Books I Have Read - 2007

For Matrimonial Purposes by Kavita Daswani (January)
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (February)
Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner (February 26, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows by JK Rowling (July 22, 2007)
Four Dreamers and Emily by Stevie Davies (July 27, 2007)
The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman (July 31, 2007)
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (August 5, 2007)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (August 7, 2007)
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (August 8, 2007)

Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I didn't get it, even though I couldn't put it down and it make me emotional.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I enjoyed reading this novel, though I found it hard to follow. Her writing style confused me and I got lost more than once. However, the ideas she presented intrigued me.

First, Orlando born male turns into a woman. As Woolf writes, “Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since” (Orlando, p.88). I found the book much more interesting once Orlando became a she.

For example, Orlando is on the ship, sailing to England, and shows and inch or so of her leg. A nearby sailor sees this and nearly plunges to his death because he “started so violently that he missed his footing” (Woolf, Orlando, p.100)

The second point, is that though the story starts in 1586, it does not end until the modern times of the 1920s. This odd time line was much more difficult to wrap my head around than Orlando changing from male to female because, though centuries pass, Orlando ages only a few years. Trying to understand the timeline of this story was like trying to pinpoint a single spot on a rushing river. Woolf’s Orlando is a fluid and continuous story, with only the occasional boulder or post to mark your current place.

Books I Want to Own

Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightengale
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Art [Objects] by Jeanette Winterson

"Hox is a racing word: it means to hamstring a horse not so brutally that she can’t walk but cleverly so that she can’t run. Society hoxes women and pretends that God, Nature or the genepool designed them lame."

Winterson, Jeanette. (2006). Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. A Gift of Wings, p.20.

"No one asks Iris Murdoch about her sex life. Every interviewer I meet asks me about mine and what they do not ask they invent. I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write."

Winterson, Jeanette. (2006). Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. The Semiotics of Sex, p.104.

"Consequences of misery and breakdown are typical and in a repressive society that pretend to be liberal, misery and breakdown ca be used as subtle punishments for what we no longer dare legislate against. Inability to cope is defined as a serious weakness in a macho culture like ours, but what is inability to cope, except a spasmodic, faint and fainter protest against a closed-in drugged-up life where suburban values are touted as the greatest good?"

Winterson, Jeanette. (2006). Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. The Semiotics of Sex, p.113.

"The question ‘What is your book about?’ has always puzzled me. It is about itself and if I could condense it into other words I should not have taken such care to choose the words I did."

Winterson, Jeanette. (2006). Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. A Work of My Own, p.165.

Since this was a book of essays, I jumped around a lot and skipped the essays that didn’t interest me. Some of the writing was over my head, because I didn’t know the books she was talking about, but it did give me a starting point for possible books to read. This book did influence me starting this blog. I’ve enjoyed reading this book but as I was reading her last essay, A Work of My Own, I get eager to get done. On Wednesday, I went to the library after work and took out a bunch of books, all of which I a anxious to begin reading. I think I would like to read these essays again after I have familiarized myself with some of the authors, including herself, she has meantioned.

As a side note, I began reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf and discovered that one of the forewords was written by Jeanette Winterson.

Books I Have Read - 2006

Thinner Than Thou by Kit Reed (July, 2006)
Art [Objects]: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery by Jeanette Winterson (August 3, 2006)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (August 4, 2006)
Vamped by David Sosnowski (August 5, 2006)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (August 16, 2006)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (August 17, 2006)
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (August 23, 2006)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (September 5, 2006)
Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman (October 23, 2006)
How To Read the Bible by Steven L. McKenzie (October 26, 2006)
Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (October 30, 2006)
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (November, 2006)
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (December 19, 2006)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig (December 24, 2006)

Book I Want To Read

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightengale
Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The History of Madness by Michel Foucault
The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault
The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
- The Will to Knowledge
- The Use of Pleasure
- The Care of the Self
The Land by Vita Sackville-West
King's Daughter by Vita Sackville-West
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Small Steps by Louis Sacher
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Ulysses by James Joyce
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
The Origin of Species (by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) by Charles Darwin
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy
The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg
Why Men Rule by Steven Goldberg
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Awakening by Cate Tiernan
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell
Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mary: A Fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft
Mathilda by Mary Shelley
The Victim of Prejudice by Mary Hays
Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science by Clare Winger Harris
Nightmare: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Gertrude Barrows Bennett
Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain,
The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas
When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone
A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter
Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein
Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism by Astrid Henry
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert A. Heinlein
Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen's
Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead.