Book 248: My Own Words

"The institution we serve is ever so much more important than the particular individuals who compose the Court’s bench at any given time. And our job—the job of judging in a U.S. federal court generally—is, in my view, the best work a U.S. lawyer could wish for. We serve no client, our commission is to do what is right—what the law requires and what is just."

Dates read: July 11-17, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Growing up, my role model (and let's be honest, idol) was Sandra Day O'Connor. I wanted to be a lawyer and judge, and the first woman on the Supreme Court was the greatest person I could imagine. As I got older and better able to understand legal writing, she become a justice whose opinions I always appreciated reading, because in her fondness for balancing tests (while tricky to consistently administer) she seemed to always remember that while The Law is a mighty and important thing, it applies to actual people with actual lives and that is not less important than one's judicial philosophy. She remains someone who I profoundly admire, along with the other women who've been appointed to the highest court in the land: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and everyone's favorite pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the past several years, she's had books written about her, a documentary and a biopic hit theaters, and been made into an action figure (which I have on my desk as I type). She's become almost more of an idea than a person, which made My Own Words, a collection of her writings/speeches, organized with her co-writers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, all the more relevant to read. There is an actual woman beneath the mythologizing, and that woman is whip-smart and has a lot of important things to say that can't be slapped on a photo and turned into a meme. Not that I have any beef with that picture of her that says "all them fives need to listen when a ten is talking" in the Beyonce font, but in a world where complex thought is increasingly rare, we owe it to one of our best thinkers to really listen to what she has to say.

The book's collection of her writings has examples all the way from pre-teen editorials submitted to the school paper to oral announcements of Supreme Court dissents. That she is a serious, thoughtful person is obvious even in the early writings, and examples of her work as she pushed for gender equity at the ACLU and then was elevated to the federal bench demonstrate her prodigious intellect and ability to distill arguments to their essence. But it's not all ponderous and serious. There's a written version of remarks about the role of lawyers in opera and an excerpt from the comic opera that was written about Justices Scalia and Ginsburg's close personal friendship, which included trips to the opera, despite the gulf between their views on the law. There are a few pieces that were written/delivered by Gibsburg's beloved husband Marty, whose wit made me giggle in few places.

The co-authors are apparently working on an authorized full biography of Justice Ginsburg, and the way they've worked with the material they have here gives me high hopes that it'll be excellent. It can be challenging to edit down legal writing into something that can be understood by an audience not trained to read it, but between what's clearly Ginsburg's own facility with language and careful tweaks, the material will definitely require attention but isn't difficult to understand. That it's just relatively short vignettes may disappoint some who are looking for something more like a traditional biography, though there is interstitial writing to fill in the gaps and provide context. You do definitely get a sense of who she is through reading it, though. I'd highly recommend this for anyone who's interested in the law, as well as any RBG enthusiasts.

One year ago, I was reading: Death Prefers Blondes

Two years ago, I was reading: Oryx and Crake

Three years ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Four years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

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Book 248: My Own Words

Book 197: The Power

"Women and men who were willing to sell him food or fuel for his little camping stove became fewer and farther between. He started to develop a sense for those who might be friendly. Older men, sitting outside a house playing cards—they'd have something for him, might even find him a bed for the night. Young men tended to be too frightened. There was no point talking to women at all; even meeting their eyes felt too dangerous."

Dates read: December 19-24, 2017

Rating: 6/10

About a year and a half ago, I was out walking the dog on a Friday around 8 P.M. I noticed someone get dropped off by a car a couple blocks down, who then started walking towards me. I registered this as odd, since most people get dropped off in front of their house or reasonably close to it. I kept walking the dog down the road, and looked back to notice the person (almost certainly a man, by build) continuing to walk towards me. Now I was really unsettled. I pulled my headphones out and began to hurry the dog up. I rounded a corner, and about halfway down the block he started to resist and pull back, and since it was a well-lit section of sidewalk I let him sniff. I looked back the way I'd come and the guy was standing there on the corner, standing partially obscured by a light pole. I practically dragged the dog the rest of the way down the block until I got to a busy road. The guy never re-appeared, but I was afraid.

As a small woman, I can't remember the last time I was out in public without at least some baseline level of apprehension for my safety. I'm not walking around constantly terrified by any means, but I am just always aware that there's the possibility that I could be anything from verbally harassed to followed to grabbed. Most of my female friends feel the same way. It's just what it means to be a woman in the world. Naomi Alderman's The Power, though, imagines a different world entirely. It begins in the world as it exists, but there's a sudden change: women have developed an organ that generates electricity inside them, electricity they can shoot out through their hands. In a matter of weeks, the world goes from one in which men are the most powerful, physically and otherwise, to one where that balance isn't the same anymore. The Power changes everything.

Alderman explores this new world through four people: Roxy, the daughter of a British crime boss, whose Power is exceptionally strong; Allie, an abused teenage foster child who turns the voice she hears in her head into a new religious movement; Margot, an ambitious politician; and Tunde, the only man, a Nigerian journalist chronicling the changes in the world since the Power emerged. There's chaos, initially. No one knows what to do, what it all means. But things change quickly, all the way from men needing to learn how to protect themselves against violent women, to women dominating the military, to women toppling oppressive regimes. Eventually the storylines all converge in a fictional Eastern bloc country, now ruled by a woman as a dictator, that's the center of a proxy war between the powers-that-be in the old world against those of the new.

This is a fascinating idea to consider, how the world would change if something like what Alderman describes happens. And I think the failure of the book (as you can see from my rating, I didn't think it was especially good) comes from trying to capture too much. Roxy and Allie's perspectives dominate the book, and while I understand why Alderman included Tunde, to give an idea of what it would be like to come of age as a man in the world as we know it and live through the way it changes, I think Margot's storyline was weak and could have been cut to develop Tunde better. There's some good characterization going on with Roxy and Allie (particularly the former), but it's inconsistent, and it seems almost like Alderman was so excited to really dig into what she thought might happen in her new world that she didn't really think about the people who would be living in it beyond broad strokes.

That being said, it's an effective exploration of the way that power corrupts. At first, many women lash out at men in revenge for the ways they themselves have been hurt, which is an understandable reaction. The reader expects it to settle down after a while, after some wrongs have been righted, but it doesn't. Women begin to objectify the men around them, use their superior position to commit emotional and physical violence against them. While it's easy, living in the world we do live in, to imagine that women would wield large-scale power more effectively and humanely than men have and do, Alderman punches through that fantasy by remembering that women are, after all, human, and human beings do not have a great track record when it comes to the way we mistreat each other when given the opportunity to do so. I do think that as a novel, there are significant weaknesses, but as a piece to engage with intellectually, there's a lot to think and talk about here.

One year ago, I was reading: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Two years ago, I was reading: Boys and Girls Together

Three years ago, I was reading: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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Book 197: The Power

Book 158: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

"There's a highly circumscribed performance of femininity expected at each stage of a woman's life—a certain way her face and body should look. All of these ideals are some form of striving for youthfulness, but only to the extent that it's 'appropriate', and with any part of the body that fails its duty hidden from sight."

Dates read: July 4-6, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Like most girls of my age, when I was little, I was told that I could be anything I wanted to be. And for a while, I (and I assume most everyone else) believed it. But as you grow up, you realize that no matter what you are, girls are expected to not be "too much". Don't be too smart, that intimidates the boys. Don't be too ambitious, set goals that are high but not too high. Don't be too capable, guys like being the ones to "rescue" you from spiders and leaky faucets. Don't be too direct, people won't think you're very nice. Look how big this box is, you have all the room you need in here. Don't get out of it.

I've long-since looked forward to Anne Helen Petersen's work on Buzzfeed. She's so good at not just really looking under the surface of our cultural climate, especially in how we perceive and treat women, but explaining it in a compelling, understandable way. If you haven't read her Cool Girl essay, go read it right now because it's phenomenal. And so of course I was psyched when I found out she was writing a book, Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud, about women who transgress our social norms. Who among us hasn't stepped outside the lines, peeked out from inside the box and felt blowback for it? Who hasn't looked at the women who do get out there and live out there and regarded them with a curious mixture of revulsion and envy? Petersen highlights nine (well, ten technically) "unruly" women, focusing on how each in turn has challenged the expectations we place on lady people. Many of these challenges focus on the body, from Serena Williams' "too strong" frame to Madonna's refusal to cover up because she's "too old" to Caitlyn Jenner's "too queer" gender confirmation surgery. There are also women who make other choices they're not supposed to: Hilary Clinton might be smart and ambitious, but she's "too shrill", and Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer (the Broad City team) make us uncomfortable because they're "too gross".   

I wanted this book to be amazing and mind-blowing and incredible. And it was good! Petersen's writing is lively and insightful and serious without being ponderous. But I think maybe it would have worked better if it had been split into two volumes, one focusing on body and one focusing on personality. The essays felt like they skimmed the surface, taking a shallow dive into concepts that deserve deeper thought and analysis that I would have loved to read Petersen's take on. In writing about how Nicki Minaj is "too slutty", for example, Petersen refers to and gives some brief background on how black female bodies are sexualized and fetishized. But there's so much there that because the book needed to be a reasonable length and there are eight other subjects, she doesn't really have space to really give it the full context it deserves. I felt the same way, perhaps even more strongly, about the chapter on Jenner and trans issues. It would have felt problematic to leave the gender binary untouched entirely, but to only briefly interact with it doesn't feel quite right either. 

One essay, though, that really made me think was the piece about "too loud" Jennifer Weiner, who won't just quietly accept the judgment of her writing about women and their lives (which, to be perfectly honest, I don't personally much care for) as mere "chick lit" not to be taken seriously. I know I fall into that trap with my own reading, disdaining titles with pastel covers or shoes and shopping bags prominently displayed. It's snobbish, but if I'm being transparent here, I will say that it takes a lot to get me to take a second look at a title deemed "women's fiction". Which is actually pretty bullshit of me. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is just as good as Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, so why is the former a "girl book" and the latter a book for everyone? There's not a good reason why we treat stories about women's lives and problems, written by women, as lesser than books written by and about men. I love Nick Hornby, but he writes lighter fare that would probably be shrugged off if he and his protagonists were ladies. I need to do some work to think about my own internalized misogyny, especially when it comes to my reading choices.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think of books by and about women as less important than books by and about men?

One year ago, I was reading: The Games 

 
Two years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Three years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 158: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

Book 58: Spinster

"It's true that the per capita divorce rate has dropped from its all-time peak in 1981 of about 5.3 divorces per 1,000 people- but even so, today nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. It's amazing, really, how deftly we hold in our collective consciousness this disconnect between what we want marriage to be and how so many marriages actually turn out. Freedom is unbearable. We opt again and again for the sugarcoated confinement of matrimony, a promise that life will work out just the way we want it- without that promise, false as it may be, the institution's many encumbrances might be impossible to bear."

Dates read: June 1-5, 2016

Rating: 6/10

This is probably strange to hear from a newlywed, but sometimes I find myself missing my single life. Not the dating part, that part sucked. I love my husband and he's just the best and I'm the luckiest that we found each other. But the part where I had total control over my own life. Where I did pretty much only what I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to, and slept on the whole bed all by myself whenever I wanted to go to sleep, and could stay up reading until 2 AM without worrying about keeping the person next to me awake. Where I put something down in my apartment and found it exactly where I left it. Where no one else used the last of the toilet paper and forgot to replace the roll. I don't want to go back to it all the time, most of the time, or even frequently. But every once in a while, I miss the complete autonomy of single life.

I'm not alone: my married/coupled up friends cop to the exact same feelings sometimes, no matter how happy their relationships. And it's just that kind of longing for a life lived accountable ultimately to only herself that drove the writing of Kate Bolick's Spinster. Once a neutral term for an unmarried woman, it's come to have pejorative connotations, implying a woman alone past her prime, probably with cats. It's always cats, those old witchy familiars, that seem to accompany jibes about older single women.

Bolick's book takes us through her life as the daughter of an accomplished and driven woman who got started chasing her dreams late because (like many women of her generation) she got married and had children pretty young. As Bolick serial-monogamies her way through her high school, college, and early adulthood, she finds herself drawn to fellow female writers (like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wharton, who she deems her influencers) who dared to live the way Bolick herself was increasingly intrigued by: alone. She ends her seemingly marriage-bound long term relationship and spends her 30s trying to figure out what she wants out of life. She experiences various employment scenarios within her field as a writer, finds herself in different living situations, and she dates around, exploring how her influencers lived and how their lives relate to her own situations.

First things first: Bolick is an engaging and talented writer. If she weren't, I wouldn't have enjoyed this book even as much as I did. Which wasn't especially much, to be honest, because this kind of personal memoir is just not the kind of thing I enjoy. Going in, I thought it would be personally focused but also take a broader sociological look at the increasingly large number of unmarried women and how that phenomenon is changing our culture at large. But I suppose I'll have to get my hands on a copy of All The Single Ladies for that, because Spinster touches only extremely briefly on anything outside of her life and the lives of her inspirations. Like with many of these kinds of books, I found myself wondering when I finished it why I'm supposed to care, exactly, about the apartments Bolick lives in or her love life or her professional struggles. Her writing was enjoyable enough to keep my attention, but at the end I found myself wondering what was the actual point of anything I'd just read. I realize the irony of this coming from a woman who starts almost every review with a personal tidbit or anecdote. I do actually read several personal blogs, and I think I would have enjoyed reading something like this over a period of time in a format like that, broken down into smaller posts and spaced out a little. But taken all together it's hard not to see it as self-indulgent navel-gazing, no matter how well-written it is. If personal memoirs are a kind of writing you enjoy, this would be a solid pickup for you. If not, though, I didn't think it was good enough to transcend its genre.

Tell me, blog friends...are you coupled or single? Do you ever envy people in the other position?

One year ago, I was reading: Thirst

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Random House Crown, through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 58: Spinster

Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick

 
"There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time- all of a woman's time, at any rate- was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place."

Dates read: May 8-11, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Sometimes I feel like a fake "serious reader". Which is the most ridiculous first world problem, I know. But there are so many of the classics, so many high-profile novelists, that I haven't read: Murakami, The Count of Monte Cristo, Faulkner, Catch-22. And until now, John Updike. But a secondhand copy of The Witches of Eastwick, which I'd seen the very cheesy 80s movie version of quite some time ago and enjoyed watching, came into my path and I decided it was time to cross that one off my list.

And this is one of those instances where (at least for my money), the movie was better than the book. They both have a similar setup: three socially outcast women living in a small town in Rhode Island become involved with a mysterious stranger, Daryl Van Horn, who comes to town and chaos ensues. In the movie, the women become witches under Daryl's satanic influence, and band together to turn against him when he causes harm. But that's not where the book goes. The book is much darker, and it suffers for it. When you're dealing with heavy stuff like magic and death and the devil, you need a little levity to keep it from dragging.

When Updike opens his novel, the three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie) are already witches. A widow and two divorcees in a small town in the early 1960s, they are outside the conservative social order and each others' only real friends. They aren't especially nice people: they frequently behave spitefully, none of them are at all involved in their children's lives, and are all sleeping with married men. When Daryl Van Horn, the devil hisownself, arrives in town, he doesn't imbue them with power as much as heighten their ambition (and start having orgies with them, of course, because that's apparently what the devil does). While all of the women have romantic designs on Daryl on some level, they share him relatively peacefully until a younger woman, Jenny, joins their group and eventually succeeds in becoming Mrs. Van Horn. The witches are jealous and band together to use their magic to kill her. Van Horn then skips town with Jenny's younger brother and the women each, eventually, conjure up a good man and themselves depart Eastwick.

Like I said earlier, it's a lot of pretty heavy material without much to lighten it up. The women have some small moments of sympathy, but are largely negative people that aren't very enjoyable to read about. You would think that the literal devil would be a compelling character, at least. He's supposed to be interesting, right? Not as Updike writes him. Daryl is never written as even particularly physically attractive, much less the charismatic wily schemer you would expect the Prince of Darkness to be. There was no one to care about, much less identify with or root for. Updike's writing is good (if you're into the flowery-language-and-run-on-sentences kind of writing, which I tend to be), but the story falls completely flat.

Because I didn't like the book, I spent much less time thinking about it and its plot as a story and more time wondering if I thought this was, as it is usually considered, a feminist work. On the one hand, you have women who are close friends, who have discovered and own their power, who have the sex lives they want to have, who are not defined by their motherhood, and who are unapologetic for any of this. While we're often presented with narratives about men who behave in an antisocial manner and asked to consider them the heroes of the story, The Witches of Eastwick is a rare example of this phenomenon for female characters. On the other hand, they aren't given many redeeming features, either: they aren't funny or really all that interesting, they're petty, and they're driven to a murderous jealous rage over...a man. Their "happy endings" only come when they've each found themselves...a man. I think on the balance, it's more feminist than not, but I will qualify that by saying that Updike writes terribly about the experience of being a woman. When he writes about sex or menses, it's cringeworthy. And even if it's mostly feminist, that doesn't mean I have to like it. I didn't, and I wouldn't recommend it. It's just not fun to read.

Tell me, blog friends...what major works or authors haven't you read yet?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick