Holidays + Challenges

I hope everyone had/is having lovely holidays (or, if you don't celebrate anything at this time of year, stress-free days off!) Personally, I am over the moon about the solstice being behind us and the days gradually lengthening again. Secular Christmas was also great, with some bookish gifts. Check out what my mother-in-law MADE for us:

An Evening All Afternoon accent pillow! Isn't that the coolest thing ever? Thanks, Anne!

I'm really looking forward to the New Year and new reading projects, and thought I would take a moment to join a few challenges (just a few, I promise!) and talk about what I'll be up to. First up:

The Women Unbound Reading Challenge

I'm almost done with my first book for this challenge, so I knew I had to get my official joiner post up! As I have more than five books currently on my shelves that would qualify, I'm going to go ahead and join at the Suffragette level: eight books, at least three of them nonfiction. Here's my list thus far:

• Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, by Elliott Gorn: This is the one I'm almost finished with. It's fascinating!


• Ladies and Not-So-Gentlewomen: Elisabeth Marbury, Anne Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Vanderbilt, and Their Times: I've somehow ended up with an area of specialization in upper-class, turn-of-the-century New York. I'm not sure how it happened, as I'm not particularly a Wharton or James fan, but there you go. Should be an interesting contrast to the militantly working-class philosophy of Mother Jones.


• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft: This is coming up in my Great Ideas series, but it's one of the abridged volumes. So I bought a trusty Norton Critical Edition for myself. Should be good.


• A Natural History of the Romance Novel, by Pamela Regis: This is one of the books that helped initiate scholarly studies of the romance genre. I don't generally read romance (beyond Austen and the Brontës), but the genre does tread a fascinating line between feminist and anti-feminist. It's also the single highest selling market in publishing, hugely female-dominated, and almost universally dismissed. Coincidence?


• The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, by Mike Madrid. Like romance novels, the sexually-charged, powerful-yet-marginalized female characters of classic American comic books walk an interesting line between throwing off and participating in oppression of women. This was a surprise Christmas present from my folks!


• Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson: Does this have to do with womens' studies? Basically, I just love Robinson and this is the last book of hers I haven't read.

The GLBT Reading Challenge
Yup, I'm doing it: joining at the pink triangle level (eight books). I actually bought The Color Purple to read for this challenge, but then I got sucked in and, you know, finished it before the year ended. Before the DAY even ended, to tell the truth. But there's lots of relevant things I'd be interested to read for this one, such as:

• Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides: I'm curious to read this family epic of intersexuality, especially since I didn't think Eugenides' earlier book, The Virgin Suicides, was very sexually enlightened.


• The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. Mmm, Sarah Waters. She's like literary crack, without the unhealthy connotations.


• The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. I've heard a lot of talk around the blogosphere lately about Larsen's Passing, and confess myself intrigued.


• The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. The novels that were adapted into I Am A Camera and Cabaret: hedonistic inter-war Berlin during the fascists' rise to power.


• Anything by Patricia Highsmith. I've never read The Price of Salt, The Talented Mr. Ripley, or anything else by Highsmith.


• Anything by Jeanette Winterson. Again, a massive gap in my reading. I ended up reading just about all of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit while standing in a bookstore one gray afternoon, but I've never given her work the attention it deserves.


• And, of course, I'll be reading Woolf in January and February, although I don't know whether I'll end up counting her toward this challenge or not.

Essay Project

This is just a little something I think I'll do on my own. I've had a book sitting around for years, entitled The Art of the Personal Essay (compiled by Phillip Lopate). I've been trying to think of a useful way to write about this book as I read it, since reviewing essay collections as a whole seems almost completely useless. Since there are 76 essays in the book, I've decided to start reading four a week starting in the New Year and extending over 19 weeks. Of the four I read each week, I'll pick the most interesting to write about, hopefully publishing those reviews on Fridays. Lopate's book is chronological, so my first four essays will all be the work of my old friend Seneca. After that, things will get more interesting: in a week composed of Carlos Fuentes, Wole Soyinka, Sara Suleri and Henry David Thoreau, who will I choose to write about? I hate Thoreau and quite like Soyinka, but how does that translate into "interestingness"? ONLY TIME WILL TELL. These entries might not be as long as my essays on full-length books, but hopefully the "battle royal" aspect will make for some fun times. Y'all can even place bets if you want to. :-)

Other than that, it's just Woolf in Winter in January and February, and continuing to write about the Great Ideas series as I finish them. Happy 2010, everyone!