OK, I've looked, the topic question was about american fiction, as the rest of you probably remember. Hmm, that cuts out a lot of what I've liked, re fiction, not just whether something is fiction, but also the 25 years; have liked a lot of nonfiction, which is not the question here.
I would nominate as the best fiction book in the last twenty five years- Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"-- The book that liberated women and advanced the cause of feminism more than any other book.
I read it, and am trying to remember what I thought.
Backing up, I am a woman who gave away her copy of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. Which sort of nonplusses me now, as in "what was I thinking". I remember what I was thinking, it was something she said about not having to obey your husband.
So, I speak from all the way back there, disagreeing with Feminine Mystique in the time it was first published.
Trust me, I got over that point of view, just for simple sane reasons.
When I did marry, obey was not part of the recitation.
But Erica Jong, heh, I thought she was sorta late on the scene.
I guess it was writing that was both coherent and enhancing of imagination... but I was thinking, oh, and?
Though zipless **** still stands as quite a useful combo of words.
Anyway, it's unlikely you and I would pick the same best book, and I have hardly started thinking about it.
Still, that book was a, what, trigger? well, whatever, it got some newspapers going, and people read those articles.
Certainly, and just behind her,although it was a non-fiction book but enormously influential in our day was the blockbuster--"Contesting Rape:Feminist Anti-Rape Movement and the State by Nancy A, Matthews.
One of the most important books of the last century!!
I don't know that one.
Back on Zipless, it might have affected people after me. I am slightly older than boomer age. I thought of her as late and sort of using the scene (I remember thinking this) but I was outside of the the key bookbuying group, I guess. In my area, Los Angeles, I'd be totally amazed that that book made a smidge of difference.....
But it might have in New York. (I hate to tell you all this, but sometimes, LA was earlier,)
I haven't had much time the last several days because of the conference.
JoeNation -- I approached this conference with some hesitation. However, it seems to serve two groups. There is the conference created by Orchard House which revives and continues the work of Bronson Alcott and is known as the SUmmer Conversation Series. Orchard House has added to that a teacher research institute.
This conference overlaps another sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities specifically for junior/community college instructors in American literature and American history.
While the NEH conference spent only one day at Orchard House, both groups had the pleasure of spending the entire day with Sterling Delano, author of a book on Fruitlands, published by Harvard University Press.
While one of my early classes (probably in high school) in American history covered those 19th C communities, it was great to revisit them with Dr. Delano.
We also heard from a young woman professor from the Cal State system who spoke on Louisa May Alcott as a social reformer. LMA used some of the socio-political concerns of her day to inform her fiction. An interesting story titled Silver Pitchers could be used today. It deals with a party. The boys spike the drinks and cause the party-goers to become drunk. The girls are angry at them and boycott the next party. The girls then decide to join the Temprance Movement and show their allegiance to it by adopting silver earrings shaped like pitchers.
I have only five minutes left of computer time and have to get to the conference.
Osso -- I will write in answer to an earlier question of yours next week as I will not have time tomorrow and the library is closed on summer weekends.
Joe -- Among the treats this week has offered were the chance to hear an historical re-enactor perform as Henry David Thoreau. I've been to archives and held letters written by Emerson and John Quincy Adams (who wrote with a tight, even hand) as well as the draft copy of Thoreau's essay, "Walking."
Earlier this year, I attended the Medieval Academy of America's annual conference, which was larger and sprawling in its scope. I learned a great deal from the conference, although I consider myself a medievalist, whose secondary interest is 19th C. America. There is something about this Alcott conference that is so exciting. I just want to be able to teach some of this stuff this coming year.
osso -- Thanks for the kind words. I read both The Feminist Mystique and The Second Sex when I was in high school for a paper I wrote in 1963, possibly 1964.
I also read Fear of Flying at some point in life. I thought Erica Jong an exhibitionist. My older son bought a copy at a used book store -- there are still some around -- read it, then tossed it in the wastebasket. I told him to recycle it and he did.
I think I still have a copy.
I never read it. I did read "Valley of the Dolls". Does that count?
I read that too. I'm incorrigible...
I don't think it counts, though.
I wonder what a thread on worst American fiction of the past 25 years would look like.
BTW, with all the hoopla going on -- which, because it is hoopla, includes some serious misrepresentations, e.g., Hemingway is no longer taught at American universities -- about maintaining literacy and reforming education and making certain that the curriculum in America's schools is top drawer, I think that something far more threatening is being ignored.
The reality show.
I worked as a temp in 2000 and 2001, and spent the summer of 2001 in the best job I have had in New England: working in traffic at public radio station WBUR-FM. The folks there were literate, intellectual, warm (with a few exceptions) and friendly. I remember taking the schedules I had just completed into the engineering room and over-hearing one of the engineers asking another if he had ever watched Survivor. The other said no, so I piped in that I had accidentally seen a bit of the show while looking for Whose Line is It Anyway (that a gray-haired woman would have been interested in this show rather tickled these two hip young men).
I described what I had seen: the contestants were to carry mud, using nothing but their bodies, to another site on the island. So here were these people, most of whom were physically attractive, smearing mud on their bodies, into their hair, between their breasts and down their bathing suit bottoms.
It was pretty obvious that the program meant to titillate. (That was a criticism of the Rock Hudson-freckled singing blonde movies of the early 60s, made by a Catholic priest lecturing on movies -- but that is a digression within a digression.) At the same time, it deamed the idiots on the show and had nothing whatsoever to do with 'survival.'
Not long after this, at a retail job I had then, my manager -- for whom I had a modicum of respect -- and another associate -- whose IQ is in double digits -- were discussing the new fall line up of reality shows and I thought, yep, just shows to go ya. Reality shows are for the LCD (lowest common denominator). BTW, I totally lost any respect I had for the manager. I know the double digit was a drop out from some 'career school' for fashion in NYC, so that did not surprise me, but, as the manager's parents were both teachers, I had assumed her to be a college graduate (despite her poor grammar in her newsletters). Not that you have to be a college grad to have taste and discernment. Just an adult.
Now, I do not want this mention to rerail the thread. I had once wanted to start a thead on the how horrible those reality shows are, but some people I know here in NE began one anticipating the then up-coming season. As I enjoyed meeting with these folks from time to time, I decided not to launch such a thread out of consideration for their feelings.
But, when a television show such as the current edition of CBS' Big Brother advertises the fact that contestants are being made to eat spiders and insects, the level of bad taste here is monumental.
These programs are far more dangerous than a library full of romance novels.
Plain Ol Me wrote:
But, when a television show such as the current edition of CBS' Big Brother advertises the fact that contestants are being made to eat spiders and insects, the level of bad taste here is monumental.
These programs are far more dangerous than a library full of romance novels.
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And she is absolutely correct.
That is also what comes from reading propagandistic garbage like Beloved which is filled with lies!!!
BernardR -- We all get the point. Stop writing about Beloved or some of us will begin to think you're Morrison's publicity shill.
Bernard, have you been on a vacation?
plainoldme wrote:BernardR -- We all get the point. Stop writing about Beloved or some of us will begin to think you're Morrison's publicity shill.
That would certainly explain the obsession.
The best american friction I've had in the past 25 years was a brunette from Maryland. She was a honey.
Hey Possum nice to see you back and with the same name, how exciting!
Dys always manages to strike the right tone!
I don't know, plainoldme, I'm in the middle of two books and about to start on a third, Chatter, a book about signals intelligence or at least Western Signals Intelligence - I'm about to finish it and the author has only briefly mentioned the former USSR-, Emperors and Idiots, on the 100 year long rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox and tomorrow on my morning run I'm going to start listening to Conservatives without Conscience by John Dean. (Cripes, none of them are fiction!)
What I started to say is sometimes I have to see or hear something which doesn't take any effort to understand (other than youknowwho's racist posts), something that will be meaningless in my life other than the time wasted doing it. Reading about the Red Sox may apply but....
Sometimes I like to waste my time doing nothing of importance, so I post here on A2K or
I punch up the TV and click over to something really stupid.
Who will win (you fill in the blank)??
Should I be reading The History of Love instead?
Joe(ah, sweet guilty pleasures)Nation
