Musings: Letters of a Woman Homesteader

I have been inspired this year to read many books on the women's experience.  I also have been downloading a bunch of free books to my Amazon Kindle because I don't have any physical books with me in New York.  These two criteria combined in fortuitous circumstances recently, making me aware of the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader, a collection (available for free online!) of letters written by Elinore Pruitt Stewart about her first several years homesteading in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century.

This book was fantastic!  It's similar to the Little House series of books, except for adults.  Elinore (I should probably refer to her as Stewart, but I felt such a connection with her that I'm sure she wouldn't mind me using her first name) has such an engaging way with words.  She is one of those people who writes her letters with a very distinct and fun tone, making you feel like she is right there with you telling the story.  I think her personality shines through in the letters and she is just so fun and bright and optimistic that it was a delight to spend time with her and her family and get to know her better. 

Musings: When Everything Changed

I read and loved Gail Collins' America's Women earlier this year, so very quickly decided to follow up with its companion volume, When Everything Changed:  The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.  The title is pretty self-explanatory, so I won't go into any more detail about the book's premise.

This book is very similar to America's Women in set-up.  A lot of information is thrown at you- names, dates, organizations, etc.  It can be overwhelming, but Collins has a natural and engaging way of writing and never made me feel like I was about to drown in a sea of feminist knowledge.  Its effect on me was similar to its predecessor, too, in that now that I've been introduced to some people so briefly in this book, I want to learn more about them!  What saddens me is that so many of the women mentioned here, the movers and shakers of the movement, were alive while I was in high school (and many are still alive now), but we never, ever learned about them.  While I had some knowledge of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams and many of the big names in America's Women, almost everyone in this book, with the exception of a few, was unknown to me.  Perhaps because the history was too immediate back in the late 90s, but I do remember covering the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement, so I'm upset that there was no room in there for women's rights.

Musings: The Map of Time

The Map of Time, by Felix Palma, is a massive novel about H. G. Wells, time machines, the power of suggestion and the desire to change past decisions.  It is really three novellas in one volume, all revolving around H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine and a man named Gilliam Murray who claims he can transport people to the year 2000 to witness the final battle between the survivors of the human race and the automatons.  The first is about Andrew Harrington, a wealthy young man who falls in love with a Whitechapel prostitute who is then murdered by Jack the Ripper.  The second is about Claire Haggerty, a woman who believes herself to be in love with a hero from the future that she met while time traveling.  The third is about H. G. Wells himself, and the task set for him to save the world from rogue time travelers.

Weighing in at over 600 big pages, there's a lot going on in the plot that I didn't fit neatly into the three sentences above.  There is, in fact, so much plot that I didn't feel much connection to the characters; they seemed dwarfed by the story arc Palma created.

Joint Musings: The Blind Assassin

In her intricately woven novel, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood gives us the life story of Laura and Iris Chase, two sisters whose fates are intertwined from their first recollections to their last.  Daughters of a dissolute and extremely wealthy factory owner, both Laura and Iris are raised in the lap of luxury by their parochial mother, but when she dies, it is up to their housekeeper Reenie and Iris herself to do the job of raising the sisters, a job that their father cannot do.  While Iris is mostly a solitary young girl and woman, Laura is more flighty and taken by strange notions and beliefs that shape her consciousness and the way that she views the world, a fact that will change both her destiny and her sister’s.

Meanwhile, running concurrently with the story of Laura’s and Iris’ lives, a third story, housed within a second, is taking place simultaneously. A young woman is having an affair with a man who is on the run, and the two are forced to meet in various abodes that he has been able to negotiate. The young man begins to create a fantastic tale for the woman’s entertainment, of an alternate universe where aliens make hostile overtures, bands of a renegade tribes are on the loose, and where human sacrifice is the order of the day. The hero of this universe is the titular blind assassin, who will go to great lengths to live up to his calling. As the story of young lovers and their fantastical story moves forward, it is sandwiched between the continuing life saga of both Iris and Laura, one of whom will end up dead under mysterious circumstances, leaving the other to carry her memory.  Both fantastically imagined, and beautifully crafted, The Blind Assassin is a triumph of literary achievement from one of the world’s most beloved authors.

I read this book with Heather from Raging Bibliomania as one of our sporadic buddy reads.  We have the good fortune of picking really great, meaty books to discuss with each other, and this one was no exception!  What follows is the first half of an (heavily truncated, for the sake of spoiler-protection) email chain between the two of us, chatting about the book.  Check out the second half at Heather's blog today here.

Musings: The Firebrand (DNF)

Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist retelling of the Trojan War, The Firebrand, is oddly named for a man- Paris- and not for any of the women in the story.  The main character is Paris' twin sister, Kassandra.  At a very young age, Kassandra is called to be a virgin priestess of Apollo (unfortunately for any number of men, since she's as beautiful as her brother is handsome).  But the Mother Earth Goddess wants her, too, and Kassandra has trouble walking the line to make both Immortals happy.  Her own personal struggle is set against the backdrop of the Trojan War and the shift from a matriarchal society dominated by worship of the Earth Mother to that of a patriarchal society ruled by the gods of Olympus.

This is another one of those books I've had on my shelf forever but never felt motivated to pick up.  I finally got it down recently because I was supposed to do a buddy read with a fellow blogger.  But I got about halfway through and she told me that she couldn't participate any more, and I (quite gratefully, I admit) set the book aside.  I didn't finish reading it so please note that the below thoughts are formed by reading only about 330 pages of a 600-page book.  I have a feeling the things that bothered me in the first half, though, would continue in the second half.

Musings: Castle Waiting

Castle Waiting, by Linda Medley, is a graphic novel of interwoven "nouveau fairy tales" with a supposedly feminist bent.  I actually didn't feel they were nearly as feminist as made out to be- but as fairy tales are notoriously not feminist, I can see how these seem very different.

The story starts off with a Sleeping Beauty plot line.  Beauty isn't too bright, and when she leaves the castle with her prince, with barely a look back at her friends, everyone is stunned.  They decide to stay on in the castle and make it a home for those who feel disenfranchised from the rest of the world, including a pregnant woman fleeing an unkind husband, a bearded nun, a horse-headed grand champion and a man mourning the loss of his son.