Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The Joy of Reading (women's edition)

To atone for my obvious chauvinistic bias, I am redoing the below meme, using only women authors.

1. One book by a woman that changed your life: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (this was the first book I read in a summer of hiking the Appalachian Trail and it opened up a new way of observing nature.)

2. One book by a woman that you've read more than once: Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some thoughts on faith

3. One book by a woman you'd want on a desert island: Flannery O’Conner, The Complete Stories

4. One by a woman book that made you laugh: Sarah Vowell, Partly Cloudy Patriot

5. One book by a woman that made you cry: Doris Betts, Souls Raised for the Dead

6. One book by a woman that you wish had been written: Dawn’s Life as a Radical Feminist Photographer

7. One book by a woman that you wish had never been written: Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice (My sarcastic answer stands, for philosophical ramblings, see the post below)

8. One book by a woman you're currently reading: Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray and Love (I'm listening to the unabridged audio version while at the gym)

9. One book by a woman you've been meaning to read: Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth (I’ve had this for several years and haven’t gotten around to read it yet. Don’t really know why, I enjoyed her novel, Storming Heaven)

9 comments:

  1. I like the way #3 now reads, - - one book by a woman you'd want on a desert island. Hmmm...let's see, what woman would I want on a desert island? I guess I'd better say my wife.

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  2. Kevin, I didn’t notice the “alternative reading” of that line when I quickly put this together, but maybe I’ll be forgiven since O’Conner has long been dead!

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  3. I would try to complete this one too but it is just too hard for me. I've been reading non-fiction adventure/exploration books for perhaps five years now and it just seems like very very few are written by women. The only one that I can even think of recently is the one that you listed on your blog awhile ago about a couple that move to Alaska to live off the land that was written in the early part of the last century.

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  4. Ed, Next week I'll post a review that I've been saving for a few weeks about Candice Millard's book, River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Hour--about his Amazon expedition in 1914--it's very good and by a woman.

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  5. Good pics. I sneaked a peek at your fav authors on you bio - great list! As far a Blue Like Jazz, I felt that many aspects of my spiritual journey mirror Miller's (sans the road trip). I feel he does a good job of holding on to the 2000 year old affirmed gospel while opening up aspects that have been lost in recent years. Because of his approach, the book is nonconfrontational. It is, in essence, a systematic theology of sorts with anthropology, hamartiology, soteriology, ecclesiology, etc. included but told through his stories rather than through proposition.
    My 2 cents.

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  6. Heh. Maybe I'll write that book for you. ;-) Thanks for reaffirming my belief that you are a multi-dimensional, open-to-suggestion kind of guy.

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  7. heather, I enjoyed Blue Like Jazz too, especially the stories. I did a review on Miller's "Through Painted Deserts" back in the winter (check out the index of my writings), but I wasn't as impressed with it as I was with Jazz.

    Dawn, you write that book and I'll buy the first copy (although if it has a lot of your pics in it, I might not be able to afford it! lol). I was comparing the men's group and the women's group, and the women seem more diverse. There's an athiest (Vowell), a former drugged out hippie turned Jesus lover who uses lots of foul language (Lamott), a Episcopal priest who writes about mining wars (Giardina), a Catholic (O'conner), a new aged type (Gilbert), a nature lover who once, as a kid, quit the Presbyterian Church (Dillard), and a photographer (Dawn)

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  8. Sage, it was fun to read both your lists. One challenging book by a woman that I haven't quite finished yet is Diana Butler Bass' The Practicing Congregation: Imagining A New Old Church. These kinds of lists take some thought - at least for me it did. But I found I enjoyed doing that kind of reflection.

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  9. Interesting how first list turned out to be so male-heavy. Interesting to see another side to it.

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