Books read in September 2021 (part one of two)

1. The Rebirth of Rapunzel: A Mythic Biography of the Maiden in the Tower, by Kate Forsyth (2016)

Reading The Wild Girl in August got me really interested in the history of the Grimm tales. I have only slightly more exposure to them than your average bookworm  - this due to having been a student of the German language, which properly should always entail a bit of time spent with the Grimm tales, a.k.a. the world's most famous German-language book.

So, I tracked down this non-fiction work by the same author, who wrote it as part of her dissertation for a phD in fairy tale retellings (I know, right?). It was wonderful and wonderfully interesting! For example, the discussion of lingering matriarchal symbolism in the Rapunzel myth just...makes me all intellectually swoony. 

It did repeat itself somewhat, but I think that's just it being an academic work. Some of the short articles by the author included at the end were a bit irrelevant to Rapunzel, but I didn't mind.

Now I need to reread the other component of her dissertation: her own novelized retelling of Rapunzel, Bitter Greens (read last December).

2. The Last Time I Wore a Dress, by Daphne Scholinski (1997)

This memoir was, in a conversational way, dark as hell, and a weird view of mental hospitals I hadn't seen before - a teenage girl committed involuntarily for several years, basically because her negligent/abusive parents didn't want to be her parents while she was exhibiting behavioral issues. Among other things, she gets slapped with a Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis for being insufficiently feminine, and prescribed makeup lessons, not having a female best friend, and developing romantic interest in male patients. What a good time! Some of her casually tossed-off anecdotes did not read as credible to me, which made me feel a little hmm but I don't disbelieve the framework of her story. Certainly an effective reminder of how well-rooted misogyny and homophobia are in psychiatry. Overall, I feel like stories like this (i.e. about hospitalization as incarceration) are underrepresented am books set in mental hospitals, at least they sure were in what I've read.

3. Zuri Ray Tries Ballet, by Tami Charles, illustrated by Sharon Sordo (2021)

Cute illustrations, cute friendship, read because ballet is one of my Interests. The moral of "Do things in whatever way you want to, even in ballet class! For example, if you want to wear a soccer uniform and do creative soccer movement while everyone else does ballet!" was odd.

4. Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, by Erin Williams (2019

This was somewhat interesting. In part it reminded me of those posts everyone was making during #MeToo, where you'd see a bunch of your female acquaintances on Facebook simply posting a laundry list of every sexual mistreatment men have subjected them too. I feel like too much was made of her thesis about choosing male-gaze desirability (e.g. her twenty-step beauty routine) versus being invisible. It doesn't guide the book that much, and as a lesbian, it's not a feminist topic that I find compelling. To an extent, I would say I feel the same about the current tendency to find/seek feminist solidarity only around our victimization.

5. Flamingo in the Dark: Images, by  Bea Nettles (1979)

I checked this out because I ran across her photographic Tarot deck, the Mountain Dream Tarot. Curious to see the types of manipulation that photographers used before computer editing was available. Dreamy but not totally my thing. I wished her descriptions in the front of what biographic moments each photograph pertained to had been connected to the actual relevant images.

6. The Witches of Worm, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1972)

A reread. This author really does creepiness and ambience well. I didn't notice as a child the ambiguity about whether the cat is really a demon or whether the lonely, angry child is just using him to justify her own bad behavior to herself. (Credit to my friend who pointed this out to me before passing on her Little Free Library copy to me!) Also, I reckon this is set in San Francisco, which is always a plus.

7. In Praise of Wasting Time, by Alan Lightman (2018)

To summarize: "Wasting time is good because it makes you more productive." This is companion to a TED Talk (which I haven't watched) and that totally fits for me. I didn't dislike it but much of it was review of topics I've read about elsewhere in greater depth. Am I the only millennial who is indifferent to the institution of TED Talks? I think I've watched two, total.

8. Lirael, by Garth Nix (2001)

A reread. The world-building of the Clayr's Glacier, and particularly its Great Library and Lirael's life in it, is so savory to me. Sam is annoyingly thick, but I guess he is a teenage boy.

9. Abhorsen, by Garth Nix (2003)

A reread. The second half of Lirael's story, but somehow I always liked the first half better, even though much of the plot hadn't really gotten going yet at that point! The parts of his books where the protagonists are running around in a panic, organizing people and magic, trying to stop the world from ending, are a little exhausting and perhaps overly drawn out here. (To me the first book, Sabriel, was the more perfectly plotted of this series.) I love the Disreputable Dog so much.

(Part two here.)

Days, lately, in photos

Hot days in a top-floor apartment = blinds down all afternoon, big fan blasting. It still reliably gets 10 degrees hotter inside than outside on those days.

Immature acorns.


A nice neighbor. I say hi to her every time I pass her yard.

Add pomegranates to the list of fruits I have seen successfully cultivated by home gardeners in my area. Another recent addition: olives!


I have taken up coloring again to keep my hands busy during team meetings on Zoom.



Our girl.

Beautiful color from the liquidambar trees.


My shady walks are becoming gradually less so...

Rosehips are ripening, and reminding me it's a good time of year for rosehip tea (a gracious source of vitamin C).

"Stepping Westward"

What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.

- Denise Levertov

Books reads in August 2021

1. Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women, by Joseph Hansen, Mary-Alice Waters, and Evelyn Reed (1986)

This book's purpose seems to be to document a debate that took place in the 1950s via a series of article and letters-to-the-editor in a communist newsletter. However, I found I didn't care that much for the most part. Too much militant jargon, also. On the bright side, did you know that "comradely yours" was considered an appropriate communist sign-off for a letter?

2. Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm, by David Mas Masumoto with Nikiko Masumoto (2016)

A collection of little standalone chapters with musings about life and operations on a small, third-generation family farm. I think these were mostly newspaper columns before they were a book. Conversational and taught me some things I didn't know. I couldn't read too many at once.

3. Looks, by Madeleine George (2008)

What a smart and interesting young adult novel. Really didn't feel like quite any other one I've read before. The story is one I can imagine others doing, but this book felt like it took its world, and its two girl narrators, seriously. Seriously enough to look closely and build them from scratch, not from expectations or cliches.

4. The Wild Girl, by Kate Forsyth (2015)

Ah! Utterly engrossing...I couldn't stop thinking about this one for a while. The only somewhat imagined story of a young woman named Dortchen Wild, who grew up next door to the Brothers Grimm and told them many of their stories. It is masterful as historical fiction - I learned so much about the time and place she lived in, and about the birth of the Grimm's collection of tales, without feeling like I was being taught. Terribly dark in parts, but oh, such a tale. I'd issue a content warning for sexual abuse.

5. Rose Penski, by Roz Perry (1989)

Quirky 1980s romance. This one charmed me because the long-term couple FEELS like a real long-term couple to me. It's not very plotty. There is a cancer context. The two women are quirky and ever so real, as are there interactions, and they are romantic in that exact way - not in a romance novel way.

6. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee (2019)

Have you deleted your Facebook (and Instagram) yet? I did, almost two years ago and I've been having a grand time. Unfortunately the present and future of my world is still being determined primarily by fellow humans who cannot say the same thing. This book is primarily a history of "the Facebook catastrophe" and its backlash (including the author's work as a lobbyist) to date. 

7. When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka (2002)

Seriously well-crafted. Sharp as a razor. Sparse. Heartbreaking without being dramatic. It's not the first book I've read on the Japanese-American internment experience, but it's so affecting and humanizing that it really shook me into a new way of looking at an old piece of knowledge.

8. Let Them Be Said, by Susan Griffin (1973)

Feminist poetry. Very 1970s leftist vibe and tone. Not totally my thing, despite my love for 1970s feminism.

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What about you - anything wonderful you've been reading lately?

May and June or so