What the Party Girls are Reading

Day 139 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and since I attended a party last night, I'll tell you what the party girls are reading.

Nancy is 2/3 of the way through the Millennium Trilogy, so she is about to read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and brought The Girl Who Played with Fire to another party girl because she had just finished it, and Lynn, the recipient, had been hooked by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I saw the Dragon Tattoo film Friday night, and really liked how it cut out extraneous information (and love affairs) and focused on the central characters. It also brought in a bit of plot from the other books, a sort of foreshadowing.

It really is a kind of wildfire, this series. I heard about it first from people in the bookstore looking for it maybe before Christmas, then from a friend in January. Then at a party in February, the hosts were reading it, and about every week since, I've run into someone who is reading it, which is why I finally did, to see what all the hoopla is about. I wonder if the hoopla is partly because of the untimely death of the author.

Judy is reading Mohawk, by Richard Russo, because she loved Bridge of Sighs. I love Russo, and so do my parents, who were the ones who told me about Nobody's Fool. I gave Straight Man to my chair when I left an English Department! Party girl Lynn also enjoyed Straight Man. I am way behind on my Richard Russo and must head to the library! The last Russo I experienced was The Whore's Child and Other Stories, on audiobook in my parents' car on a road trip to Ohio, and it made me check out the book from the library to read them all, after hearing a few.

On Judy's to-read stack is the E. L. Doctorow book Homer & Langley, a novel based on the real-life Collyer brothers, famous for hoarding stuff in their brownstone on 5th Avenue in New York, living there, and dying there, having retreated from the world into their own world. Why?!

Kristi is reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, because it was a Christmas gift. On her to-read stack is John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River, because she loves Irving, as do so many people I talk to, including me (yes, I talk to myself!). Kristi also recently enjoyed reading the Nanny Diaries, by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus, recommended by party girl Judy, who had witnessed the kind of thing in the novel when she managed a building of fancy condominiums.

Kristi also enjoyed, if that's the right word for a surreal novel about a vague crime, Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov, which she got for $1 on a library sale book cart!! When Kristi described it to me, it sounded like Kafka, and I see that the mini-reviews at Amazon do refer to The Castle.

Yay for library book sales! And yay for libraries and interlibrary loan, which Lynn thanks for the chance to read The Avengers, by Rich Cohen, and The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright. Lynn said Cohen was someone who grew up hearing that Jewish people did not fight back during World War II, but then met and interviewed a number of Jewish resistance fighters, the "avengers," for this book. She hopes everyone will read The Looming Tower: Al Quaida and the Road to 9/11, a Pulitzer Prize winner, so we can better understand what is really going on with Islamic terrorism, and Osama bin Laden in particular.

In thanking the Chicago Public Library for the opportunity to read these books, Lynn also shared the news that there's a tiny CPL branch now in the actual downtown Water Tower, along with a tiny Hot Tix booth, and a tiny, but very, very good coffeeshop!

Shakespeare in Love, and a Vibrator

Day 73 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. It's Shakespeare's birthday! Is anybody reading some Shakespeare to celebrate? I put Shakespeare in Love into the machine last night to celebrate, seeing the opening, her audition, the Queen reminding her to bow as Kent, and the shipwreck, sort of a sleep montage.

It's also Vladimir Nabokov's birthday! Is anybody reading Lolita to celebrate? Is anybody Reading Lolita in Tehran?

And it's Kingsley Amis's birthday. (Thank you, Garrison Keillor, Writer's Almanac!) Is anybody reading Lucky Jim? I don't think I ever have read that one, an early campus novel (according to Keillor...'s staff). But I bet it's on my parents' bookshelf, if I want to. I say that to help me resist buying any more used books with my employee discount at Babbitt's. The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson, came into the store yesterday, and, yes, by now you know what happened. And I haven't even read the other one yet! But I figure these will be great books to take on vacation to the beach this summer. And share!

But, speaking of campus novels, who has read Straight Man, by Richard Russo? It's hilarious. I gave it to my department chair when I left a teaching job I loved (had to move) and as he was leaving the chairpersonship, a rotating position. (See him twirling?!) Anyhoo...

As you can see, this is another of my whimsical, hodge-podge entries, and I will also let you know now that I am going on a 2-day retreat, with women, so I will ask them what they are reading, and will post two entries in one someday on Sunday, instead of one on Saturday. Today's Friday, right? This is turning into a sort of 2-in-one, too, or 3-in-one, etc. Anyhoo...!

The theme of the women's retreat is passion. Passion as enthusiasm, passion as love (various kinds: romantic, sexual, or strong feeling, compassion, etc.), and passion as suffering (that kind of strong feeling, as in religious passion). Perhaps I will learn about books on passion, or books with passion in the title. Shakespeare in Love had passion, but I was asleep through most of it.

Franny and Zooey had passion. Of the various sorts.

Also set aside for purchase with employee discount at a future date is The Lost Sisterhood. Not the one by Julia Ingram, about The Return of Mary Magdalene, Mother Mary, and Other Holy Women, which does look like something I'd want to read and will snag if it comes into Babbitt's, but The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, by Ruth Rosen. It's about the profession of prostitution, about women who chose and developed that line of work, and about it being rooted out as society's major ill at the time, without, of course, rooting out the cause/need of it, as usual. I look forward to reading that, as I enjoyed Sex in the Second City, by Karen Abbott, focusing on brothels in Chicago, and the businesswomen who ran them, the men who frequented them, and the police who protected and/or raided & closed down their establishments.

This is on my mind a bit after a little discussion in the blog of poet Martha Silano about women being able to choose their work and their pleasures, and the complicated history and values attached to this. (Read her book Blue Positive, pictured & available to click at her blog of the same name! After all, it is National Poetry Month!)

And, along those lines, where is my copy of The Technology of Orgasm, by Rachel P. Maines, another great Babbitt's find, subtitled "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)? I know I bought it, read it, and did not reshelve it in either Women's Studies or Technology at work, so it's here at home somewhere. Unless I loaned to my mom. Or dad.

Also, I suspect Sarah Ruhl may have read it researching her play In the Next Room, aka The Vibrator Play, and that's what those women are doing in the picture, figuring out what the heck this 19th century medical device is.

Sarah Ruhl is one of my favorite playwrights. And that brings us back to Shakespeare!