A Book with a One Word Title

I'm sneaking this entry in between book writing and reading a zillion things for my World Lit II class. However, if I don't write this up I'll completely forget the book! I read it in January, for Pete's sake.

Here, I'm going with a Book with a One Word Title from my Better Reading Challenge. I've chosen Hild by Nicola Griffith. This could have fulfilled a few categories: book longer than 500 pages, book by a LGBT author, and a book a friend recommended. Don't worry, it's not taking all four categories, I'm not cheating.

Hild is by an author that I like, Nicola Griffith. I've read and enjoyed Ammonite (1993) and Slow River (1995) and hated The Blue Place (1998). Man, that one was terrible. Anyway, the first two novels were science fiction, and felt like Griffith was trying on genres for size. Ammonite was clearly an homage to Le Guin and Slow River was built on Gibson and other Cyberpunk authors. Hild is where I think Griffith really comes into her own.

It's historical fiction, telling the story of the early days of Hild, who later becomes Saint Hilda.  This is the story of the early conversion of England to Christianity and the tenuous role that one young girl plays in that story. Not tenuous because she's not great, merely because there are so many power plays happening that she's always in danger. What I loved about this book was the pacing. It's slow. Very slow. Reading it felt like sinking into a really comfortable bed. (I was going to say warm syrup, but I thought that might gross you all out.) The slowness of the text really gave me a chance to feel like I was in Hild's head. She's a thinker, a planner, as well as a doer. There's something rare about just engaging with a complex thought process that isn't always even tied to action. 

We also get a larger perspective on women's roles in early Britain. (The book is meticulously researched, so I feel as though they aren't terribly exaggerated, but I'm not an Medievalist so buyer beware.) The relationship between female companions was fascinating, the women's roles at court are complex, and women just generally seem like competent members of society. The opposite of what we often expect based on other fantasy novels, as the NPR review notes. As an aside, Terry Jones also teaches this lesson in his Medieval Lives episode on "The Damsel:" 

I highly recommend Hild if you like engaging in popular conceptions of the Medieval era. Give this a chance now that you've read all zillion pages of Game of Thrones, why dontcha? 

A Book Longer than 600 Pages

Yeah, right. 

Another better reading challenge blog post. I certainly won't make 50 this year, but hopefully 10. I've read many more than 10 books so far this year (and, actually, probably more than 50 at this point) but I don't have as much time to write as I'd like. Or, not as much time for pleasure writing.

First, let me introduce everyone to an amazing resource. Amazing! I’m currently teaching World Lit II online. All of our texts are also online, making the “I don't have the book yet” excuse entirely moot. What a pleasure! Anyway, some of the readings were on rather messy webpages, so I went searching for better versions that could be easily downloaded to Kindle (the Project Gutenberg downloads have never worked for me). I came across the University of Adelaide’s eBook program, and it’s great. The books read well on a web page, but are also easily and quickly downloaded to Kindle. In fact, both the readings I reference here are available: Little Women and Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Go forth and find some books! (I also downloaded Collins’ The Moonstone which I’m super psyched to read in conjunction with Waters’ Fingersmith.)

Oof. When I started reading Little Women on my kindle I didn’t really check to see how long it was. I also apparently read both parts, packaged together as Parts I and II by the Adelade eBook website, not realizing they were published as separate books initially. So, some of these impressions are definitely from Good Wives. When I downloaded the book I just figured, “oh, I haven’t read this and it’s a big hole in my children’s lit knowledge, so I should do it.” Little did I know. So many pages! So much "womanly advice!" So much nonsense disguised as sense!

My book's cover was more utilitarian. 

I really disliked this book. I know so many people have fond memories of it from reading it as a child, but as an adult I found the larger message of meek womanhood to be extremely frustrating. In fact, rereading Wollstonecraft’s Vindication I came across this passage:

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.

Of course, this is what Wollstonecraft is rallying against in her treatise. Yet it seems exactly the advice that Jo et. al. receive throughout Little Women. Jo is repeatedly advised to hold her anger inside in order to model ideal femininity. While this article from Michigan Quarterly Review suggests one of the most engaging aspects of the story is Marmee's underlying anger, it's still an anger she has learned to quash and encourages her daughters to do the same. Published in 1868, America is 20 years into "first wave" feminism, but the possibilities of that movement are not reflected in the novel. 

The girls are encouraged to be obedient and proper. One of the most nauseating examples, I think, is the chapter where Meg is struggling a bit after the birth of her first child. She no longer is pretty! And endlessly charming! And she’s tired! And frustrated because she never talks to adults! So her husband just quits eating at home and goes to his friend’s house, where there’s a more charming wife. When Mama March finds out she encourages “a puerile kind of propriety,” suggesting Meg be a perfect version of a housewife until she charms her husband back home. Smile pretty, make nice dinners, and your husband will pay attention to you for a few hours a day. Yeesh.

My one word review

I also think Jo should have ended up with Laurie. They challenged each other! I think the lively discussions were good, not bad. I get why Alcott wanted Jo to remain independent, but I'm not sure a marriage to Laurie automatically undermines her autonomy. It does recenter the book around the girls' relationship with each other, but that's also undone by creating the "good wives" of Part II.

Jo's temper just gets totally checked and she meekly marries that old scholar. Plllbbbthhh. I just really have nothing good to say about it. I suppose it's admirable that Jo starts the school for boys, and that she marries for love and not money. Everyone is happily paired off by the end, the girls' having successfully found husbands due to their excellent feminine virtues.

Anyway, keep those happy childhood memories intact if you have them, and by no means give this a nostalgia reread. It’s a miserable and heavy handed book about obedience to your husband and God. Go read Wollstonecraft instead and see how many of her ideas we have yet to realize. 

A Classic Romance!

So, another entry from the "Better Reading Challenge" realm, this time about a classic romance. Romance isn't actually my genre of choice, but I DO love a "happily ever after" sort of story. STARDUST (2007) and AMELIE (2001) are some of my favorite movies for that reason.

Well, I need a book and its sequels to rightly talk about this one, so you get a three-fer here. I’m choosing Anne of Green Gables, Anne ofAvonlea, and Anne of the Island as my classic romance. Is there anything better than L.M. Montgomery’s thwarted/not-thwarted love stories in general? I mean, for romances? I claim there is not. You also may get the impression here that I’ve read a lot more than these three recently… so sorry if basically all of her works sneak in.

The way relationships develop in Montgomery’s work is really all the more poignant when you realize she herself entered an unhappy marriage after she turned down other men. In Chronicles of Avonlea she seems to want to rectify this over and over and over again.

Anne is, of course, a classic character of children’s lit. After rereading all (yes ALL) of the series earlier this year I feel like they hold up well as an adult reader. Except, EXCEPT Anne of Ingleside. This is one Montgomery went back and wrote later, and the charm has gone out of it. The sewing circle gossip seems mean rather than lighthearted and the whole thing is just…bleh. I think that’s the one everyone focuses on when they say “well, they just get worse as they go along.” Yet, Rilla of Ingleside is a really delightful book. Don’t believe the hype and give Rilla a chance.

Anyway, I love all the romances in Montgomery. Actually, I find Emily Starr and Dean Priest to be just creepy, so maybe not all. That works out okay in the end though. Emily’s a smart girl. Of course Anne and Gilbert is one of the most satisfying since it takes so long to develop (and doesn’t get stupidly put off like Emily and Teddy). You know it’s going to happen, yet they each grow as their own people before they finally get together. In contemporary boy/girl relationships I wouldn’t accept the “well, he pulls your hair because he likes you." Clearly that cements all kinds of really bad expectations for how men and women should interact. However, I’m not actually certain that Gilbert liked Anne at the hair-pulling point though, as he was just probably a jerk. Anne was right to be pissed. Yet, the book certainly teaches us about the downsides of holding a grudge after the Ophelia incident. 

Shakespeare comes to life...

Gilbert and Anne have a lovely romance because they both inspire each other (sometimes out of spite) to work harder and be better people. Once they are married their union is represented as a very happy one (DON’T pay attention to the blurbs for Anne of Ingleside AT ALL). Gilbert is sometimes stuffy and condescending, yes, but overall I accept it as a romance that I feel warm and fuzzy about (nostalgia tinged, of course).

Warm fuzzies.

Most of the books (not Windy Poplars or Ingleside which were written later and not public domain yet) are available as a set online for .99, so I suggest you give them a reread if it’s been a few decades. 

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

My students had some questions and moments of confusion when they recently completed some discussion board postings. I decided to write a quick FAQ for them, and also post it here for future reference. I'd love to see your thoughts on what else I should include. 

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction FAQ

Which is which?

Fiction is made up. Something that is fictional is NOT real.

Non-Fiction is factual, or real. I know, this seems like it’s backwards from how it should be. But English often doesn’t make any sense.

Similarly:

Novels are always fictional. They are made up. Therefore, not every book is a novel. In fact, most are not.

Non-fiction can be referred to as a text or a book when you are discussing it. Or, for shorter pieces, call them articles or essays.

Is that it? Why do we need a FAQ?

Well, here’s some more subtleties that we can think on:

What about if something really happened in the past and an author wrote a novel about it?

Well, there’s such a thing as historical fiction which means an author takes a historical moment in time and writes about it from a made-up point of view. This is still fiction because the characters and situations come from the author’s imagination. Examples of this sort of book are The Book Thief, The Help, Secret Life of Bees, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Number the Stars.

But what if it’s about a real historical person?

You may also find a novel from the perspective of a person who actually lived. One way to tell if you’re reading fiction or non-fiction in this case is to see if the text is labeled a biography (non-fiction) or a novel (fiction). You can also look for footnotes or references at the end of the book (see below). An example of a fictional text that has a character who did actually live would be Annexed, the story of Diary of Anne Frank told from Peter van Pel’s perspective. Wolf Hall and In the Time of the Butterflies are also examples of this kind of book.

Okay, but what about a book like Devil in the White City? That talks about actual people from the past, but reads like a story.

The difference between Erik Larson’s books and the fictional examples above is in how the authors gather material for their books. In Devil in the White City or others like it, the author will include many notes at the back of the book telling you where the information comes from. They will also often include a prelude or afterword explaining their process of writing. Many popular history texts (like Seabiscuit) will read like a story, yet be carefully footnoted. Importantly, every word a character says comes from either historical record OR interviews (like In Cold Blood), depending on when the book was written. All the dialogue the characters say are words they actually said or wrote, and are not from the author’s imagination.

So what's a memoir?

Well, we tend to assume that memoirs are non-fiction. And most are. Of course, we need to consider the slippery nature of memory itself here and realize our brains are always making things up and filling details in. This is why eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Just because someone experienced an event, we can't say we have the "truth" from any one description (or even many, because there are all kinds of motivations one might have). Still, readers believe there is "truth" or "authenticity" (both complicated terms on their own) behind a memoir, which is why A Million Little Pieces and Fragments were both so vilified when people discovered they were partially or completely fabricated (i.e. fictional). Here's a little more on the difference between memoir, autobiography, and biography. 

Both of these last two (popular history, memoir) are often referred to as creative non-fiction. 

A Graphic Novel

I'm cheating a bit here and writing about Lumberjanes. It's a comic, rather than a graphic novel, but the first trade paperback has a contained story so it's gonna work here. I'm also writing about it for two forthcoming edited collections (as long as the editors like the work) and presented on it at CHLA recently. So! Quadruple duty for Lumberjanes!

What can I say about LJ? Lots. I just wrote 20 darn pages on it. But here's the highlights:

• The girls of Roanoke Cabin (which, btw, when I presented at CHLA on this topic we were in the Roanoke Room, which was amazing) work as a group to defeat the powers-that-be. There's no defined leader, instead their power comes from working together. We can contrast this against Harry Potter & the Sorcerers Stone where the group is really there to prop up Harry's success. No such power structure here.
• The girls, like actual adolescent girls, are at different stages of development, yet aren't set up as "mean girls" that pick on Ripley (seen above on the far left). I think the rejection of the mean girls trope is cool.
• Unlike the 1990s cartoon representatives of "girl power," the Powerpuff Girls, the LJ's don't gain their abilities from the patriarchy. PPG were created by Dad and given assignments by the Mayor (who, yes, has a power behind the throne woman, but still). The girls learn things, earn badges with bad puns, and use that knowledge to defeat various enemies. I like this, as it challenges some anti-intellectualism we see in American culture. Learning is good y'all.

I encourage you to check the comic out. It was clearly more popular than anticipated,so the trade paperback is sold out on Amazon. However, you can buy back issues of 1-8 on Comixology and read them online/on yer tablet. Two thumbs up so far, although one of the creators is leaving this fall, so we'll see where it goes.

A Book Set in a Different Country

Back to the Better Reading Challenge. Today we're going with "A book set in a different country." I could have chosen a few here, as I've read books set in Sweden and Canada and Germany and Iowa so far this year (see what I did there?)

However, I've gone with Jo Walton's Among Others, which is set in England and Wales.

This is a book in which not a lot happens. And I'm actually okay with that. It's a book about recovering from a trauma, reality, and loving books. Sometimes recovery requires that not much "happen," I guess in a way that I hadn't thought about before reading this book. Mori, the main character, needs the process of reading and writing to recover from the events that led up to her running away from home and finding her long-estranged father.

It's a meditation on the power of "others," fictional, real, and maybe real. And for the duration of this book, the power of others is largely generative helping Mori to heal from the destructive months that precede the story itself. It's about how being smart is attractive and how desire can be an important part of healing (as is Lovely Bones, in a totally different way).

It is also a powerful love letter to early Sci-Fi. It brought me back to my early 20s, when I had inherited a lot of old paperbacks from my Dad and went on a big Asimov/Clarke/LeGuin/Heinlein/Herbert reading binge. My engagement with Sci-Fi hasn't stayed quite as strong as it was fifteen years ago, so I hadn't read nearly as deeply as Mori does, but it was fun to reflect on the power of possibility and imagination that helps Mori heal.

I don't know what to make of the fairies, or magic in the book, which is why it gets this category and not the "a book with magic" label. And I've just realized I've said dead nothing about England or Wales here! Ha. Well, Wales is represented as a combination of wild and etched away by industry, which if you've taken the train from London to Swansea certainly is true. Mori's role, in part, is to help the wild reclaim places that industrialization has destroyed (if you believe the magic part is true). This really has to happen in Wales, I think, rather than England, which is represented through the traditional British Boarding School and Family With Old Money. While Mori spends most of the book at the boarding school, it's Wales and the nearby town that have an impact on her life. There should be more books set in Wales. 

A Book by a Female Author

Hey, remember my Better Reading Challenge list that I posted a few months ago? And my list of female authors, AKA authors? Well, I thought it might be useful to keep track here with some short posts on my progress through these 50 books this year. Clearly, I have some catch-up to do since it's already July.

I'm starting with the category that bridges the two other blogs I posted and am going to comment quickly on Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. I presented on this book at a Women in the Holocaust Conference at the University of South Carolina in March, so I'll try not to go on too long.

Rose Under Fire is a loose sequel to Wein's Code Name Verity. It was less well-received than Verity, and I think that's fair. Then again, Verity was amazing, so it's hard to live up to. There's room to criticize another camp narrative for young readers and it brushes up against questions about historical accuracy. Wein is well aware of that potential problem, however, and includes information on how she got her historical knowledge and where she's made allowances in order to move the story forward. This paratext is important in any YA Holocaust lit because of the way readers are often internalizing historical knowledge by reading these books.

What I liked about Rose is the engagement with two concepts rarely seen in YA Holocaust lit: medical experimentation and the Nuremberg Trials. Additionally, unlike most medical experimentation seen in popular culture, Wein humanizes the victims. Often these victims are particular sites of horror in pop culture, their bodies becoming more alienated and weirdly victimized yet again. Think X-Men, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and others here. So that's one important thing. Second, the engagement with the Nuremberg Trials, including the forthcoming trial of a guard who readers have developed some sympathy for, allows readers see how the Holocaust echoes throughout Europe long after the war is over. Rose's trauma upon leaving the camps is also worth engaging with.

I'm not covering these books, nor many other resistance narratives, in my book. There's just not room. Maybe in my next book, which is shaping up to be about female friendship and collective action. If I keep doing research. Anyway, if you are a reader of WWII adventure stories, interested in female pilots, or want to follow up your reading of The Book Thief, here's a book for you! Oh, lastly, Wein has some really interesting social media presence that helps readers gather more historical information if they want to follow up. Here's her Pinterest page, if that's your thing.

Virginia Holocaust Museum

I just returned from Richmond and this year's Children's Literature Association annual conference. It was, as always, a combination of great and stressful. I saw some wonderful papers, met a few new people, caught up with some friends, and just generally conferenced my butt off. (BTW, if you view this on a phone the layout isn't as nice. Just FYI.)

Because I got in Wednesday night and was staying in a different area than the conference hotel, I decided to check out my neighborhood a bit. And, lo and behold, there was the Virginia Holocaust Museum just down the street. Google promised a 'Powerful museum with free entrance," and Google reviewers gave it 4.8 stars. To give some perspective on the other Holocaust museums/memorials I've written about here, the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston has 4.6 and the USHMM has 4.5. Unsurprisingly, for these more widely visited sites, it's often Holocaust deniers that are ranking things with one star. In fact, reading them today introduced me to the term 'Holohoax' which I really should have anticipated as a thing that existed yet somehow hadn't. Learn something new everyday, I guess. This could easily become a whole digression into these ratings, but we'll avoid that. What I'm getting at here is that it's well-regarded by visitors and is centrally located in Richmond. 

I came away from the experience feeling conflicted. Certainly the Museum has a good heart, and is clearly trying to do good work. People are touched by it, or responding positively, as the five-star reviews would indicate (it also ranks highly on TripAdvisor and Yelp). Many people express a preference for this museum over the USHMM and seem moved by their time there. So, why was I conflicted? Well, read on.    

The structure of the Museum seems to want you to experience the "reality" of the Holocaust. Online feedback indicates that this seems to be the takeaway many people had, with comments on Yelp like, "Very hands on museum and they do a good job of making you feel like you are there" and "“I believe this place makes you feel you are one of the Jews during the WWII.” I found the way the museum "make[s] you feel are there" to be incredibly odd. After watching a film made my Richmond's community survivors you enter the first exhibit, seen below: 

Creepy Mannequins 

I felt something, for sure, but I'm not certain it was as though I was there in the barracks with these poor guys (representing early round-ups of those who spoke against the Nazi party). There's a strange kitschyness to the whole thing that limited the amount of emotional impact. Some exhibits were more funny than troubling, such as our poor woman who has just experienced the violence of kristalnacht: 

Stuff is kinda broken, I guess?

End Game: the Allies
Save the Day

There's also something troubling me about the teleological structure of the story. There's clearly a beginning, middle, and an end. We start with these first mannequins and follow through all the way to our courtroom drama. Yet, if we think about trauma as Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son, does we need to acknowledge that trauma is disordered, full of lapses, too much or too little information, and doesn't have a tidy resolution. Literature does this well for us, but I don't think it's impossible to represent that overwhelming amount of information in architecture or museum. You can see more on this in my Year of Memorials post from a few years ago. 

Much has been written on Holocaust memorials in many more and fancier words that you'll find here. Let's look at one text that directly addresses the sort of performative "really there" aspect that the VaHM is evoking:

In a museum of the dead, the critical actors are gone, and it is up to us to perform acts of reinterpretation to meaning and memory. To some degree, then, the usual museum situation (in which we look at objects) is exploited to underscore the absence to be read in the presence of objects that stand for the violent loss of which they are only the remains.To the degree this historical, material, human loss is allowed to remain a tangible 'presence,' a Holocaust museum can constitute a particular metonymic situation: inanimate material objects document and mark the loss instead of simply substituting them through representation. In this case, the enormity of the absent referent is neither contained nor scaled down through representation that claims its presence over the terrible absence produced by genocide (122).--Vivian Patraka, Spectacular Suffering 

Yet the referent is weirdly not absent in the VaHM. Certainly we have those representations of those who were lost in pictures and letters. Yet the dominant impression is of a staged performance that one wanders through as the actors have been frozen in place. In particular I was troubled by the trajectory that led me through a train car (which whistled and made rushing noises as I walked through) to the room with a door.  The door had a small window in it, covered in mesh. It led to a recreation of a gas chamber (so, so happily mannequin free). There were no directions as to what I should do. There was a door on the other side. An exit? I refused to enter.  

The interior of the "gas chamber."

I found myself unwilling to perform the role the museum asked of me: to reenact a form of violent death. (Again, with the particular trajectory, why was I not asked to stand in front of a gun and fall "dead" into a pit?) 

Luckily, I didn't have to crawl
through here.

I went back around the whole museum as there were no optional routes around the gas chamber, again, unwilling to play dead. When I arrived at the other side of the gas chamber I found myself facing the crematoria. The whole place has the lights on timers, so if you walk through backwards (as I did) you find yourself entering dark rooms whose lights don't come on until you've wandered around a bit. I was doing this wandering in the crematoria room when the lights came on and the "ovens" began to glow. 

Now, one might say, if you're going for trauma what's wrong with being tasked to walk through a gas chamber and seeing the theatrical representation of how your body will be disposed of? I think what I truly object to is that you do just that: walk through. You move on. You live. As the family behind me did, talking about their grandfather's visit to Dachau and its emotional impact. Moving into the future. It seems a disservice to those who were never able to walk again to play dead in this particular way. 






I drifted through the rest of the museum, stopping to watch some of the Nuremberg Trials from my seat in the audience. The presence of the actual Nazi leaders on video is a strange contrast to the mannequins that surrounded them. 

You can just barely see the TV here, which was playing
actual Nuremberg scenes. 

I ended with a trip to this exhibit:

In some ways this sums up the whole thing for me. Auschwitz, now open on the second floor. Not "our Auschwitz exhibit" but just that Auschwitz itself is open, upstairs. The content is there but the context is off. At the Virginia Holocaust Museum the heart is there, and the stories of survivors who came to Richmond are important in this cradle of Patrick Henry's calls for liberty and the darker history of slave trails and confederate museums. (I shall echo a common refrain here, and one that Phil Nel touched on in his CHLA talk: why a Holocaust Museum and not a Museum of Slavery? Can't we learn the same "lessons" of "tolerance through education" when considering slavery?) To prove my point, a full list of Richmond museums here.

For my criticisms of the larger concept of "tolerance through education" you'll need to wait for my book next year. There's way more than a blog's worth. 

Tolerance Cards!

I also just discovered you can get married there. Who? What? Why? I cannot imagine sending out wedding invites asking everyone to come celebrate with me at the Holocaust Museum. Anyway, people do. You can find pictures here.

Greatest (?) Books by Women

Recently, I took about a million online quizzes. You did too, admit it. I particularly like the sorts of survey quizzes that let me rank how many of the top 100 movies from IMBD I've seen, or how many books featured on Gilmore Girls I've read. Generally, I don't "share" these to FB or Twitter or whatever, I just take them and move on. I think I'm mostly just interested in what shows up on these kinds of lists, rather than really caring where I "rank" in terms of other users who have taken the quiz themselves. Okay, sometimes I get a little jealous on the travel ones when I come in only in the top 30% or something.

However! (You knew it was coming, right? I wouldn't write a blog just to tell you I don't post quiz results to my FB wall.) Last week I took Buzzfeed's Greatest Books by Women quiz. I got a 35/102. This is sad, as I read a lot and I taught Women's Studies for years. However, even sadder is the fact that having read a mere 34% of these books put me in the top 7% of those 18,000 or so people who had taken the quiz. I assume quizzes like this also skew towards readers, and those who feel as though they've read a lot of women writers--like myself, which makes it an even more potentially depressing statistic.

There was also something...odd about the list itself. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels super haphazard, like someone googled "books by women" and then made a quiz of all the ones they had heard of before and thus labeled them "great." Following the quiz (which I DID post to FB) we had a brief discussion of the number we had read, and one friend asked me to cull down the list to 90 or so of the "greatest" books by women. Now, my list may not be any better, but I'm going to include some rationale and organize it a bit better than the Buzzfeed list. If you were looking for books to read after my last blog post, maybe this is a good place to start!

YA: If you want 2 books that have significantly altered our popular culture landscape over the last 20 years, look no further than:
1) Harry Potter...ah, just read them all. But my favorite is probably Prisoner of Azkaban. J.K. Rowling, naturally.
2) The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins. Worth engaging with the first-person narrative even if you have seen the movie. It's a very different experience.
Other "Greats"
3) Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl. Don't read it as a "Holocaust book" but instead as fascinating portrait of girlhood in extraordinary circumstances. If you haven't read it since Jr. High, give it another read.
4) Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. Read these with an eye to what Margaret Atwood suggests: that the novels are more about the transformation of Marilla than Anne herself.
5) A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle. You know it blew your mind in grade school. Admit it.
6) Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein. One of my favorite recent WWII novels. Great storytelling and characters.

19th Century Novels: this isn't really my area of expertise, but if you think 19th century novels are boring (like I used to) then you should read these. Not at all boring!
7) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. And don't you dare go reading that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies junk. The saddest thing about that book is that people will read it instead of Austen and miss the amazing humor and delight that Austen has and the Zombies version tries for but fails.
8) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte. Mad woman in the attic, anyone? Follow this with its adaptation,
9) Wide Sargasso Sea. Then follow that with I Walked With a Zombie, for an early film adaptation. WSS is not from the 19th Century, but the 20th. It lives here anyway, next to it's inspiration.
10) Frankenstein, Mary Shelly.
11) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. I put this one here because it is on the original list but not because I particularly like it. Although it does feature the word "snoozle" so that's worth something. Really though, I find WH to be a slog.

Gothic Novels, a category which could also contain many of the above, but this list expands into the 20th century, so here you go:
12) Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. Check on one of Hitchcock's favorite authors in such a great book.
13) Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson. Or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Or better yet, both! They're short. Who's up for a HHH book club around Halloween?
14) Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice. Followed by
15) Sunshine, Robin McKinley for a perspective on a more monstrous vampire. He doesn't sparkle one bit.
16) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, Suzanna Clarke. Aren't they working on an adaptation? Where's that?
17) The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe. The OG of Gothic novelists.

Crime Fiction. There was no real crime fiction on the Buzzfeed list outside of Gone Girl which is totally a shame. There's so much great crime fiction by women, and here's some to check out.
18) The Blood Spilt, Asa Larsson. Yeah, yeah, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But there's a lot more to Scandanavian crime fiction than that. Sure, you can check out Mankell and Larson and Nesbo (actually, don't do Nesbo. Bleh). However, the one that has stuck with me the most is Blood Spilt. Its so intense and you should read it.
19) A Great Deliverance, Elizabeth George. The introduction of Inspector Lynley and DS Barbara Havers. Such great character development.
20) Dark Places or Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. Smart and super fast reads.
21) In the Woods, Tana French. Totally compelling and interesting introduction to the Dublin Murder Squad books.
22) The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey. Anglophiles and Richard the III lovers should check this out.
23) Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie. Can't leave out our most famous detective fiction author!
24) Cover Her Face, P.D. James. Another classic British detective fiction author. This one introduces her main detective.

Sci-Fi. See this year's Hugo Awards and the Sad Puppies for more on current sexism in the genre.
25) Kindred, Octavia Butler.
26) Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. Yep, I did it. Put Atwood in the Sci-Fi section. Of course, Blind Assassin from the original Buzzfeed list is also great and everyone should read Handmaid's Tale. But Oryx and Crake is the one that ranks highest on my list today.
27) Brothers in Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold. Not the first book in the Vorkosigan saga, but one that always sticks with me. I think of Bujold as more "traditional" sci-fi than some of the others here, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
28) The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger.
29) Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin. And after you read this one follow it with
30) Ammonite, Nicola Griffith which is heavily inspired by LeGuin
31) To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. What I love about Willis is her ability to perfectly represent the frustrations of dealing with a bureaucracy while writing really great time travel novels.
32) Among Others, Jo Walton.
33) The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russel. An amazing look at linguistics and faith in a sci-fi setting.

Non-Fiction.
34) Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. This could also go in a graphic novels category. The last 2 pages of the novel never fail to make me cry.
35) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard. From the Buzzfeed list, but makes mine because who doesn't love her "Shitty First Drafts?"
36) Bossypants, Tina Fey. I haven't read it, but also from Buzzfeed, and we love Tina Fey.
37) Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks. Yep, it totally is.
38) A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit. I've only read Savage Dreams, but this one looks great so it makes the list.
39) Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi.
40) Wild, Cheryl Strayed.
41) Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, Kate Bornstein. I don't think Bornstein is the best writer always, but she's a foundational author on transgender rights and worth a read.
42) Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde. She's such a fundamental part of my work, and a great author to teach.
43) The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Wolf. Her concept of disaster capitalism is worth engaging with.
44) The Stranger Beside Me, Anne Rule. Such a fascinating portrait of Ted Bundy.
45) Girl, Interrupted, Susana Kaysen. A terrible film adaptation, and why did Angelina Jolie win an Oscar for this?

Early 20th Century, a category that I'm also only marginally familiar with. The Buzzfeed list really loved Edith Wharton for whatever reason. Here she only gets one entry.
46) House of Mirth, Edith Wharton. I hated the movie adaptation until I'd had enough wine and then I loved it. Do with that what you will.
47) The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Technically a short story, but whatever. It's a classic.
48) Nightwood, Djuna Barnes.
49) Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.
50) Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, Gertrude Stein. There's a lot of possibilities when thinking of Stein, but I love the humor of this one.
51) The Awakening, Kate Chopin. Fun short book to teach and great descriptive language.
52) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston.
53) My Antonia, Willa Cather.

Image from the film adaptation of WISE BLOOD (1979)

Mid-20th Century
54) The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. I haven't read this, but it's long been on my list after the film, which was so upsetting.
55) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.
56) Wise Blood or the Complete Stories, Flannery O'Connor. She made me think of tattoos and muvsems in a whole new light.
57) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou. Well, maybe a stretch for mid-20th century, but this is my list and thus a-ok.
58) The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. Oh, fine, whatever. I've never liked this book, but you just might.
59) Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. I heard that she was willing to take no money for at least one of her books in order to get her message out there which is...somewhat contradictory to the message, no?

Late 20th Century, more my home territory. Starting with four classic L of the LGBT novels,
60) Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Alison. It's not a happy book, but you should certainly read it.
61) Fear of Flying, Erica Jong.
62) Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown. That grapefruit scene prepared me for many a day of reading Dan Savage later in life.
63) Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.
And moving onto some other great novels,
64) The Color Purple, Alice Walker.
64) In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez. You should also read Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a companion to this one.
66) Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood. Oh, look, I snuck her in a second time. She's just so great!
67) Housekeeping, Marilynn Robinson.
68) Birds of America, Lorrie Moore.
69) Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich. I TA'd for a class that read this book, but it was the semester I had foot surgery and taught 10 small group sections and thus I never actually read it. Don't worry, I was in charge of teaching writing, not discussions on readings.
70) Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan. This feels really book-clubish, but I remember liking the book.

Contemporary 
71) Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold. Skip the movie though, why doncha.
72) Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. So good. I make everyone read this if possible.
Three from the Buzzfeed list I haven't read:
73) White Teeth, Zadie Smith.
74) Half a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
75) Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
76) Wyoming Stories, Annie Prolux. Being from Wyoming, I've always identified with these stories. Read the Brokeback Mountain novella and see the lovely, lovely film (that Heath Ledger should have won an Oscar for, if not for homophobia of the Oscar voters). Shipping News is also great, but I didn't like Accordion Crimes at all.
77) Hild, Nicola Griffith. Man, this was some amazing historical fiction.
78) The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield. I suppose this should go in the Gothic section, but I'm too lazy to go renumber everything now. Nice, moody, good twist ending.
79) Swamplandia!, Karen Russel. Slippery book where I couldn't decide on the un/reality of it often.

Nobel Prize, Booker, or Pulitzer Award Winners, of which there are many more than I have listed here. Still, these are some favorites or representatives from the original Buzzfeed list.
80) God of Small Things, Arudathi Roy
81) Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri. I love teaching these short stories.
82) The Luminaries, Elanor Catton. I thought this was pretty long for not a lot of payoff, but I know many of my friends loved it.
83) A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Eagan. Great, creative interwoven tales.
84) The Goldfinch, Donna Taratt. Currently sitting on my nightstand!
85) The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison. The book I've taught the very most times. Such a great story and a good chance to challenge an automatic pity reaction to Pecola's story.
My gosh, we're nearly there!
86) The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing.
87) Runaway, Alice Munro.
88) Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. I'm also dying to watch the PBS adaptation of this. Why is Henry VIII so darn fascinating?

Okay, I made it to 88, not 90. I need to go cook dinner so I can eat, so I can get on the road to Nashville for the weekend. I wish I could have linked to all these books so it would be easy for you to find out more about them, but again, running low on time. I'd love to hear what additions or subtractions you would make to this list, if you made it through this whole long-ass blog post.

My count on this list? 58/88. Better, but not perfect. Looks like it's time to get reading.

A Better Reading Challenge

Recently, PopSugar released their 2015 Ultimate Reading Challenge. Being a reader myself (duh) I was intrigued, but also sort of disappointed in the list. Perhaps it's because the "other" Reading Challenge that was recently circulating around my FB feed. While I appreciate the sentiment behind not reading White, Straight, Cisgender authors for a year, I also recognize that many people want to pick up a new book by their favorite author (hello, Clairel!) or have a stack of books lurking on their nightstand waiting to be read.

Ok, this is a picture of my desk, not my nightstand. Books lurk both places.

 So, my solution was to come up with a New! Improved! Reading Challenge. It took the structure of the PopSugar Challenge and added in some categories that would come closer to the OX Jane challenge.  It is as follows:

• A book with more than 500 pages
•          A classic romance
  
•          A book that became a movie/TV show
•          A book published this year
•          A book with a number in the title
•          A book written by someone under 30
•          A book written by an African American or African author
•          A book with nonhuman characters
•          A funny book
•          A book by a female author
•          A book by a minority author
•          A mystery or thriller
•          A book with a one-word title
•          A book set in a different country
•          A nonfiction book
•          A popular author’s first book
•          A book by an author you love that you haven’t read yet
•          A book a friend recommended
•          A major award winning book (Pulitzer, Booker, Printz, National, etc)
•          A book by a LGBT author
•          A book at the bottom of your to-read list
•          A book that a family member loves
•          A book that scares you
•          A book more than 100 years old
•          A book based entirely on its cover
•          A book you were supposed to read in school but didn’t
•          A memoir
•          A book you can finish in a day
•          A book with antonyms in the title
•          A book set somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit
•          A book with bad reviews
•          A book set in the future
•          A book from your childhood
•          A book with a color in the title
  
•          A book that made you cry
•          A book with magic
•          A graphic novel
•          A book you own but have never read
•          A book in translation from another language
•          A play
•          A banned book
•          A book you started but never finished 

Go forth and conquer, my friends.