When I’m not working, moderating “Literature by Women”, knitting, or reading whatever I like as fast as I can (i.e. in my other, other life) I occasionally participate in reading challenges with other bloggers – reading a certain number of books in a certain category within a specific amount of time and then blogging about those books (and whether or not I finished the challenge). I don’t choose challenges in genres I don’t read – it’s self-defeating – so the challenge for me is focusing my reading. I’m an ADD book omnivore and, to borrow a term from The Yarn Harlot, afflicted with start-it is.
A new challenge popped up this year – Women Unbound. Not necessarily a challenge about reading books written by women (too easy) but a challenge about reading books that examine women’s place in society, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, power. In short, “women’s studies” as defined by Merriam-Webster: the multidisciplinary study of the social status and societal contributions of women and the relationship between power and gender. Interesting…I signed up knowing that I have enough books in my overflowing bookshelves to make my “Suffragette” level reading easy-to-find.
The first two books I chose were easy (The Help and Little Women) but the next two selections might be a bit of a challenge. The first, A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter, was an as-yet unread book I acquired after some discussion with other users on THE BOOK NOOK thread of “Literature by Women.” Showalter gathered a chronology of well-known and obscure women authors from America to create a framework for a female literary tradition. I’m reading this one in bits because, let’s face it, I find it very difficult to read what is essentially a series of mini-biographies of obscure North American women writers, one right after the other. I was hoping it would be more like an anthology with mini-biographies and examples of the writers’ best work – mostly so I could find even more authors to discuss at “Literature by Women” – but no. Still, it is the information Showalter provides showing how many women have similar backgrounds, or that they all use George Eliot as a model or anti-model, etc., that makes the book interesting even though it will take me the better part of a year to read it (I’m just up to the turn of the twentieth-century with 300 pages to go).
I have The Madwoman in the Attic waiting in the “on deck” position but I don’t think I can hold out for very long, even though it is a pretty thick book. This would be a re-read for me – the third full read-though but the first for pleasure. Madwoman is the first book of literary theory/criticism I found to be “readable” and enjoyable – and since I agree with the theory, as put forth by Gilbert and Gubar, that nineteenth-century women writers struggled with the angel/monster dichotomy Madwoman is a book to which I keep returning. The authors profiled in Madwoman – Austen, the Brontes, Shelley, Eliot, Dickinson, Rossetti – are among the most well-known authors of the nineteenth-century and their books are read far more often than the many women profiled by Showalter in Jury. My familiarity with the authors and work examined by Gilbert and Guber makes Madwoman that much more appealing…and Jury that much harder to read. I still hold out hope that Jury will drop a golden kernel and lead me to “discover” an author buried in history so I can add her novels to my reading repertoire.
So I press on.
Do you try to direct your reading? Do you use a book club or challenge list? Does it work?
Melissa W. has degrees in biology and epidemiology from the University of Iowa. She is a research assistant in hospital epidemiology, Barnes and Noble bookseller, dancer, knitter, and just happens to inhale books, too. She lives with two spoiled cats, Chaucer and Dante.
