Reading Material for May

Things have not been going well recently.  In addition to finding out that my job is being cut back to part-time, and that I have to move again in the next few months, my application for almost every job I’ve gone for has been rejected.  Good times, good times!

Whilst I know all this is only temporary, my mood has not been great.  My father, being the wonderful man he is, gave me a book token for my favourite Dublin bookshop, Hodges Figgis, to cheer me up.  It was very well timed as The Pile was looking a bit depleted.  So off I trotted last week to replenish it.

Firstly I bought The Rolling Stone Interviews which contains interviews with rock and acting legends such as Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Neil Young, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Kurt Cobain and our very own Bono.  My only complaint about this book is that it has very few interviews with women; out of forty interviews only five are with women.  I suppose it reflects the sexist nature of the music industry.  However so many greats collected in one book is bound to make for some interesting reading.

To counteract such sexism I then picked up The Women’s Room, a seminal feminist novel by Marilyn French.  The book follows the life of Mira Ward in in the 1950s and 1960s in America as she experiences a feminist awakening.  This is my second copy of this book as I lent the first copy to a friend about ten years ago and never got it back (one of my pet peeves).  This book’s influence on generations of women was huge (in fact my step-father blames this book for the breakup of his first marriage!) and I’m looking forward to re-reading it.

Lastly I bought Secrets of the Flesh: a Life of Colette.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a biography of a writer on the go and Colette had such a fascinating life that I thought it was definitely going to be a good read.  Colette lived a fairly scandalous life  – male and female lovers, a stint in vaudeville, an affair with her stepson, a final happy marriage to a younger man – and created a great literary reputation with works such as Gigi and Cherie.