may

Still behind on books…3 books behind to be specific. I feel bad about this but I have been feeling super unmotivated lately…Hopefully, I’ll come back at the end of June with a longer list!

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn: ★★☆☆☆

I've wanted this book for a long time. I found a copy when I was in Paris at “Shakespeare and Company”. I had been searching for a copy for over two years and due to my refusal to buy books online, had never read the book, but always kept an eye out at every bookstore I frequented. It was in the most famous bookstore in the world that I finally found a copy. I took this as a sign and bought it.

I love books on love. One of my favorite books of all time is All About Love by bell hooks. I felt this book was perfect for me since Lunn speaks of her own experience with love in between interviews with so-called “love experts”, or you could just call them writers, two of whom I had read before and loved (Dolly Alderton and Roxane Gay). But sadly guys, I didn’t find myself relating to this book.

The bulk of the conversation on love surrounds Lunn’s struggle with getting pregnant and the effects it had on the closest relationships in her life. I’m a 20-year-old girl sifting through Hinge matches till I get the ick. I don’t need to be coachedon how to process the loss of a pregnancy or marital disconnect. I can’t even comprehend those things at this point in my life. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone my age because it wasn't written for us. I wouldn’t even recommend this to someone younger than thirty. That being said, I have a copy now and am going to keep and cherish it, not only because I carried it with me through Europe but for the day when I might need it. Knock on wood, that won’t be for a long while.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf: ★★★☆☆

Another classic to check off my list! I know what you’re all thinking; “Jesus, Caraline, how have you not read this until now?” To be honest, I didn’t want to. It was gifted to me for my 18th birthday and has sat on my shelf since then. I knew it was something I would like because, duh, feminism and Shakespeare!   Two of my favorite things! But I just never picked up simply because I wasn’t in the mood to digest it. But I finally did it.

My only quibble with books like these is that I’m not learning much. I’ve understood the injustice of gender inequality since I was ridiculed by the boys in my class for wanting to play four square with them. I didn’t really want to play four square, but I wanted the boys to know that I could play four square and even beat them at it. So I set this book down, proud that I finally read it and satisfied that I now know words like “loquacity”. But I also left this book with a question I’ve continued to ponder: Men historically have been taught that women are the inferior sex, but did they actually believe that? Were they just pretending to believe that or were they brainwashed enough to seriously think that they were better than more than half the population? Perhaps this wouldn’t be the same answer for every man but it’s hard for me to believe that they always thought they were stronger, smarter, and more capable. Did they have to convince themselves?

Picture this; a girl and a boy are in class together. The teacher asks questions and the girl continues to answer them rightwhile the boy is stumped and confused. My question is, is that boy sitting there, filled with anger, and wondering how this could happen if he is superior to her? Is he wondering if this is a fluke? A glitch in his patriarchal system? Is he ignoring her undeniable skills? I’m not trying to project all of this misogynism on a hypothetical boy, nor do I think it’s his fault either way. This must have been so confusingly enraging for both of them. What do you think?

A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs: ★★★★☆

This book was an impulse buy and I’m glad I did. It felt connected to the other books I read this month because the title is obviously a play on Virginia Woolf’s novel but it’s also the story of how Biggs made a life for herself after her divorce, intertwined with the life stories of history’s most famous writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. I’ve read so many of these women’s stories and yet knew so little about them before reading this book. It was amazing to connect the lives they lived with the characters they created. Like how Hurston set her book Their Eyes Were Watching God in Eatonville, Florida, her hometown. Or how Esther Greenwood’s summer in the city in The Bell Jar was based on Sylvia Plath’s incredible success in her young adult life leading up to her hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. That’s the other thing I learned about these women; they were amongst the most tortured of souls. They felt deeply and loved deeply which benefited their work but created circles of suffering around them. It begs the question, would these women have become as famous as they are now had they not suffered so much in their lifetime?

I like how Biggs incorporated her own story about moving beyond her marriage and becoming one with herself again or perhaps for the first time. It felt dissimilar to how Lunn weaved in her personal life in Conversations On Love because Biggs had the lives of these writers to relate to whereas Lunn was using her own heart as a map. But I liked the ease and subtlety with which Biggs moved between biography and autobiography.

In summation, I loved this book because it wrote about some of my favorite books and my favorite authors! Not only that, but it gave me a greater appreciation for women writers (who knew I could get even more celebratory of them?) and more books to add to my “Must Read” list. If you love writing, reading, autobiographies, love stories, sad stories, history, and most of all, women who encompassed all of these things and paved the way for people like me to write a silly little blog, I’d recommend you read this book.

finished books: 9

# of books behind: 2

books remaining: 20