The Diary of a Housewife took me all sorts of places. The book itself made me want to read more books from the female perspective, from decades ago. But there was another thing.
The changes on Goodreads are usually something I complain about. Like the new reading challenge widget for 2014 (I liked the previous, 2013 version better), and a few other things, which I can't remember at the moment, though. But there's a new feature on Goodreads that I really like. It's the Recommendations feature, on the right, just under Currently Reading. It's a feature that shows you a few recommendations based on some particular shelf of yours, or based on the book you are currently reading, etc. Sometimes the recommendations can get repetitive, but sometimes you get some very interesting recommendations, and I always check them out, whenever I remember.
When I had TDoaH marked as Currently Reading, I got these as recommendations:
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman
from BD: Alix Kates Shulman's "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen" created a profound impact on the cultural landscape when it was originally published in 1972. A sardonic portrayal of one white, middle-class, Midwestern girl's coming-of-age, the novel takes a wry and prescient look at a range of experiences treated at the time as taboo but which were ultimately accepted as matters of major political significance [...]. The book went on to sell more than a million copies and is regarded today as a classic, one of the first and best pieces of fiction born of the women's liberation movement. With many of its concerns still with us today, this witty and devastating novel continues to resonate with readers, and Sasha Davis has proved herself a prom queen for the ages.
And I love the cover:
Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York by Gail Parent
From Amazon: Sheila Levine is thirty, over-weight, over-sexed and unmarried...Sheila Levine is getting a divorce from life! Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York is the most achingly funny suicide note ever written by a marriage-mad manhunter trying, unsuccessfully, to straddle two worlds: the one she's been programmed for since birth - marriage first, life later - and the illusive swinging singles scene of "liberated" New York. You'll laugh at her. You'll cry for her. You'll recognize her at once... There's a little bit of Sheila Levine in every woman.
The Women's Room by Marilyn French
From BD: The bestselling feminist novel that awakened both women and men, The Women's Room follows the transformation of Mira Ward and her circle as the women's movement begins to have an impact on their lives. A biting social commentary on an emotional world gone silently haywire, The Women's Room is a modern classic that offers piercing insight into the social norms accepted so blindly and revered so completely. Marilyn French questions those accepted norms and poignantly portrays the hopeful believers looking for new truths.
Then I came upon another book by Alix Kates Shulman, called Drinking the Rain: A Memoir:
From Amazon: At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that speaks to us all: to build a new life of creativity and spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment.
Then I don't remember what happened, but I was getting these different recommendations, and books led to other books, and it's all a bit of a haze now, but all in all, these all made their way to my wishlist:
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
Amazon: Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape-from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene-we experience everything from Morvern's stark, unflinching perspective. Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.
When I googled the book, I noticed that the talented Samantha Norton played the main role in the movie (some of you will remember her from Emma).
Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness by Gail Hornstein
Amazon: In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other patients have managed to get their stories out, at least in disguised form. Today, in a vibrant underground net-work of “psychiatric survivor groups” all over the world, patients work together to unravel the mysteries of madness and help one another re-cover. Optimistic, courageous, and surprising, Agnes’s Jacket takes us from a code-cracking bunker during World War II to the church basements and treatment centers where a whole new way of understanding the mind has begun to take form.
A vast gulf exists between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer. Hornstein’s luminous work helps us bridge that gulf, guiding us through the inner lives of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, and paranoia and emerging with nothing less than a new model for understanding one another and ourselves.
Life Inside: A Memoir by Mindy Lewis
Amazon: The patient is an ascetically pretty 15½-year-old white female. She is intelligent, fearful, extremely anxious, and depressed. Her rage is poorly controlled and inappropriately expressed. Diagnostic Impression: Program for social recovery in a supportive and structured environment appears favorable. In 1967, three months before her sixteenth birthday, Mindy Lewis was sent to a state psychiatric hospital by court order. She had been skipping school, smoking pot, and listening to too much Dylan. Her mother, at a loss for what else to do, decided that Mindy remain in state custody until she turned eighteen and became a legal, law-abiding, "healthy" adult.
The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
Amazon: Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe -- Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they're calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It's true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it's true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she's not a murderer at all -- she's a murderess.
How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
Amazon: Lou Connor, a gifted but unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney, Australia. When she is offered a place as an exchange student at a college in Illinois, it seems as if her dreams are going to be fulfilled. Her host family, the Hardings, has a large and beautiful house in Illinois and couldn't be more welcoming. Everything is perfect. Until Lou starts having to live in the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of the Hardings' suburban mansion and things start to go terribly wrong. How the Light Gets In is an acutely observed tale of adolescence. But more than that, it is an intelligent and darkly humorous study of human aspiration, self-sabotage, and the dislocation and alienation felt by an outsider. In Lou Connor, M. J. Hyland has created a complex and unforgettable protagonist who mesmerizes the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.
I tell you, the Recommendations thingy is very, very dangerous!
