Reading Resolution: Exploring Women Writers

Time to make those 2019 reading resolutions! I've decided that one of my resolutions will be a conscious effort to read fiction by and about women. After all, 2019 is seeing a record 102 women sworn into House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi making history by returning as House Speaker, another Women's March organizing for Jan. 19, and the #MeToo movement bearing fruit as at least 11 states pass new protections against workplace harassment. I'll start with women authors receiving 2018 fiction awards. For example, the 2018 Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award went to Attica Locke for Bluebird, Bluebird, about an explosive intersection of love, race, and justice in East Texas. The 2018 Man-Booker International Prize honored Olga Tokarczuk for Flights, which interweaves haunting characters and stories to create a meditation on what it means to be a traveler in both space and time. Kamila Shamsie won the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction for her Home Fire, a reworking of Sophocles' Greek tragedy Antigone. Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction last year for Improvement, a novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and unexpected implications of their decisions. In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, winner of the National Book Award, the unnamed protagonist loses her longtime best friend and fellow writer to suicide and finds herself responsible for his Great Dane, bonding with the dog to deal with grief. The Reading Women podcast named All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, a genre-busting collection of stories about struggles with fate, as its 2018 fiction winner. For more ideas on women-oriented reading, try the "2019 Reading Women Challenge" at https://www.readingwomenpodcast.com/reading-women-challeng…/

The Best Travel Books Are More Than Guides

In looking for gifts at Christmas, my kids are baffled by my interest in travel books. After all, they can use Internet search to find highly rated places to visit without the cost and bulk of a book! What they don't seem to realize is that the best books about travel go way beyond tourist info. The best books are explorations of nature, culture, art and philosophy, and are really quests that lead to expanded self-knowledge for the author and, vicariously, for the reader. For example, consider the late TV star Anthony Bourdain's memoir Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to The World of Food and the People Who Cook, in which Bourdain still expresses his long-held convictions about what makes good cooking but also reveals, by meeting people who are less fortunate yet happier than he can ever be, how stepping outside comfort zones can be a road to growth--even if he could not follow that road beyond a premature end. Another classic combination of food and travel is A Moveable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures Around The World), a collection of 38 short stories from famous chefs, culinary writers and foodies, edited by Don George. This book will definitely spur a foodie travel lust! For women hesitating to travel alone, find the impetus to explore the world solo in A Woman Alone: Travel Tales From Around the Globe, a collection of inspiring tales of female adventure edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and Christina Henry de Tessan. Then maybe you can follow the path of Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road as she spends a year cycling the Silk Road and penning meditations on remote places, history and human borders. Or get inspired by Judith Schlansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will to go where she has not, based on both the factual secrets, enticing and daunting, of 50 isolated islands and her poetic essays on rare wildlife, surprise discoveries and human folly. For those who dream of an African safari, Paul Theroux satisfies in Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, taking readers on a road trip via rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train, as he details his encounters with dangers, hardships and delays as well as revealing interactions with Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. Finally, if you want to know less about where to travel and more about why to travel, read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, as he discusses the "pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything," from grand vistas to mundane events, and enriches his own observations with those of famous travelers. For more inspiration, see https://www.rearviewmirror.tv/best-travel-books/

Funny Women Top the Book Charts

Funny women are coming into their own. Six of the top 10 books in the humor category of the New York Times best-seller list this October are written by women: Why Not Me? and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling (No. 1 and No. 7 spots respectively), Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson (No. 2), Self-Helf by Miranda Sings (No. 4), Yes Please by Amy Poehler (No. 5), and Bossypants by Tina Fey (No. 8). Also note that, for the first time since it was established in 1996, the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor, went to a female author: Julie Schumacher for her novel Dear Committee Members. Now it's not that there haven't been female stars in the comic ranks before; Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett were icons long before the current crop of funny women. But more than a 50% female share of humor best-sellers is amazing. The next big step will be a woman host for one of the late-night talk shows! Of course, female humorists still face hurdles if former Disney CEO Michael Eisner could opine publicly to comedic actress Goldie Hawn at the Aspen Ideas Festival this July that "unbelievably beautiful women...are not funny." Eisner reflects a lingering gender gap; while both men and women tell pollsters that a "sense of humor" is a top attractiveness factor, it turns out that women mean they are attracted to men who make them laugh, but men mean they are attracted to women who laugh at their jokes. Hopefully, women are breaking through the laughter barrier in American culture at last. Why will that be a good thing? In a New York Times "Women in the World" article celebrating Schumacher's Thurber Prize win, author Brigit Katz explained "when funny people present us with their personal history and we acknowledge it--with laughter, with nominations, or with awards--those experiences become validated as stories worth telling." So consider yourselves a bit more validated, ladies, and check out the NYT humor best sellers: http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2015-10-11/humor/list.html

Once a Rare Breed, Female Sleuths Proliferate

Ever since Nancy Drew, I've liked female sleuths in mystery fiction, especially because they were once a relatively rare breed. Now women mystery-solvers--police detectives, medical examiners, journalists, psychiatrists and detecting psychics--proliferate in publishing. In fact, the 2015 Edgar Award nominees included two good examples. Karin Slaughter, known for her Will Trent crime-solving bestsellers, was nominated for her first stand-alone effort, Coptown, about two disparate police women, one defying her privileged background by entering the force and one out to prove herself to a family with a police background. They become uneasy partners in 1974 Atlanta on the hunt for a serial killer targeting cops. Another finalist for the 2015 Edgar, as well as the Mary Higgins Clark Award, was Invisible City, a debut work by Julia Dahl. Protagonist Rebekah Roberts, whose mother abandoned her as an infant to return to her Hasidic faith, moves to New York to pursue a journalism career, also putting her near Brooklyn's Hasidic community, where her mother might still be living Covering the story of a murdered Hasidic woman, Rebekah ends up immersing herself in her secretive, unwelcoming world to get at the truth. Of course, I put both books on my bookshelf, but, as I did so, I noticed titles featuring favorite female detectives of the past. I think they're worth a visit from modern mystery fans. I mean, who doesn't love Agatha Christie's sharp-eyed old spinster Miss Marple? Join the village gossips in A Murder Is Announced, a deftly plotted piece of misdirection, to appreciate her. While you're "across the pond," drop in on Harriet Vane, the mystery novelist extraordinaire paired with dashing Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, sometimes called "the first feminist mystery novel." And of course, re-read P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, where England's mystery queen championed her first woman detective way back in the 1970s. To see the other 2015 Edgar Award nominees and winners, go to http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

When Wikipedia's Sexist Slip Showed in 2013

In case you didn't note it, Wikipedia had women trouble in 2013. It began when writer Amanda Filipacchi protested in an April New York Times op-ed piece that Wikipedia was quietly but systematically removing all women from the category "American novelists" and placing them in the subcategory of "American women novelists." Headlines and commentators decried Wikipedia's sexism, and many attributed bias to the fact that Wikipedia's cyberspace editors are 90% male. The issue also highlighted all kinds of Wikipedia ghettos, where women and racial or ethnic groups were assigned only to subcategories. Well, after the uproar, the women novelists are listed in the main American novelist category again, as well as in the American women novelist subcategory and whatever other subcategories Wikipedia pedants deem relevant, from mystery writers to lesbian writers to African-American women writers. This is a debate that many may dismiss as overly sensitive semantics about an effort to logically structure information. But I think it reflects real social challenges. When we collectively think about people by category, we can place real limits on how we treat them in education, in politics and even in personal relationships. We set different standards and expectations based on assumed generalized characteristics, and we may justify subtle or blatant discrimination based on stereotypes. Human "categories" have lead to oppression, genocide and war, and we need to be very careful of their use and implications. Wikipedia is just one mirror of how we think about each other; there are many other examples in our media, politics and private lives. We really do need to be vigilant and vocal when faced with distorted "categorizing." For more on the Wikipedia controversy, see http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/29/wikipedia-women-problem/