What it is: The Cleft by Doris Lessing is a novel about a Roman man who tells the story about the beginning of humanity, which consists of only women. They live communally and conceive babies through moonlight. Suddenly a baby boy is born, and eventually their society changes to establish, embrace, and struggle with gender roles. The…
I like to think that some day I’ll write a book. I have no idea what that book would be, but seeing my name in a bookstore would be absolutely amazing. In the meantime, I get to admire my blog friend Beth Teliho whose same dream of releasing a novel is coming true next month. If…
What it is: Cry No More by Linda Howard is a mystery/romance novel centered on Milla Edge, a woman whose six-week-old baby was violently torn from her in a Mexican open-air market. She dedicatedly spends the next ten years trying to find her son, Justin, which is both dangerous and difficult due to the smugglers’ conniving tricks…
What it is: The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo is a novel about Marjorie, a 17-year-old girl living in rural New Hampshire, and the challenges she faces growing up in a more or less abusive home where her parents keep her isolated and even use their own strange dialect of English. After getting a job as…
What it is: Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh is an inside look at gang life in the Chicago housing projects, particularly the activity of the Black Kings at the Robert Taylor Homes during the early 1990s. Venkatesh spent years in and around the complex, collecting data and anecdotes for his graduate work in sociology. He…
What it is: The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell is a behind-the-scenes account the astonishingly awful cult classic The Room. It tells everything a fan of the movie would want to know, from anecdotes from filming to how it ultimately rose to fame. Much of the novel is devoted to debunking the myths behind the…
New year, new reading list. This year, after reading a post at Cynk’s blog, I’m taking on the Read Harder Challenge. I’ve committed to completing 24 book-related challenges. Gamification of personal goals is a huge motivator for me, and even though I didn’t meet my Goodreads goal of 30 books in 2014, I’m setting that same goal…
My Blogging Secret Santa absolutely hit the nail on the head. I got the email from my college’s mail service that I had a package, and I went to pick it up. It contained Paper Towns by John Green. John Green was a large fixture in my younger adolescence. He was a huge role model for…
Goodreads recently published an infographic entitled “Sex and Reading: A Look at Who’s Reading Whom” with stats collected by 20,000 male users and 20,000 female users of the site. The takeaway is this: men and women each primarily lean towards reading their own gender. Yet those first two circles are troubling–only 20% of a female’s…
Reading has always been a primarily solitary activity. Sure, adults read aloud to young children, but in most cases that stops when a child gains the ability to read independently. Just because we read the actual words alone, though, doesn’t mean that books aren’t meant to be shared. Discussions about literature in class, at book club,…
Victim to Charm 