I have no particularly profound thoughts on the year or decade, so I’m once again doing my annual book post. This year I read 59 books and plays, only to have Christmas replenish my TBR pile so it’s once again threatening to crush Packrat and me. Oh well, I’ll just have to keep reading, I guess.
Here’s the nonfiction list. I’ll put up the fiction list next time.
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Nonfiction:
Current Events/Politics:
Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill
Johanna Fateman & Amy Scholder, Eds., Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country
Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names
Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This?
Erin Wunken, Notes From a Feminist Killjoy
A few of these books got their own diaries, including One Person, No Vote, which is all too relevant to the coming election. Invisible Women is about the “data gap:” in everything from medical testing to phone design, researchers tend to assume male is universal and female is the exception. This has real-world consequences.
She Said and Catch and Kill both deal with the Harvey Weinstein scandal. While the NYT editors encouraged Kantor and Twohey’s investigation, NBC went to weird lengths to shut Farrow’s story down.
Sarah Kendzior and Rebecca Solnit are two of the best essayists around. Kendzior deals primarily with the issues and circumstances that brought us *resident *rump, and the parallels with authoritarian regimes around the world. Solnit is best known for her notorious essay “Men Explain Things to Me.” Her two latest collections deal with feminism, *rump, climate change, “death by gentrification,” the power of naming, and a whole lot more.
The Dworkin reader wrestles with her radical views, her history as a victim of violence, her close relationship with the men in her life, and her aversion to paragraphs. (Seriously, a 10-page excerpt from Mercy that’s all one paragraph? I get that this particular piece of fiction was supposed to feel overwhelming, but yikes.)
Wunken’s Notes From a Feminist Killjoy was a bit too much Feminism 101 for me. Conversely, Kate Manne’s Down Girl was far more dense and theoretical than I’d expected.
Plays:
Anton Chekhov, The Sea Gull
Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit
Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind
Arthur Miller, An Enemy of the People
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Luigi Pirandello, Liola
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple
An Enemy of the People has new relevance in the age of climate change denialism. Inherit the Wind and The Devil’s Disciple both hinge on the trope that the “heretic” turns out to be the godliest of all.
Given the premise, and having seen Roxanne, I expected Cyrano de Bergerac to be a comedy. It has some funny moments, but veers in a very different direction. Beautiful story about a not-beautiful man.
I don’t know if it was the translation or what, but I don’t think I understood The Sea Gull. (It did, however, follow Chekhov’s famous rule about guns in literature.) Eugene O’Neill has a weird habit of specifying precisely how every line is delivered (“with ironic detachment” or “with a resentment that has a quality of being automatic while on the surface she is indifferent”). And do we recast if a character has “long slender fingers” but the actor doesn’t?
Blithe Spirit was just silly supernatural fun.
Poetry:
Kim Addonizio, Mortal Trash
Danielle Barnhart & Iris Mahan, Eds., Women of Resistance: Poems of a New Feminism
Michael Boughn et al, Eds., Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems for the Resistance
Sandra Cisneros, My Wicked Wicked Ways
Amy Darabos & Erin Passons, Eds., Nasty Woman Project: Poetry from the Resistance
Diane Frank et al, Eds., Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace
Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (reread)
Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One (reread)
Marilyn Sewell, Ed., Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality
I have two rules for poetry: I like it to be (1) comprehensible, and (2) actually about something. Which is why I like Amanda Lovelace, who writes about sexism, surviving abuse, and learning to love yourself. Her poems are deceptively simple, but fit together int a complex narrative. Also love Kim Addonizio, though Mortal Trash didn’t impress me as much as Wild Nights. I like Sandra Cisneros, but think her fiction outshines her poetry.
Nasty Woman Project is a very brief collection that should not be confused with the more comprehensive (and much better) Nasty Woman Poets, edited by Grace Bauer & Julie Kane. Women of Resistance isn’t all about resistance, but introduced me to some interesting writers. Cries of the Spirit defines “spirituality” broadly, and includes both favorite authors and little-known ones. Carrying the Branch had themed sections where each editor chose poems around the issues or interpretations of “peace” that were important to them.
And Resist Much, Obey Little is a giant tome with 17 co-editors, and while the theme was ostensibly resistance under *rump, a lot of the poems were just incomprehensible to me.
Misc Nonfiction:
Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound For Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Doug Richardson, The Smoking Gun: True Tales from the Hollywood Screenwriting Trenches
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger
Lindy West, Shrill
I read a bit of history this year. Hitler’s Willing Executioners made sense to me in a way that it might not have in a previous decade. Bound for Canaan traces the history of North American slavery and resistance to it, and makes sense of how the Underground Railroad developed and spread. One Nation Under God is more recent history, on the unholy alliance between right-wing Evangelicalism and capitalism, and how they infiltrated the government. (If you’re on Twitter and not following @KevinMKruse, you’re missing out.)
The Smoking Gun has some amusing stories, but they’re all pretty similar. Shrill is an interesting memoir of a writer who’s seen as fat first, and everything else second if at all. It includes her famous story of getting in contact with a troll who had harassed her, and having him actually apologize. (She stresses, this was a one-time experience for a woman who gets trolled constantly.)
And Good and Mad is an interesting reflection on how women’s anger is pathologized or ignored. Traister found that, contrary to her expectations, paying so much attention to her anger did wonders for her mental (and even physical) health.
On to Top Comments!
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From white blitz:
This is a great top comment for the new year from SFOrange.
Crammed in pens with no access to bathrooms?
Sounds like Miller’s border camps
Top mojo, courtesy of mik:
Picture quilt, courtesy of jotter: