From Rural Womyn Zone Central to friends in Towanda:
Searching for new book titles this morning, I got lost in an online bookstore reading lists of favorite books from 2007. I like reading staff picks for best of the year. I had so much fun that I decided to send you a list of feminist bookstores instead of books. I hope you have as much fun as I did.
I can sit at home out here in my jammies on the frosty plains where the nearest bookstore is 60 miles away and explore bookstores from California to Chicago, and find out what women who love books are reading. Life is good. (Although it’s so cold here in the upstairs of this old farm house that my fingers are getting stiff - I’m going to have to get a hot cup of coffee to keep them warm!)
Antigone Books
Tucson, AZ
http://www.antigonebooks.com/
This one didn’t have their 2007 picks online yet but has a large staff with their earlier picks - so lots to look at. They also have an email newsletter. A “zany” fun bookstore.
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
http://www.womensbookstore.com/new.html
Includes new books and staff picks and has an online store. More serious than Antigone, this bookstore is “promoting anti-oppression politics and feminist politics. Our mission: To provide books by women writers, especially marginalized women, including women of colour, First Nations women, lesbians, other queer women, working class women, disabled women, Jewish women, and other groups of women.”
Wild Iris Books
Gainsville, FL
Mission: Our mission is to honor the sacred feminine and its unique diversity of expression through art, music and the written word.
http://wildirisbooks.com/
Also has a mailing list. Art, books, gifts, green products. We’moon 2008 date book.
Charis Books
http://charis.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
Staff picks lists. I checked out Debbie’s list and found great titles like, That’s funny, you don’t look Buddhist, The Time Travelers Wife, and Hunting and Gathering. I definitely will go back and read more of these books to get a new list to either buy or order from my library.
Women and Children First
Chicago
http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
” . . .shop as independently as you think . . . ” You can order any book in print from them, and they have a list of new books that you can pre-order and staff recommendations.
Center for New Words
Massachusettes
http://www.centerfornewwords.org/
Mission: To use the power and creativity of words and ideas to strengthen the voice of progressive and marginalized women in society.
Also has a blog about interesting women. These may be the kinds of blogs I can get hooked on instead of politics.
http://www.centerfornewwords.org/blog/
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The event calendars on some of these websites make me feel like moving to where there are bookstores and events! My biggest bi-monthly Saturday thing is to go to the local flea market where they have estate and moving sale items and occasionally the Saturday afternoon auction and chili supper.
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Of course, there is the Amazon Co-op Bookstore,
“the oldest independent feminist bookstore in America” in Minneapolis.http://www.amazonbookstorecoop.com/
One of their featured titles is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, “In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara
Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species’ attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and ’savage,’ Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a ‘danced religion.’”
Book-woman, “the only feminist bookstore in Texas.”
http://ebookwoman.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
Website says they are a full service independent bookstore “serving the reading and resource needs of all women, their friends, families, and children. We stock unique merchandise celebrating the diversity of our lives with a great selection of classic and cutting edge women’s writing. ” Features book group picks for each year, including 2008
A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin.
http://www.roomofonesown.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
They have recommendations and a Fight the Winter Blues list.
The only time I was in Madison was for a World Dairy Expo. We were at the hotel, the Expo building and grounds, and then got in busses and went on tours of dairy farms. Based on that limited perspective, it is hard for me to imagine that there is a feminist bookstore there. Love the name, though.
Well . . . .I know there are more bookstores to peruse, and I hate to stop, but I have to get some hot coffee or tea and warm myself up. Guess I’d better start wearing legwarmers and booties when I’m shopping online. Next week I hope to have my laptop back.
Have fun!
Week of Nov. 18, 2007 book list sent to the Ruralwomyn List by Arnica Montana. I was asked to put it online for the Towandans whose sticky notes are falling off their clothing! If you purchase any of these books, use this link http://astore.amazon.com/ruralwomynzone01 to benefit the Zone. Thank you for your support! Rural Womyn Zone Home
Now is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker
“Kate, a successful author fearful of aging and uncertain about continuing her relationship with Yolo, an artist, sets off on a journey of spiritual discovery. She has been profoundly unhappy for some time, dreaming of rivers, until she takes off for rivers–the Colorado and the Amazon. . . . . . ”
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The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield
“There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father’s shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it’s the truth. . . . .Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. . . . .Margaret has a story of her own: she was one of conjoined twins and her sister died so that Margaret could live. She feels an otherworldly aura sometimes or a yearning for a part of her that is forever missing. . . . ”
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And while we’re talking about food. . . . .
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp
“Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers “putting food by,” as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don’t raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. ………….”
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High school to adult level:
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See
See’s engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or “old sames”) Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily’s voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. . . .”
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I’ve been avoiding reading this, then saw that the vet who raises grass fed beef is reading it. . . ..
The Ominvore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
“Pollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls “our national eating disorder” (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It’s a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. . . . .. . . . .
One of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans.
Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.”
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Mozart’s Sister by Rita Charbonnier
“Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, affectionately called Nannerl by her family, could play the piano with an otherworldly skill from the time she was a child, when her tiny hands seemed too small to encompass a fifth. At the tender age of five, she gave her first public performance, amazing the assembled gentlemen and ladies with the beautiful music she created. But her moment of glory was cut short, for even as her father carried her around to receive their praise, her mother began laboring to bring a second child into the world. After hours of her mother’s pained cries and agonized shouts, which rang in Nannerl’s ears like a terrifying symphony, the child was born. They named him Wolfgang. . . . ”
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The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
“. . . . even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model?
How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt political movements?
How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden expos of the ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.”
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