Feministing Reads: What We’re Reading

Here’s what we’re reading this month:

Lori: I am so excited to dig into the recently re-released Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. It feels especially relevant given the role that black women have played in protesting police brutality this year. With a foreword by the inimitable Jamilah Lemieux.

Chloe: I’m about to finish The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s gorgeous; enough history to make you feel like you understand the time and place the characters live in, but without being heavy-handed or overtly didactic. You can tell that an enormous amount of research, on a wide range of topics, went into this fiction. It was one of last year’s best-reviewed books for a reason. I also just read The Summertime Girls by my friend Laura Hankin. It does a great job of capturing the shifting nature of female friendship in your early twenties, of figuring out how you want to make a difference in the world, of growing into empathy and compassion, the real marks of adulthood. I devoured it in a day. Two biased thumbs way up.

Maya: Depressingly, I have not yet finished the books I was reading when we did this a month ago. But I’ve also started Being Mortal, which Courtney gave a shout-out to last time. And I’m revisiting Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s classic Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. So between the two of them, feeling pretty pissed about the white dude take-over of medicine.

Suzanna: This past month, I’ve read Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, and a delightful young adult biography of Ida B. Wells — called Ida B. Wells – by Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin. Relatedly, I fell asleep for the nth time working my way through the Robber Baron chapter of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Katie: I’m reading Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by the brilliant journalist and writer Johan Hari. It’s a page turner and important and educational, which is a pretty rare combination.

Courtney: I read Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More in the bookstore the other day, fun quick read. It’s an archive of this project she did where she put a list of projects/ instructions on a website and people completed them and sent in the finished work. (i.e. take a picture of beneath your bed.) Basically, her ongoing quest to capture the human condition. I also just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which is a novel about the unlikely friendship of a recluse concierge and a young 12 year old tenant of a fancy apartment building in Paris. They’re both preoccupied by the meaning of life. Not many strong feminist themes, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless.

Alexandra: I’m switching between Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment — to tide me over to the final Neapolitan Novel — and Hilton Als’ White Girls.