Little Miss Media Junkie

Recently read Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman. While it isn’t perfect, I really enjoyed it overall and was often that girl awkwardly laughing out loud on public transport while I read it. Here are a few good links about Caitlin:

The New York Times review

Jen Doll at the Atlantic Wire interviews Moran

NPR’s Fresh Air looks at the book

and

A Hairpin Q&A with Moran

Plus, prior to reading the book, I read a lot about Bitch magazine deciding not to run an interview with Moran over some flip tweets she wrote about Lena Dunham and race on Girls.

You can read an overview of the whole scuffle here.

Bitch shared their decision to not run the piece here. 

And then Salon ended up publishing the original piece (which was commissioned by Bitch) and you can read about that, as well as Moran’s response, here.

Phew, ok.

I recently read the 2011 National Book Award winner, ‘Salvage the Bones.’     

The book is worth a read for the visceral opening scene alone, which had me captivated and horrified. The prose is tense, urgent, luscious. The protagonist is poor and pregnant and 14. She’s fierce and smart but not plucky or precocious. In short she’s completely different from any young female character that I’ve ever encountered. 

Admittedly, this is a book that I appreciate more reflecting on after the fact, than when while I was reading it. Here are a few reviews that I liked:

The Sunday Times Book Review

The Washington Post

and

The L.A. Times

Image via Bloomsbury

Just started reading ‘A Game of Thrones,’ the first book in the ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ series this morning. Really excited to be getting into these books and super eager to watch the first season of Game of Thrones on HBO when I’m finished.

Just started reading this (it’s my first Kindle loan from the library - so convenient!) and thus far it’s really great. I knew pretty much nothing about this book: I’d vaguely heard that it was a getting a lot of buzz in the publishing world and borrowed on a whim. I really think that’s one of the best ways to experience a book, free of any expectations or judgments.

Image via Viking

Here are a couple essays on Lolita that I really enjoyed. The first examines a cultural misinterpretation and perhaps misremembering of Lolita as a ‘sweet,’ ‘seductive,’ ‘sexually precocious’ character when in fact, as the author reminds us, she was a serial rape victim.

The second is a brilliant essay in Slate commemorating the book’s 50th anniversary and revisiting its still-shocking perversion. 

I love Lolita. Nabokov’s lyricism and subtlety and the way you wrestle with your sympathetic feelings toward Humbert Humbert combine to make it one of my favorite books. But people who come away from this novel thinking that it is sexy or a brutally honest love story are surely misreading it. 

Six famous writers share their book-collecting habits (and favorite books) with FT magazine. 

Image via House of Wentworth.com

Currently reading The Poisonwood Bible. Some really stunning prose thus far.

Image via Harper Perennial