Alan Bennett

"The Uncommon Reader" By Alan Bennett Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007


Most people would say both here and across the pond that the Queen of England is a rather dull sort of monarch; but this book portrays her in a far different light and although it is fiction one would only wish it was a true one. Alan Bennett has written a witty and delightful book about reading and used the Queen to be the explorer of great books and how one chance meeting at a bookmobile sitting at the back of the palace changes her life.

If the author can transform an unintellectual queen into interesting and intelligent woman with the use of books, there is hope for all of us. Not everyone in the palace understands the queen's growing hunger for books and many see it as a threat to the empire. The more she reads the more she is able to build a sense of self-determination and to direct her own life. Ah, the power of books. She has help in this in the person of Norman Seakins who helps her on her journey.

This is a short book, a novella really of 120 pages and the evolution of a reader and beyond. It is believable and a lot of fun. There are many good mentions of great books and if someone wanted to expand the lessons that the queen learned from her reading to those of us who read as well it would not be hard. There is lots of humor here as when the queen asks why she cannot read the books from her own library and finds out they are too valuable to read. I liked this book so much I read it twice, and it is staying in my library.

Pat Conroy

"My Reading Life" by Pat Conroy Doubleday: 2010

This book is a library book and I have no idea when it is due. It is so well written that I wanted to savor the language and the commentary on books as well as the love that Conroy has for reading. I could not. Still, it was a wonderful journey into Conroy's mind for there is no mistaking this author's love of books. It is a love that unites him with his mother who also loved reading too but not his father who thought of books as furniture. His mother gave all of her children a love of books that lives with them still although she is gone now.

As with most writers, writing and reading is so intertwined that it is hard to separate the two activities. The reader gets a strong dose of Conroy as the writer as well as Conroy as the reader in this book. We roll around in his ocean peaks of admiration, elation and enjoy his love of language as well as the books that he read throughout his life. There is humor as the he describes his mother's love of the book, "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell and all of the times his mother read it and made her kids watch the movie. For her, it was not so much a novel as a book of manners and they way things were supposed to be in the South.

Conroy is considered a Southern writer and it is evident in this book that he agrees with this assessment for his mother, Peg Conroy, is Southern raised as well. His father Donald Conroy, is a U.S. Marine fighter pilot. He will move his family 23 times before Conroy is 18 years of age. At one point in the book, the author states his father raised him to be a fighter pilot too but his mother got him with her reading and love of books. He became a writer instead and one of his sister is a published poet. He also said that he has spent his whole life trying to understand who his mother was. He also wrote the novel, "The Great Santini" so he could understand his relationship with his father who was a abusive husband and father so he could have a relationship with him. His mother divorced his father after he retired from the service.

There were many special people in Conroy's life and one of them was a special English teacher. He introduced him to different writers especially Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward, Angel" (1929)). His mother would follow behind him reading the same books Conroy read for she did not have a college education and always felt inferior to others because of that. Whatever classes he took in high school and even at The Citadel, a military college, she followed behind him absorbing the same lessons and books that he took. He states: "Your mother plays witih snakes and poison and raises you to tell the stories that will make all our lives clear. It all congeals and moves and hurts in the remembering." The author writes he could not ask for anything more.

I found this book a wild and fascinating ride through books, reading, writing and one man's life. I am not a big fan of Conroy although I have read several of his novels, but if anyone loves to read, this is a book to glide through for it is one long trip of of enjoyment and literary knowledge. He states many times how much he enjoys language and this book certainly is an example of his love affair with language, books and writing.

Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ, Who Drew Women to Sci-Fi, Dies at 74

(from the New York Times dated today)

Joanna Russ, a writer who four decades ago helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women — died on April 29 in Tucson. She was 74.

Her death, from complications of a stroke, was announced on the Web site of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Ms. Russ was best known for her novel “The Female Man,” published in 1975 and considered a landmark. With that book, which told the intertwined stories of four women at different moments in history, she helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science fiction. She also published essays, criticism and short fiction.

Ms. Russ was herself the subject of many critical studies, including those collected in “On Joanna Russ,” edited by Farah Mendlesohn and published in 2009 by Wesleyan University Press .

The science fiction writer has the privilege of remaking the world. Because of this, the genre, especially in the hands of disenfranchised writers, has become a powerful vehicle for political commentary. In the America in which she came of age, Ms. Russ was triply disenfranchised: as a woman, a lesbian and an author of genre fiction who earned her living amid the pomp of university English departments.

Some critics found her too polemical, but many praised her liquid prose style, intellectual ferocity and cheerfully unorthodox approach to constructing her fiction, which could include discursions into history and philosophy and sections of quasitheatrical dialogue. (She was originally trained as a dramatist.)

There was palpable anger in Ms. Russ’s work, but it was leavened by wit and humor. In a scene from “The Female Man,” Janet Evason, who inhabits an idyllic future on Whileaway, a planet without men, visits Earth, where she is promptly hustled onto a television talk show. A dialogue unfolds between Janet and the master of ceremonies:

MC: I — Miss Evason — we — well, we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason, that you reckon the descent of your children through both partners. ... I confess you’re way beyond us in the biological sciences. ... But there is more, much, much more — I am talking about sexual love.

JE (enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.

MC: Yes.

JE: And you say we don’t have that?

MC: Yes.

JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.

MC: Ah? (He wants to say, “Don’t tell me.”)

JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.

She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread.

Writing in The New York Times in 1983, Gerald Jonas ranked Ms. Russ “among the small band of accomplished stylists in science fiction.”

She won a Hugo Award in 1983 for “Souls,” a historical fantasy novella about a 12th-century abbess who must defend against invading, sexually brutalizing Norsemen, and a Nebula Award in 1972 for the story “When It Changed,” a precursor of “The Female Man.” The Hugo, presented by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and the Nebula, presented by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, are considered the Pulitzer Prizes of the genre.

Joanna Russ was born in the Bronx on Feb. 22, 1937. In 1957 she earned a bachelor’s in English from Cornell, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov. In 1960 she received a master’s degree in playwriting and dramatic literature from the Yale Drama School.

But by then she had set her sights on science fiction, having published her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” the year before in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The field was such a male stronghold that through the mid-20th century its handful of female writers often used masculine pseudonyms. (Ursula K. Le Guin, today the best-known woman in science fiction, did not begin publishing until the 1960s.)

In midcentury science fiction by men and women, female characters resembled their earthly counterparts: comely, compliant and domestic. “Galactic suburbia,” Ms. Russ derisively called this fictional universe, and she began to push against its confines.

In a series of stories published in the late 1960s, she introduced the heroine Alyx, a quick-witted, not greatly beautiful mercenary, thief and assassin who roams energetically across the centuries from antiquity onward.

Alyx also stars in Ms. Russ’s first novel, “Picnic on Paradise,” published in 1968; the novel was later reissued with the stories in a compilation volume, “The Adventures of Alyx.”

Ms. Russ’s feminism is perhaps nowhere more visible than in “The Female Man.” It features a contemporary woman, Joanna, and three alter egos: Jeannine, who dwells in a dismal past; Jael, a warrior who inhabits a world in which the war between men and women is literal (“The best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx,” she says); and Janet, the utopian.

Ms. Russ, who lived in Tucson, had a brief early marriage that ended in divorce. No known family members survive.

As a scholar, she was known for a study of Willa Cather that invoked Cather’s lesbianism, long a taboo subject. She taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton (now Binghamton University, State University of New York); the University of Colorado; the University of Washington; and elsewhere.

Her other books include the novels “We Who Are About to ...” and “The Two of Them,” and the nonfiction books “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” and “Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts,” in which she denounces as censorship the antipornography stance of some feminists.

In her critical work, too, Ms. Russ’s wit came barreling through. Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1969, she had this to say about John Boyd’s novel “The Last Starship From Earth,” published the year before by Berkley Books:

“I forgive Mr. Boyd the anguish his novel caused me and hope he will eventually forgive me the anguish this review may cause him, but for Berkley there is no forgiveness. Only reform. Don’t do it again.”