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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 17th, 2019 08:15 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made By Women is a series of movie reviews - fifty-two of them, to be exact, so if you wanted to fulfill the #52FilmsByWomen challenge you could simply follow the recommendations in this book. In any project of this kind, it’s easy to quibble with the choices - no But I’m a Cheerleader? And I wouldn’t have picked The Edge of Seventeen - but on the whole it’s a solid selection. I’ve seen about half the films mentioned, and I wrote down most of the others with the intention of watching them sometime. (Many of them were already on my mental to-watch list, so this just makes it more official.)
I particularly liked this quote, from Gillian Armstrong: “The women that have got through over the years - Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse and so on - have worked ten times as hard as the men. They’re ten times as good as the men. There won’t be equality until there are as many mediocre women directors as there are mediocre men.”
I also read Jacqueline Wilson’s Best Friends, because someone turned it in at the library and how could I resist a title like that? And I loved a couple of her books when I was a kid: Double Act, about twins, and The Lottie Project, about a girl who does a project about Victorian times which leads to her making a charlotte russe which sounded like the most epic cake to me and may have partially inspired my own experiments in baking, although I never rose to charlotte russe level.
There is also baking in this book! But mostly it is about best friends who are TORN ASUNDER when one of them moves away to Scotland, a fate that the girls try to avert by running away (!!!!) but they get caught and are torn even more asunder because now their moms don’t want them to keep in touch. But they find a way, and also find new friends, and it’s all around very nice.
What I’m Reading Now
Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which is An Experience. She’s writing about a group of Vassar alums in the 1930s and their intersecting lives after graduation - they’re all part of the same social set so they can’t help hearing about each other even if it’s been ages since they last met. It’s interesting tracing the intricate web between them - it’s different from most other novels I’ve read.
What I Plan to Read Next
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, IF THE PERSON HOARDING IT ON OVERDRIVE EVER TURNS IT IN. Ditto Empress of the World and Marie Rutkoski's The Winner's Curse
Alicia Malone’s The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made By Women is a series of movie reviews - fifty-two of them, to be exact, so if you wanted to fulfill the #52FilmsByWomen challenge you could simply follow the recommendations in this book. In any project of this kind, it’s easy to quibble with the choices - no But I’m a Cheerleader? And I wouldn’t have picked The Edge of Seventeen - but on the whole it’s a solid selection. I’ve seen about half the films mentioned, and I wrote down most of the others with the intention of watching them sometime. (Many of them were already on my mental to-watch list, so this just makes it more official.)
I particularly liked this quote, from Gillian Armstrong: “The women that have got through over the years - Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse and so on - have worked ten times as hard as the men. They’re ten times as good as the men. There won’t be equality until there are as many mediocre women directors as there are mediocre men.”
I also read Jacqueline Wilson’s Best Friends, because someone turned it in at the library and how could I resist a title like that? And I loved a couple of her books when I was a kid: Double Act, about twins, and The Lottie Project, about a girl who does a project about Victorian times which leads to her making a charlotte russe which sounded like the most epic cake to me and may have partially inspired my own experiments in baking, although I never rose to charlotte russe level.
There is also baking in this book! But mostly it is about best friends who are TORN ASUNDER when one of them moves away to Scotland, a fate that the girls try to avert by running away (!!!!) but they get caught and are torn even more asunder because now their moms don’t want them to keep in touch. But they find a way, and also find new friends, and it’s all around very nice.
What I’m Reading Now
Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which is An Experience. She’s writing about a group of Vassar alums in the 1930s and their intersecting lives after graduation - they’re all part of the same social set so they can’t help hearing about each other even if it’s been ages since they last met. It’s interesting tracing the intricate web between them - it’s different from most other novels I’ve read.
What I Plan to Read Next
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, IF THE PERSON HOARDING IT ON OVERDRIVE EVER TURNS IT IN. Ditto Empress of the World and Marie Rutkoski's The Winner's Curse
