible.

Hurray, hurray this book is fabulous and it made me want to reread ‘Going Postal’ (I thought I’d a had a fit of ‘you can’t keep all the books’ and given it away, but I eventually found it in a trunk). I’ve decided Moist is a combination of early Vimes and Rincewind, but with a special charisma that is all his own. In Spike, Pratchett has created a truly new kind of Discworld woman. At first I thought she was a bit like a less polite Sybil, or like an unrestrained Angua, but she’s none of those, she’s just Spike the woman who’s extremely caring, independent and cynical and goes everywhere in deadly six inch heels.

I liked it very much (and for all those people who said Spider the dog was their favourite character in ‘The Woman in Black’ there is a dog called ‘Mr Fusspot’ who eats sticky toffee pudding in ‘Making Money’). I recommend it to all Pratchett fans and anyone who likes satire, or a book about the grand old fight between good and evil. Usually there’s no need to read Discworld books in order, but I think in this case you need to acquaint yourself with Moist in ‘Going Postal’ before reading ‘Making Money’, otherwise quite a bit won’t make sense.

Hopefully in just a few months a copy of ‘Unseen Academicals’ will appear under the Christmas tree. I’m sort of considering rereading a few Discworld books in the future (for most this will be the fourth of fifth time I’ve read them), but I’m not sure which ones to choose. What are your top three Discworld novels?

The Women Unbound Challenge

I am so all over the ‘Women Unbound’ challenge it is useless to remind me about my challenge ban. The idea is to read fiction and non-fiction books related to a very broad definition of women’s studies. I’m going to smush all the initial challenge business into one post, so this may get a bit long. First let’s look at what I might read to qualify for the ‘Suffragette’ level (eight books, including three volumes of non-fiction):

Fiction

'An Equal Silence' – Francesca Kay: A female artist finds her marriage struggling when her work becomes more successful that her husbands.

'Emma' – Jane Austen: How does Austen free her women, while keeping them respectable enough for her readers? I’m intrigued by this book after the recent BBC series and my book came free as part of a free offer, by a woman’s razor company.

'Twelve Miles' – Cara Hedley: Women in playing ice hockey and probably being tough? Rocking.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – Lisa See : As far as I can remember this is about the brutal practice of foot binding.

Then I need something new and shiny to read for my fifth book. Perhaps ‘The Thirteenth Wife’ or ‘The Chosen One’ which both deal with polygamous societies.

Non-fiction

Warrior Queens – Antonia Fraser: I’m a bit worried about including this, as I tried it before and found it impenetrable, but this seems like the perfect challenge to try a book about historical women of power who physically fought.

Daughter of Desert: The Life of Gertrude Bell - Georgina Howell: Explorer, spy, map maker, pioneering women, why wouldn’t I want to read about Gertrude Bell?

No Place for Ladies – Helen Rappaport/Bluestockings – Jane Robinson: I realised the only other non-fiction I own, that fits this challenge is another Antonia Fraser book. All other non-fiction about women seems to be about women in the war and I think they’re going to be a bit general and not really about gender. So I’d have to buy, or borrow one of these fascinating books, how awful that would be.

Now for a few recommendations from my own shelves for anyone who is compiling their lists, or just likes female centred fiction:

'The Carhullan Army' – Sarah Hall: Britain’s society disintegrates and the heroine finds herself living in a closed community, where women are forced to wear the coil. It’s probably one of the best and the most brutal dystopian novels I’ve read so far.

'The Handmaid’s Tale' – Margaret Atwood: Another dystopian novel about reproductive rights. I love books form this genre which reflect the idea that women’s rights tend to appear, or disappear in relation to the state of the general world.

'The Virgin Suicides' – Jeffrey Eugenides: Four young women are kept in a house, with little access to the outside world.

'The Red Tent' – Anita Diamant: A Biblical retelling (the first part is the best) and a treatise on how women are bound together, even as they’re set against each other.

‘Flygirl’ – Sherri L Smith: A historically based novel about the WASPs, women who flew planes for the army during the second world war.

‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ – Michael Faber: Sugar is a most accomplished Victorian prostitute who dreams of writing a novel, decrying male control over women.

‘The Bitch Goddess Notebook’ – Martha O’Connor: Honestly I can’t remember that much about this one, except that three friends who have separated remember events past, but I remember loving it when I was reading it. It’s one of those spiky little books that dig themselves under your skin.

Finally my answers to the introduction meme the organisers devised:

1. What does feminism mean to you? Does it have to do with the work sphere? The social sphere? How you dress? How you act?

First two links, the Wikipedia entry on feminism and some thoughts on what modern feminists are trying to achieve. For me, feminism is all about a woman’s right to choose and to take control of her own life (I guess that makes me a typical third-waver). I also believe that the fact that feminism has splintered into different, specific groups is a good thing, as long as we encompass all those views under some main rights we can all agree on (the right for women to be educated, the right for women to be free from abuse, the right for women to control their own reproduction and sexual health, the right for a woman to work if she wants to and probably a few more thing I can’t think of right now). As long as a woman approaches herself and other women with the respect they deserve then I believe she’s aligning herself with feminism.

2. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

Plenty of people I know say they believe in equality of the sexes, but they’re not a feminist, in the same way you might say ‘I believe anarchy, but I’m not an anarchist’. They identify feminism as the set beliefs of a specific group of activists and although they believe in the values these people uphold, they don’t identify with that group of people and they wouldn’t support all the actions of feminists. Unfortunately when these people say ‘I’m not a feminist, but...’ all the world hears is the first four words and all feminists like me hear is ‘I don’t want to say I’m a feminist because of I do not want to be associated with negative image certain men perpetuate about feminists’ (must get better about hearing that differently).

I think these people are put off self-identifying as feminists by this negative visual image that certain men and women push on to the word feminism, but also by the archaic version of feminism, as an ideaology that is opposed to housewives, mothers and women who take care of their appearance. Feminism has moved on to become all encompassing and has broken off into so many shoots, but many people assume that being a stay at home mother, sets them at odds with feminism. This is pretty frustrating, because the domestic sphere, where it is so easy for a woman to lose her own self-identity and her control on her life choices, because of the baggage of easy assumptions and traditional roles that daily domestic life brings with it is probably one of the places where a knowledge and belief in feminism is most practically useful.

I’m a feminist, that’s how I self-identify. I feel proud of the history of the movement (although mistakes were made, it was generally on the right track and every movement goes through a period of development) and I feel that feminism allows me to express my own views, without feeling excluded by the movement. I’d say that most women who are reluctant to align themselves with feminism probably haven’t found the right branch of feminism for them.

3. What do you consider the biggest obstacle women face in the world today? Has that obstacle changed over time, or does it basically remain the same?

There are about a billion obstacles that women face today. The most visible problems, like opposition to reproductive choice, extreme violence based on outdated ideas associated with women and the lack of legal support for women occur mostly overseas. Opposition to making birth control available is pretty big obstacle, because it leaves women raising too many children to be able to save money, or go out to work, or to gain an education. Then their daughters face the same problems and their sons perpetuate the cycle. I think that western feminists need to get more involved with these problems abroad, or risk being branded insular.

In the UK there is the media to contend with, as well as ordinary people’s assumptions, which box women into particular roles because of how they look and act. Cultural baggage is a hard thing to shake off. Since old cultural ideas also encourage men to believe they have the right to rape and beat women I’d say it’s a pretty big obstacle.

The idea that women are somehow now a privileged group that is eroding the rights of men, sits right alongside the racist idea that black, or asian groups now receive too many special privileges and is gaining a following. That’s a dangerous idea, because when men feel their way of life is threatened, they’ll hit back and block women’s progress either in an official capacity, or in their own homes. Masses of men are not being won over to feminism and while I don’t encourage pandering to them, I think there must be a way of encouraging them to see the benefits of feminism (many already do) and the fact that we’re striving for equality, not control.

All the answers to this meme strike at something important, but I just wanted to spotlight Amanda’s answers Amanda's answers , because they highlight such an interesting slant on feminism. Amanda says she was always more interested in equality and focused on male rights (paternity leave etc) as she’d seen a negative side of feminism.

I leave you today with the news that when forced to meet pay equivalency equality standards Leeds Council opted not to pay its female employees more, but to cut the pay of 3,500 male bin men and street cleaners. There’s been a strike among the male employees, and people is calling it disgusting behaviour (not least because the bins are starting to smell and attract rats according to the One Show. What everyone seems to be forgetting is that these men have never been concerned enough to strike over the low pay of their female colleagues.