HoF, lets choose a book for our book club
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood:
Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood:
Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for 40 years.
Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood:
Rennie Wilford, a young journalist running for her life, takes an assignment on a Caribbean island and tumbles into a world where people are not what they seem. When a burnt-out Yankee offers Rennie a no-hooks, no-strings affair, she is caught up in a lethal web of corruption.
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd:
Long, brisk, charming first novel about an 1875 treaty between Ulysses S. Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, by the sports reporter and author of the memoir A Hunter's Road (1992). Little Wolf comes to Washington and suggests to President Grant that peace between the Whites and Cheyenne could be established if the Cheyenne were given white women as wives, and that the tribe would agree to raise the children from such unions. The thought of miscegenation naturally enough astounds Grant, but he sees a certain wisdom in trading 1,000 white women for 1,000 horses, and he secretly approves the Brides For Indians treaty. He recruits women from jails, penitentiaries, debtors' prisons, and mental institutionsoffering full pardons or unconditional release. May Dodd, born to wealth in Chicago in 1850, had left home in her teens and become the mistress of her father's grain-elevator foreman. Her outraged father had her kidnaped, imprisoning her in a monstrous lunatic asylum. When Grant's offer arrives, she leaps at it and soon finds herself traveling west with hundreds of white and black would-be brides. All are indentured to the Cheyenne for two years, must produce children, and then will have the option of leaving. May, who keeps the journal we read, marries Little Wolf and lives in a crowded tipi with his two other wives, their children, and an old crone who enforces the rules. Reading about life among the Cheyenne is spellbinding, especially when the women show up the braves at arm-wrestling, foot-racing, bow-shooting, and gambling. Liquor raises its evil head, as it will, and reduces the braves to savagery. But the women recover, go out on the winter kill with their husbands, and accompany them to a trading post where they drive hard bargains and stop the usual cheating of the braves. Eventually, when the cavalry attacks the Cheyenne, mistakenly thinking they're Crazy Horse's Sioux, May is killed. An impressive historical, terse, convincing, and affecting.
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine:
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.
The Invisible Woman: Confronting Weight Prejudice in America by W. Charisse Goodman:
This intelligent, political, feminist treatise explores the all-pervasive prejudice against fat women. It is about shattering the stereotypes, raising awareness about harassment, and asserting the truth that no one has the right to discriminate against anyone based on their size! Goodman exposes our culture’s widely accepted hatred of fat women, from the "health police" who feel that it is their right to approach and criticize strangers about their weight, health, or appearance, to the mass media who perpetuate inappropriate standards of beauty. The Invisible Woman also discusses weight obsession, false assumptions about diet and exercise, the fear and loathing of fat women as sexual beings, disturbing similarities between the aesthetic ideals of the Nazis and America’s quiet extermination of heavy women, and an open letter to men who think fat women are ugly.
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Here are the choices. Let's give a couple days of vote. Anyone that is looking at this from a $ perspective, please pm. Betcha we can work something out. I have never done a book club, so i am looking forward to participation more than anything else. I have always wanted to do this.
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