52 Books by 52 Women: The Wounded Sky
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
When I decided to take on the year-long project of reading
52 Books by 52 Women authors I’d never read before, I made the somewhat arbitrary decision that they’d all be fiction, but not tied to any particular genre. So the last book I finished, Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, is not only a science fiction novel, but a Star Trek novel, and it’s the first one I’ve ever successfully read. Read more
52 Books by 52 Women: Our Nig
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is a book I probably would never have become aware of were it not for the
52 Books by 52 Women challenge I took on for this year. I ran across it while doing some online research to refresh my memory about female authors I’d been curious about but had never read. I’d never heard of author Harriet E. Wilson, and indeed no one knows much about her. More than half of the 1983 Random House edition I read is devoted to historical notes and speculations about the author by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Read more
52 Books by 52 Women: The Interestings
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
For some reason, this book took me a really long time to read. I mean, it’s a long book—468 pages—but it’s not like I haven’t read longer. But it’s not a fast 468 pages. Because I’ve been hoping to read a book a week to get my 52 Books by 52 Women challenge done in a space of a year, I found myself putting this one aside several times to read shorter books, and even then I fell a little behind. (When I referred to reading a book that was way too long to finish in a week a few books ago, this is the one I meant.)
52 Books by 52 Women: The Scarlet Pimpernel
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
Well, I knew I’d start falling behind sooner or later in my
52 Books by 52 Women challenge, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. Only six books in, and I’m already a week behind. I can catch up, of course, if I ever have any leisure time, but it’s a reminder that finding time to read 52 novels in the course of a year is difficult, especially when you work full time and are typically seeing plays and writing about them in your supposed off hours. But I knew all that when I took this project on, so there’s no sense in grousing about it. Read more
52 Books by 52 Women: We Need New Names
For a year I’m reading 52 books by women authors whose work I’ve never read before. Click here for previous installments.
We Need New Names is the 2013 debut novel by 32-year-old author NoViolet Bulawayo, born and raised in Zimbabwe and now living in the United States, where she’s a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. It’s told from the point of view of a 10-year-old girl, Darling, in a shantytown in Zimbabwe. The country is never named in the novel—it’s always “our country” and “our language”—but it’s not exactly hidden either, with references to white self-identified “Rhodesians” and the Limpopo River border with South Africa.
52 Books by 52 Women: The Woman with the Flying Head
I don’t remember who originally recommended The Woman with the Flying Head, a book of short stories by Kurahashi Yumiko, selected and translated by Atsuko Sakaki. I picked it up at Half Price Books in Austin, Texas, circa 2003, because some people I knew and some I didn’t were starting up an online book club, and this was one of the books on the list. The book club fizzled out pretty quickly, and ever since then this book has been sitting on my shelf, intriguing and unread. It’s survived several rounds of book collection trimming, with the logic that it really did look like a book I’d like to read and was obscure enough that I’d probably never run across it again if I sold it. I finally read it this week, not because it was “next in line” in my
52 Books by 52 Women reading project, but because I realized the book I was already reading was way too long to finish this week, whereas this one’s only 155 pages and easy to knock out in a few otherwise-busy days. Read more
52 Books by 52 Women: The Secret Lives of Married Women
I’m not sure how this happened. I had a perfectly respectable book lined up to follow last week’s reading of Kindred as part of my 52 Books by 52 Women challenge. I was all set to read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,
52 Books by 52 Women: Kindred
As a guy who read mostly genre fiction in high school—mostly fantasy, with some light sci-fi thrown in—and then abandoned it entirely in college when I discovered Russian novels, I’d always meant to check out Octavia E. Butler but never got around to it. So when I started the
52 Books by 52 Women challenge of reading female authors I’d never read before, she was pretty high on my list of authors to read. Read more
52 Books by 52 Women: The Age of Innocence
Well, this week I finished the first book in my year-long 52 Books by 52 Women challenge (not calendar year, or else I’d have a lot of catching up to do). I saw Martin Scorsese’s movie of The Age of Innocence when it came out way back in 1993, and I thought, “Man, that was not a good movie, but I get the impression that I’d really like the book.” It only took me 21 years to get around to reading it, but guess what? I did really like the book.
52 Books by 52 Women
I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. In fact, I’ve been thinking about doing this for at least a year. I thought about starting it at the start of the new year, but I immediately got the flu or something and pretty much everything fell by the wayside. Since then I’ve been aware that although it’s a year-long project, that year can start at any point; there’s no reason that it has to start on January 1. And when I realized all of a sudden that it’s International Women’s Day, I thought, that’s it; it’s a sign.
