#saramarcus

[dimanche-jmen-fous]

🇬🇷🇱 🇵🇼🇷 Read these two within a month

[thepidgeondrummer-blog]

Join me on this improvised #happydance if you will 🙃 @kimletgordon @carrie_rachel @msjesshopp @amypoehlersmartgirls #saramarcus #hungermakesmeamoderngirl #thefirstcollectionofcriticismbyalivingfemalerockcritic #girlstothefront #yesplease

[ktsipp]

I am the kind of reader

who is always in the middle of at least two books, never just one. More often than not, if you find your way into my bedroom there will be a stack of books on the floor, on the bedside table, and on the bed itself, all of which are in some state of being read. Current examples include a cookbook that I've been 'reading' for more than a year, and a book on the history of maps in the US that I probably haven't looked at in six months--but I'll get to it, eventually.

The top of the stacks change fairly frequently, though, as I generally read between 60-100 books a year (88 in 2012, for the curious). They usually include some combination of literary fiction, some kind of genre fiction, maybe a graphic novel and a non-fiction book or two about a subject I'm interested in. 

Rarely do they have anything to do with each other, even thematically. When I'm reading in bed, if I get tired of one thing, I usually want something new or different to turn to after that. 

Over the weekend, I've been reading a combination of Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution and Nick Hornby's More Baths Less Talking and I can't remember the last time I had such a complementary set of pleasures. 

The Marcus book appeals to me on a couple of levels--it feels almost like personal history, in a way. I wasn't a Riot Grrrl, myself--but I was a young woman activist at the same time that the Riot Grrrls were trying to sort how to be artists in the fucked-up sexism of the early 90s. Third-wave feminism always felt more like a home to me than the second-wave did, even though I'm about 2 years too old for it. Marcus has managed to capture the quality of hope and anger that drove so many of us in those years. 

And the Hornby book is a dream. I had missed, somehow, that Hornby had published more in this series of columns he wrote about the books he bought--& read--every month, after The Polysyllabic Spree, but I was in a bookstore recently and found this one, and when I was trying to find something in my to-be-read pile that I knew would pay off, I grabbed it. 

Pay off it did. Who else but Hornby could write that one of Muriel Spark's books is "...pitched straight into the long grass between Patricia Highsmith & early Pinter..."? If that doesn't make you want to readThe Driver's Seat, I don't know what will. 

Maybe it's the 90s that makes me react so well to these two books, maybe it's just some misplaced nostalgia for a time when more things seemed possible. I don't know. I'd like to think that all my reading choices could result in this much enjoyment, but I know that's not likely So I'll savor the moment while I can.