Do you have a book you read in school that you swore was the worst book ever? Have you ever thought that maybe your teachers weren't out to torture you, and there may have been a method to their madness after all? Then the July Challenge is for you!

Details on the challenge can be found here...check it out, and join us!

I got #40, The Corset: A Cultural History, by Valerie Steele, on a whim. It's much more interesting than I'd expected, informative, with many illustrations and an easy-to-follow text. 

Anyone interested in women's studies or fetishism would probably like this, also possibly if you're interested in the effects of propaganda, too. There's a lot more to the history of the corset than just "a bunch of repressive, controlling Victorian men slapped it on their womenfolk to keep 'em in line and then it got trendy because haute coutre designers used it for their ballgowns". 

The damage caused by wearing a corset may not have been as severe as we've been led to believe, though prolonged use did cause some difficulties-I'm not qualified to judge, but it does seem iffy. There were (and are) some benefits to it. It's NOT the Western equivalent of foot-binding. The author makes some vaild points about how we take other medical discussions of this time period with a grain of salt, given the state of medical knowledge and societal preferences/prejudices; but the idea that wearing corsets killed women isn't often questioned. It *should* be questioned, because an objective look at the illnesses or symptoms evidently do not match up to the actual effects of what wearing a corset *does* do to the body's internal arrangements. 

I still think it looks uncomfortable-an underwire bra is as close as I'll ever want to come to it (and that, not close AT ALL). But it's fascinating to see the corset evolve into a simultaneous symbol of women's decency and respectability (wearing proper clothes, being straight-laced and properly behaved, upright, etc) and their desirability and sensuality (it's UNDERWEAR! showed off their figures! often used metaphorically by artists, too). 

Extremely interesting book, and a very good read.

40. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, by Joss Wheldon: The first graphic novel of the Season 8 Buffy comics. Good comic, well put together. I enjoyed it fairly well, but thought some of the plot points (those concerning Dawn) were a little forced. I still liked it a lot. Better than Season 7!

Midnight Snacks, by Michael J. Rosen and Sharon Reiss: A small cookbook all about late night munchies. The gingersnap recipe would be worth the price of the book if I bought it (it's at my local library). It's also very witty.

42. Runaways 1, Pride and Joy, by Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Alphora: The first in a series I'd started reading somewhere near the middle. Very good beginning story, well told. I love Gertie, she's my favorite.

43. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman: Another cookbook, and there are more. A excellent basic veggie cookbook. It's vegetarian in the sense that there is no fish, but vegan recipes are a bit spare for such a large volume (I don't think he tried out any vegan baking, for instance). I loved the recipe for fried thin tofu slices-it's like bacon!

44. Am I Blue? Coming Out From the Silence, edited by Marion Dane Bauer: A YA collection of stories about gay and lesbian issues, released in the 90's and still the only one of it's kind that I've seen. The stories vary in quality, and most of them are "positive image", which is great but led to some sameness in stories in the middle of the book. It picks up again by the end, with several excellent short tales. Recommended for teens and adults, good work.

45. The Psychology of Harry Potter, edited by Neil Mulholland, PhD. Very fun look at various psychtratic themes in the Harry Potter series. Everything from better wizarding career counseling to cognitive therapy in the wizarding world to a look at self-mutilation in the books is discussed. I have to say, most of the essays are good, and only the one on traditional psychotherapy drags. (That may be because that branch is rather unfashionable.)

46. Vegetarian Christmas, by Rose Elliot: Fairly straightforward, small cookbook. It's an English cookbook, so a lot of recipes for fruit (Christmas) cake and bread sauce. I liked the veggie sides the best. Reasonably useful, although none of the proposed main dish alternatives appealed to me.

47. Fables Vol.5, The Mean Seasons, by Bill Willingham:
48. Fables Vol. 6, The Homelands
49. Fables Vol. 8, Wolves:I'm still loving Fables a lot. It just gets better and better. I can't even pick a favorite character. It's great!

50. Eat Healthy for $50 a Week, by Rhonda Barfield: A fairly typical thrift/recipe book. Most of the recipes aren't suited to my veggie diet, and since it was written over ten years ago, I don't think $50 for a family of six would cut it anymore. Not a whole lot I didn't already know.

51: The Marriage of Sticks, by Jonathon Carroll: One of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy authors. I admired his restraint here: 96 pages went by before anything weird happened. Then it's non-stop oddities until the last sentence. I always liked how he sort of takes you by the arm forcibly into a magical world inside the real one.

I'm over 50 books, but there's so many comics on the list I'm not slowing down. More to come.

 

22 / 50 (44.0%)

Per request, I'm putting most of this post behind an LJ-Cut.

The books you'll find within:

#13-#15 is actually an ominbus edition of all three books in the Wraeththu trilogy by Storm Constantine, and I'll review it as one book.
#16 was Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser
#17 was Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism by Merideth Maran
#18 was Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore
#19 was Food and Feast in Tudor England by Alison Sim
#20 was The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
#21 was Folly by Laurie R. King
#22 was House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

86. Savvy Ingrid Law (4/5)

This magical children's novel reminded me a bit of Joseph Helgerson's Horns and Wrinkles with a hefty dose of Nina Kiriki Hoffman thrown in.

In Mibs Beaumont's family, thirteenth birthdays tend to be VERY major occasions. That's when every Beaumont receives his or her Savvy, a magical power that he or she must learn to control. Mibs's brother Fish can control the weather (well, sort of -- he has a tendency to cause hurricanes). Grandpa Beaumont causes earthquakes. And Mibs's mother does everything perfectly; she even makes perfect mistakes. So Mibs is looking forward to her birthday with trepidation and excitement, hoping for a humdinger of a Savvy. Her priorities change, however, when her father is seriously injured in a car accident. Now all she wants is a Savvy that will help her family be a family again.

This is a great adventure yarn, as well as a good story about coming of age and learning about oneself. I definitely am looking forward to seeing what Law comes out with next.

87. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary Marina Warner (4/5)

Warner's books on culture, sociology, history, and folklore almost always top my list of favorites, and this book is a splendidly erudite history of the concept of the Virgin Mary.

My only real quibble with the book is that Warner clearly has feminist Opinions about how the Church and society as a whole have used Mary to oppress women. This is not a problem; I hold similar Opinions, and would be interested in reading more about Warner's. The real problem is that her incisive cultural criticsm tends to appear in the book in short, jarring bursts that don't flow smoothly with the rest of the text. At times it was almost as though there were really two books she wanted to write -- one straight-up history, one cultural criticism -- and she couldn't quite make up her mind which she was writing. This is not a fatal flaw in the book, by any stretch, but it does call attention to how much Warner's writing style has improved in the decades since this book was first published.

88. Close Kin Clare Dunkle (2.5/5)

This sequel to The Hollow Kingdom was entertaining enough, but I found it overall to be rather disappointing. There were definite high points: the fleshing out of the history of the conflict between the elves and the goblins was welcome, and Dunkle's depiction of the dying elf culture was excellent, if harsh.

There were quite a few problems with the book, though. For one, the pacing and plotting was very odd; I felt that Dunkle introduced a lot of plot elements and then didn't give them their due, and the story seemed to move in fits and starts.
( Read more... )

89. Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 1: The Nixie's Song Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi (2.5/5)

I'm pretty "meh" on this one. The writing is somewhat awkard, and half of the book reads rather like fanfic, with the main characters running around with copies of the first Spiderwick books and meeting not only one of the children from the first series, but the authors as well. I am interested to read the sequel, however, because toward the end this started to actually get interesting and feel like a real book.


90. By These Ten Bones Clare Dunkle (3.5/5)

This is a unique take on the werewolf legend, set in a well-realized medieval Scottish landscape. Dunkle's tendency to "tell" rather than "show" is still very much in evidence here, and the ending was a bit predictable, but it's a good, fast adventure with a real sense of menace.

Book 85: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
Author: Erik Larson, 2003.
Genre: Non-fiction, Cultural History. True Crime.
Other Details: 496 pages including extensive notes and bibliography.

I sought this book out after a review on LJ as it sounded a very intriguing premise. I had read about other World's Fairs in this era when studying art history but hadn't encountered the Chicago one. I also had never heard of Dr. H.H. Holmes, though my husband, who is a fan of true crime documentaries, knew all about him.

The text moves between two streams in alternating chapters. The first stream details the planning and building of the 'White City', the site of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. It focuses on the life of its chief architect Daniel H. Burnham. I found it a fascinating account of the obstacles that faced the planners and builders to get the exhibition open on time. One challenge was to find a memorable centrepiece for the exhibition to rival that of the one held in Paris in 1889, where Eiffel's Tower had been a huge sensation. Their answer was provided by a young engineer named George Ferris, who build the world's first Ferris Wheel, an astonishing engineering feat. I think it is fair to say that the Eiffel Tower in becoming such an iconic symbol of Paris rather won that contest.

The other thread is that of Dr. H. H. Holmes, who seemed to be a very personable and charming young man. However, he took advantage of anyone who crossed his path and soon escalated to murder. He used the increased activity in Chicago over this period to not only lure his victims to their deaths but to cover his activities. It's compelling reading though quite gruesome stuff especially when dealing with his methods of disposal of the bodies.

The book was skilfully written and read almost like a novel. It comes under the category of popular non-fiction rather than the academic works I've been reading recently. Still Larson does provide plenty of notes as well as an extensive bibliography. I sometimes found the change over from the serial killer chapters to the World Fair chapters a little jarring but overall just a small niggle. I also would have appreciated more images of the Exhibition though did find those on-line.

Random House page with excerpts.

Book 79: The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts.
Author: Owen Davies, 2007.
Genre: Academic. Non-fiction. Paranormal.
Other Details: 299 pages with extensive notes.

Dr. Davies is a Reader in Social History at the University of Hertfordshire with a special interest in the popular belief of magic and witchcraft from the early modern period onwards. In this highly researched book he examines the phenomena of ghosts and hauntings, primarily in England though with some reference to other areas.

Underpinning Davies' approach is the awareness that for all the intellectual and scientific advances of the last five centuries the belief in ghosts continues to be vibrant and socially relevant. He is not concerned with either proving the existence of ghosts or debunking them. Instead he examines how ghosts and their appearances have been interpreted within society from the late medieval period onwards. I found it quite fascinating how changes in contemporary philosophy, religion and science had shifted these perceptions. He also examines ghosts as a source of literary inspiration and the rise of spiritualism in the 19th century.

Although not a long book it is packed with stories of ghost sightings, the exploits of ghost hunters and the inevitable frauds and hoaxes and is written in a very straight-forward, non-sensationalist manner. It was one of those books where I kept a notepad alongside me while reading so that I could jot down bits of information. Among the things I discovered was that the belief in the walking dead/re-animated corpse had been a widespread phenomena in medieval times. It seems George Romero was drawing on old folklore with his 'Living Dead' films.

I do enjoy studies on popular culture and folklore and felt that Davies had done a superb job of bringing together a wealth of source material and presenting it in a very articulate manner.

Davies' website: Cunning Folk.com.

THE KITE RUNNER
Khaled Hosseini
371 pages.


When there is so much hype surrounding a book, I generally hesitate to read it. This time, I saw the movie first. I saw the movie again. I loved the story, the setting, the beauty. So, I read the book. It was as perfect as I could have hoped. A tale about guilt and love in modern Afghanistan. The importance of branching out and reading about different situations is undervalued today. Read this book and obtain a glimpse into another culture while appreciating phenomenal writing and beauty.

Books: 2/50 - 4%
Pages: 921/15,000 - 6.14%

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini - added to To-Read List.

Next up: The Abortionist's Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde

( List )

52. The Men Who Stare at Goats Jon Ronson (3/5)

The subject matter of this book is fascinating. It explores the US military's research into decidedly strange fighting and reconnaissance techniques: psychic warfare (as in, soldiers using psychic powers to stop the enemy in its tracks), remote viewing, you name it. It starts out fairly lighthearted: look at what happens when you give some whackadoos in the government money to try to walk through walls! There's a serious side to it, though; out of some of the same minds that came up with the more out-there techniques of psychic warfare, came some of the psychological techniques that are being used to manipulate and torture prisoners and insurgent populations.

The execution leaves something to be desired. For one, Ronson is aware that there is both an amusing and a serious side to his research, and points this out from time to time, but Ronson does not work to somehow make these two aspects of the stories he tells play off each other, or to reconcile these two aspects of the subject matter. Instead, the tone of the book is simply wildly uneven, sometimes switching from dead serious to satirical and jokey in the same page or two. The book is also quite rambling, and the overall impression is that it's a series of journalistic articles he wrote, which he then strung together into a book. It just struck me as lazy writing. Still interesting, though.

53. Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA Richard C. Hoagland & Mike Bara (2/5)

Richard C. Hoagland is a real piece of work. The guy believes that the "Face on Mars" is a sculpture (despite all evidence to the contrary) and that it's surrounded by a ruined Martian city. He believes there are the remains of crystaline ruins on the Moon, and the reason the astronauts don't remember seeing them is that they've been brainwashed. Furthermore, the Real Truth about ancient alien civilizations is being suppressed by NASA, which is under the control of some kind of mystery cult. Masons are involved somewhere in there, as is the Kennedy asassination. He's the master of misinterpreting photographs, which makes the whole thing kind of entertaining: a fuzzy blob in the background of a moonscape because a castle suspended by cables, high above the lunar surface. Non-color-corrected photos of Mars that seem to show green blotches (due to the way the images are processed) are proof that there is plant life on Mars.

Have I mentioned that Hoagland refers to himself in the third person for the entire book? And that the Sun is a hyperspacial gateway? (that one isn't really explained particularly well...)

At any rate, I'd give this zero stars for scientific accuracy, four stars for entertainment value -- I figure it averages out to two...

54. Quakeland Francesca Lia Block (2.5/5)

This is a dreamy book that starts out fairly strong, or at least is intriguing: we're introduced to Katrina, who suffers prophetic nightmares of disasters around the world, who is insecure and sad and wants love so badly she gets involved with a terribly annoying, new-agey, self-absorbed man. I got into this part of the book, despite feeling sad for Katrina; the language is lovely, and I wanted to know more about her. Unfortunately, Katrina's story just seems to trail off, somewhat unresolved, at which point Block gives us several shorter vignettes that follow similar themes.
Even these shorter vignettes hold promise, for the most part, but Block seems to have included at least one slightly different version of Katrina's story, told from a different perspective, which becomes very confusing (particularly since people are frequently not named).
Block has a gift for beautiful language and imagery, but I enjoy her books most when there is a strong backbone of story and plot to hold up the glitter. This book feels unfinished, and lacks enough backbone to really stand on its own. When I was reading it, I found it engaging enough, but it was easy to put down and I did not feel strongly enticed to pick it up again.

I also have to admit (and this is just my own reaction to it, rather than a value judgement, and didn't really affect my rating of the book too much) that I found the book as a whole intensely depressing. The message seems to be that loneliness is more common than not, that fragility is more likely than strength, that even powerful love does not last, and that men will let you down. I was left with a strong (although transitory) sense of sadness when I finished it, perhaps in part because it stands in such stark contrast to Block's earlier, more starry-eyed works.

 

12 / 50 (24.0%)

I have to be forgetting a book or two, it's been so long since I updated. I'll check my stack when I get home and add any stragglers later.

Book #5 was An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears

From the Publisher:
We are in Oxford in the 1660s - a time, and place, of great intellectual, scientific, religious and political ferment. Robert Grove, a fellow of New College is found dead in suspicious circumstances. A young woman is accused of his murder. We hear about the events surrounding his death from four witnesses: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologican and inveterate plotter; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary. Each witness tells their version of what happened. Only one reveals the extraordinary truth.

An Instance of the Fingerpost is a magnificent tour de force: an utterly compelling historical mystery story with a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing until the very last page


Book #6 was Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, edited by Brian Bouldrey

From the publisher:

In Wrestling with the Angel, twenty-one authors - gay men who are Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, and Mormon - explore in moving and powerful essays the paradox at the center of their faiths: If God creates each of us in His own image, then how can that image be "wrong"? In vivid descriptions of their paths toward spiritual and sexual identity, such eloquent contributors as David Plante, Mark Doty, Lev Raphael, Alfred Corn, Andrew Holleran, Frank Browning, Michael Nava, Brad Gooch, Fenton Johnson, and Felice Picano reveal the joys and frustrations of communicating with one's excommunicator or, in some cases, of constructing a faith of one's own. Heightened by the urgency of this brutal age of AIDS, their essays are both intensely personal and partisan. They rise off the page like rambunctious prayers, reflecting not only the spiritual hunger brought on by the new millennium, but also the fact that we can no more choose our God than we can our sexuality. 

Book #7 was Tales of the Lavender Menace : A Memior of Liberation by Karla Jay

From the Publishers Weekly:

Jay writes with wry humor and astute historical analysis in this memoir of her early days as a feminist and gay liberation activist. Currently the director of women's and gender studies and professor of English at Pace University, she was raised in a middle-class Brooklyn home by an emotionally disturbed mother and a father who didn't believe she was his daughter. Jay's political life began in 1964 when she entered Barnard College; by 1969 she was a member of the Redstockings radical feminist collective and a leader in the newly formed Gay Liberation Front. With a canny eye for detail, she creates a vivid, realistic portrait of early 1970s feminist and sexual radicalism, from communal living to group sex to the watershed feminist protest in the offices of Ladies' Home Journal. She charts how women's and gay liberation were made possible by the black civil rights and antiwar movements and is careful not to idealize or whitewash complex, sometimes petty and factional, political struggles, while clearly expressing the joy and excitement she felt in the moment. Nor does she hesitate to contradict the memoirs of luminaries such as Rita Mae Brown and Betty Friedan, taking them to task for what she considers historical misrepresentation. Jay has turned out a political and personal memoir that succeeds in its aim to convey "what it was like to live then and what some of us did to forge social change." Photos not seen by PW. 


Book #8 was Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman

From Amazon.com:

First published in 1981, this feminist classic began modestly as an academic essay on Emily Dickinson's love poems and letters to her future sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. In her original introduction, Faderman recalled her surprise at finding these records of an erotic attachment between women that showed no evidence of guilt, anxiety, or the need for secrecy. Yet 60 or 70 years after they were written, the original letters had been bowdlerized by a niece of Dickinson's, who clearly found them too shocking for publication. Why, Faderman wondered, was passionate love between women, once almost universally applauded in the Western world, now almost universally condemned? She learned that the love between Dickinson and Gilbert had many precedents, and that it was only in the late 19th century that medical literature and antifeminism combined to rank women who loved women "somewhere," as she puts it bluntly, "between necrophiliacs and those who had sex with chickens." For this new edition, Faderman explains that she has resisted the urge to update her text, hoping that her exploration of romantic friendship, from French libertine literature through the dawn of feminism through the lesbian panic of the 1920s will still serve as "solace and ammunition" for those hoping to find "a usable past.


Book #9 was Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Divine Feminine by Sue Monk Kidd

From Amazon.com:

The author's journey to capture her feminine soul and to live authentically from that soul makes a fascinating, well-researched and well-written story. Kidd's successful pilgrimage from her Southern Baptist roots and away from the patriarchal and fundamentalist Christian religious systems surrounding her is an account of anger turned to courage, creativity and love. A mid-career realization that she had lived without "real inner authority" and with "a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity" produced in Kidd the new mindset that made her journey possible. Additionally, her extensive knowledge of many subjects, including theology, mythology and the arts, made possible the copious references and cross-references that will prove invaluable for readers who wish to follow her in this same search. While Kidd cautions that each woman's path will be unique, there is no question but that many women will find in her book a mirror of their own present conditions and a hopeful call to self-discovery


Book #10 was Standing at Water's Edge: Moving Past Fear, Blocks, and Pitfalls to Discover the Power of Creative Immersion by Ann Paris

From Amazon.com

30. The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society, by A. L. Rowse. 304 pages. (1971)

Grade: B+

This book meanders through such topics as the court, the gentry, sex, astrology, sport, and food. It covers the entire reign of Elizabeth I, with occasional looks back at the times of her father and peeks forward to the days of James I.

A fun read.

23) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Wow, what an intriguing book. It's a generational saga leading up to the very formation of the narrator, Cal, a hermaphrodite. Very little of the book takes place in Cal's present day life. The heart of the book, for me, was really in the story of his grandparents' exodus from turbulent 1920s Turkey to America, and to Detroit. Middlesex is also in many ways a love letter to Detroit; I've never been to the city, but the geography rang true and vivid for me.

The perspective of the book caused some problems for me. In truth, Cal knew too much. There were details that his grandmother wouldn't be able to provide, and other characters were dead, and yet Cal explored their viewpoint, too. It bugs me when a first-person narrator comes across as omnipotent. Even imagination can only go so far, especially in describing the details of your grandparents' sex life. Still, I loved Cal. He was delightfully complex and sympathetic, even as he did some stupid things that made me want to throttle him. His yia yia, grandmother, was my favorite character, though. I love the details on Greek culture (everything else I know is from a hilarious episode of the British comedy Are You Being Served?) and life in the 1920s in Motor City. The research on topics from Ford factories to silk worms is amazing and fascinating.

Overall, it was an excellent book, though I don't think I'll read it again.

40. Nobody's Child Marie Balter and Richard Katz (3/5)

Marie Balter spent the majority of the time between age 17 and her late thirties in Sutton Hospital in Boston. After her tenure there, she gradually managed to rejoin the outside world and eventually became an advocate for the mentally ill, particularly those who had been hospitalized for the long-term.

Balter's story is interesting, and is a good counterpoint to some other memoirs of mental illness, like Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, which tend to involved relatively brief stays in much nicer private hospitals. Balter's writing, unfortunately, is not particularly good; she frequently switches between past and present tense to describe events happening in the past, which sometimes makes it confusing, especially since she also jumps chronologically from the past to the present fairly frequently. I also wish that she had written a little more about exactly what she was supposed to be in the hospital for; at first, when she was seventeen, it seems like she mostly ended up there because she was depressed and didn't have anywhere else to go. Later, she seems to show signs of acute anxiety disorder and anxiety or depression-related psychosis, but since she was also on massive amounts of drugs in an experimental program, it's hard to know how much of the psychosis was caused by this.

The final thing I was curious about is that at the time she wrote her memoir, Balter was working closely with patient's rights groups and seems to have been part of the movement to get more people released from the hospitals into group home situations. While she seemed to have a strong sense that there was a right and a wrong way to do this, I do wish that she'd talked more about how the massive closings of state mental institutions in 70s affected the population of the homeless and mentally ill.
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41. Aliens Adored: Rael's UFO Religion Susan J. Palmer (4/5)

Palmer, a sociologist specializing in NRMs (New Religious Movements, known to some as cults), spent approximately ten years in close contact with the Raelians. She was able to establish a great deal of trust among the leadership (particularly at first), and as a result she has almost unprecedented knowledge of the history and inner workings of the movement. This book is absolutely fascinating. Palmer actually has quite a bit of sympathy for the Raelians, noting that many of the accusations by ex-members are untrue or appear to be the result of the actions of individuals, rather than endemic to the movement as a whole. There were even things I could get on board with, philosophically -- for example, while the Raelians are very much about "free love," the official "doctrine" is that if a Raelian makes repeated unwanted sexual advances on another individual, they are ejected from the movement for seven years.

Palmer does not make any bones about the fact that many of the Raelian beliefs are deeply weird to outsiders, and discusses the odd situation surrounding "Clonaid" and the supposed cloning of human beings at great length. She does this mainly from a sociological and religious perspective, however; what she is interested in is the question of what such a stunt means about the changing focus of the religion, and what Rael and the other leaders hope to achieve by such publicity.

This is a great book, and one that I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in NRMs and the intersection of science and religion.

18) The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

This is a curious book, and it didn't grab me as much as I hoped. Foremost, it's told in a monologue, and we know almost nothing about the man this is being narrated to. That alone has its weaknesses, specifically why a person would spill all their most sordid secrets to a total stranger. The protagonist Changez, is a young Pakistani man who falls in love - and out of love - with America. For this being in first person, Changez depicts himself quite well-rounded. There are a few times where he does incredibly stupid things and I had the profound urge to yell at him. I think the novel is at its strongest when dealing with Erica, the American girl Changez loves. That by itself is a haunting love story, even without all of the political accouterments.

I wanted to be sucked into the story and into his mindset. I wanted to see how a man who loves America might fall by the wayside. I didn't find Changez's journey to be believable. Maybe it needed more emphasis on the racism after 9/11. Maybe I just wanted to see more rage on his part, more cold rationality. I'm left feeling... wishy-washy.

As for the ending... I don't know quite what to think. How have you other readers interpreted the final few pages?

 I would think being in an English grad school program I'd be reading more but alas, I have not.  So around the research papers, I finished the following books, mostly for school:

8. The Tempest - William Shakespeare.  Never mess with the smart guy with 'magic' powers that you stranded on an island for more than 10 years.

9. As You Like it - William Shakespeare.  Everyone hides in a forest and pretends to be people they're not in order to survive the Duke that kicked them out of court. Love story ensues.

(Technically I flipped through Hamlet while the class read that as well. However, being it the 6th time I've academically studied Hamlet, I didn't read it cover to cover)

10. The Grass Dancer - Susan Power.  Native American literature starting with two teens who have troubling pasts. decendents of powerful people.  It's a great read if you want to understand the way just being forced into an idea of American colonialism has messed with tribal life.

11. Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko. One of the few Native American Lit books in the official canon.  It's a complicated book to explain as it follows Tayo, who is suffering through severe post traumatic stress disorder after surviving Vietnam.  Combine this with several family issues and it takes a journey and healing to get Tayo back to normal and heal the community and his family as well.  If you like the confusing, post-modern, let-the-pieces-come-together-in-thier-own-time sort of reading experience, I'd recommend it.  If you dont, the book will drive you crazy.

In honor of finishing my final research paper ahead of time and being frustrated with Shakespeare,  I picked up and devoured Marisa de los Santos' book Belong to Me.  A sequel to her first book, Love Walked In, this book isn't necessarily dependent on the first.  It does however follow Cornelia as she moves from city life to suburb life with Teo and is interspersed with the people she meets around her new home.  Phenomenal writing, great story and some twists like you wouldn't believe.

Being so refreshed after reading that,  I finished off my last class reading of Julius Caesar by, of course, William Shakespeare.  One of W.S.'s historical plays reflecting the state of Rome but also of Elizabethian England.  The play includes the warning of the Ides of March, the death of Caesar and the consequent civil war.

That being my 13th book of the year, and only one short paper away from being done with the semester, I look forward to catching up in no time.

Happy Reading! 

Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood is traced through the events that lead to the production and nomination of  “In the Heat of the Night", "Bonnie & Clyde", "Doctor Doolittle", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Graduate” for the best picture in the Academy Awards Ceremony of 1967. As you read it you become painlessly enmeshed in the practical nuts and bolts of movie making as well as the political, social and technological changes affecting their production and distribution.  It is clearly based on meticulous research and interviews so you get both the contemporary take on things and the older and perhaps wiser reflections on events of many of the main characters.

 

 

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 #5 is 'Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods", by Michael Wex. 


I picked it on a whim. I found the book interesting, though I don't know enough about the subject to really follow it as closely as it deserves. But for somebody with a more scholarly background, or at least a basic fluency in Yiddish or Hebrew (possibly a smattering of German or some of the Balkan languages?), I think it would make for a fascinating read.

The book talks about colloquialisms in Yiddish, how they've changed over the years and the variations caused by different cultures' influences. Most of the expressions are simultaneously very earthy and discreet, and usually quite funny. I doubt I'll ever read this again; but I might pass it along to my brother, who's very interested in this kind of subject.

Now I want to watch 'Fiddler on the Roof' again.

Sisterhood, Interrupted. From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild by Deborah Siegel. 170 pages.

I've been interested in the history of feminism for a while now, and have read a few articles and books on the subject - this is the most methodically set out that I've seen. It was also quite approachable - Deborah realising that some of the readers would be active feminists who would know the key players and events, while others would have no background knowledge at all and choose it for the pink cover.
The book has been divided into two sections, Mothers and Daughters (looking into Second and Third Wave Femisinsm respectively) ending with a conclusion. She looks at the differences between the movements while also showing the many similarities that the two generations of women can't see themselves. It also has an impressive references/bibliography section with books, articles and websites she's used, and an online resource guide listing blogs, archives and other online media about and/or by feminists..

Book 2 was: The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious changes and expectations 950-1050, edited by Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, And David C. Van Meter. This book was really hard to get through, as it is a collection of papers on the year 1000 and whether or not there was apocalyptic anxiety, how much there was, and how it can be seen. It also gets into the schools of thought on the subject.

All in all, it was depressingly boring. However, these are all very scholarly papers, and I'm not a medieval studies expert, so perhaps that's the problem.

However, I did find two things in the book that amused me, because some days I have the sense of humor of a ten year old boy, especially when I'm bored. Those two things were: the word "religiosity", which I always thought of as a word people who were being silly use; and also the phrase "Holy Foreskin" which refers to a type of holy relic of Jesus Christ that was prominent in this time period. Weird, huh?

I'd only recommend this book to people who have a DEEP interest of medieval history and/or are studying it in school. If you just enjoy reading a book about history, it might be a bit boring and dense, since it's written for a scholarly audience.

 

88. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. 336 pages.
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