“What will happen to us?” I asked. “There will always be us,” he answered.” Just kids is like one long shared breath; breathing in the same air as Patti breathed with Robert. Just kids isn’t an autobiography; it is the story of Patti and Robert, as they were, once lovers and artists together. Patti Smith lives at home with her parents with dreams of becoming an artist. When she becomes pregnant she knows she cannot be a mother and she gives up her baby and […]
“It was a horrible time to be alive”
In her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, author Fay Weldon calls the Regency era “by our standards, a horrible time to be alive.” She also writes that the class society was “fair enough if you were Jane Austen, but supposing you were the maid?” That is what Jo Baker’s Longbourn does: supposes you were the maid. And it does the supposing brilliantly. For me, this was one of those books where the reading experience is so emotionally magnificent, it seems like a […]
Fly the plane, Maddie.
I decided to finally read Code Name Verity when it was announced as the first Go Fug Yourself book club selection. It seemed like a perfectly lovely excuse to pick up a book I’d been meaning to for ages. I’m glad I did, because the book really got under my skin, and as a historian I was ridiculously pleased with Elizabeth Wein’s research and the selected bibliography she supplied at the end of the book which included a museum exhibit! *insert museum professional happy dance* […]
I’m a nice man.
Rogues was my second George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois themed anthology in less than six months, and I’m happy to say I enjoyed it more overall than their previous effort, Dangerous Women. (I will pick up Warriors eventually. Maybe next year. I’m soooo done with anthologies for now.) And I’m sad to say, especially for how good Martin is at writing lady characters, I really think the main difference is that a lot of genre writers (including women!) just could not fathom how to write a […]
A Rose among Thorns: Sacajawea and the Corps of Discovery
I first came across Sacajawea living in Washington state. Of course it was her name in a textbook, but I thought it was intriguing that a woman would be willing to travel with a group of men to places she had never been. And not only was she the only woman, she was the only Native American in that group too. Sadly, I never encountered her again outside of textbooks and museums. Living in the Northwest you come across a lot of Lewis and Clark […]
The Lady, in All Her Shades of Grey
If you need a book that can explain to you the context of Burma’s burgeoning transition to a democracy (or at least a nominal democracy), this book by Bertil Lintner is a good one. Not only is it a relatively short look at the modern history of Burma, now known as Myanmar, Lintner’s profession as a journalist makes this read very easy to digest. As the title of the book suggest, a lot of it concerns Aung San Suu Kyi, and how the people in […]
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