Literary Inclination

This blog is dedicated to literature, whether well known or obscure.

[penandinkprincess]

hitting return early on libby when there's people waiting and feeling like a benevolent queen distributing alms to the poor

[literaryinclination]

“Just once I’d like to fall for someone who isn’t handicapped by narcissism, but it’s too late.”

-Caroline Keynes, You Love Me

[literaryinclination]

“Through this expanding network, ‘respectable’ evangelical leaders and organizations gave cover to their ‘brothers in the gospel’ who were promoting more extreme expressions of patriarchy, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish margins from the mainstream. Over time, a common commitment to patriarchal power began to define the boundaries of the evangelical movement itself, as those who ran afoul of those orthodoxies quickly discovered.”

-Kristina Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

[literaryinclination]

“Like ‘servant leadership’ and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change…by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would received more than $104 million in federal funding. Here was a case of government intrusion into the most intimate of matters, yet evangelicals didn’t seem to mind.”

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

[youneedtostudyives]

white + gold

[literaryinclination]

Lore was so good tho

[queerbookclub]

[image description: an orange and black banner reading “queer halloween reads, part one: classics”. it is surrounded by four book covers of the titles listed below.] The is the first of four posts featuring queer and queer-ish reads for Halloween. Enjoy! The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Jackson has penned several creepy classics, including We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Lottery. This 1959 literary ghost story is a landmark of the genre, inventing (as far as I can tell) the strangers-gathered-in-a-spooky-house trope. Many fans of the novel have read at least one of those strangers as queer.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu An 1872 novella (now in public domain and available online) that tells the story of a young woman named Laura who befriends a strange girl named Carmilla. This pre-Dracula vampire tale is sometimes subtitled: “A Tragic Love Story”. The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez A runaway slave is taken in by two kindly vampire women who operate a brothel - for them and their kind, giving life is as important as taking blood. This unconventional vampire story then follows Gilda over the next two hundred years as she travels the world and seeks connection. Confession: I’m too much of a wuss to read most of the scary stories that will be in these Queer Halloween Reads, but I’m working my way through this one, and it’s pretty great.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite Lost Souls, the debut novel by Billy Martin (the author’s current name), is perhaps more well-known, but I went with his second book, Drawing Blood, to keep the vampire-to-haunted-house ratio even. It stars a cartoonist named Trevor, the only one spared when his father killed his family and himself. Returning to his childhood home to confront his father’s demons, he also crosses paths with Zach, a bisexual hacker on the run from the FBI.

[literaryinclination]

You can change the law, but you can't change people and how they treat each other

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

[literaryinclination]

For me, one of the main conclusions from this survey is that neither my baby boomer generation nor theirs [millenials] is living in a postracial, color-blind society. Instead we may be living in a color-silent society, where we have learned to avoid talking about racial difference. But even if we refrain from mentioning race, the evidence is clear that we still notice racial categories and that our behaviors are guided by what we notice.

Beverly Daniel Tatum. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? 

[literaryinclination]

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t therapists supposed to keep their personal lives private? Aren’t they supposed to be blank slates who never reveal anything about themselves, objective observers who refrain from calling their patients names—even in their heads? Besides, aren’t therapists, of all people, supposed to have their lives together?

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone?

[fleetingwishes]

Research Participants needed! I am looking for participants to take a series of surveys relating to childhood experiences and romantic relationships. Participants are also able to enter into a raffle to win 1 out of 4 $25 gift cards! To participate: you must be over 18 years old and must be in a romantic relationship. This includes: marriage, dating, co-habitating, engaged, etc. As long as you have a specific partner in mind to take the survey, you may participate! Please feel free to message me with any questions or concerns.

Link to the survey: 

https://alliant.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5AvRJDL5QRxQZ2B

[literaryinclination]

[literaryinclination]

And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new- perhaps something better- into this world.

Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

[literaryinclination]

These results suggest that when Whites interact with a Black partner, their attempts to appear color-blind—by avoiding race—are accompanied by additional costs: less friendly nonverbal behaviors.

Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction Playing the Political Correctness Game by  Michael I. Norton, Samuel R. Sommers, Evan P. Apfelbaum, Natassia Pura, and Dan Ariely

[booksthatmatter]

Throwback Thursday: Bartimaeus Trilogy | Blooming Twig #BooksThatMatter

“Always read between the lines,” a sentiment that applies to Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy. I’ll do just that and recap my journey with Bartimaeus.

[literaryinclination]

We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[nevver]

Camden Lock Books

[literaryinclination]

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others. Our ongoing examination of who we are in our full humanity, embracing all of our identities, creates the possibility of building alliances that may ultimately free us all.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, "The Complexity of Identity: 'Who Am I?'"