Foss Family

I hadn’t read a novel by any other Bronte (besides Charlotte) so I decided to pick this one up. I was not disappointed. I loved this one. I have a huge project due at the end of the week but I still stayed up till 1:30 reading it. I get kind of obsessed when I read. Well it was worth it. The writing was engaging, the characters humanly flawed and really believable. I read a second edition print which was prefaced by the author who at the time was writing with a pseudonym of Acton Bell. The author tells how she was abused by her critics for being too hard on men. She admits that she was hard on them, but justly so, it was her hope to write a novel that was challenging, she did it well. I imagine her novel was very scandalous at the time of writing. It just makes me realize how much we as women take our freedom for granted. We owe a lot to women like the Brontes for paving the way.

I finished reading this one today. It was my second time through. I found it kind of difficult to get through because I already knew all the plot twists and I was impatient for them. Jane Austen was really pretty funny. Her humour is so understated that if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it. I would imagine that this novel was meant to teach morals and manners. Fanny Price is modest, lovely, shy, completely unpretentious and unspoiled. Her cousins provide the opposite. The contrasts are very obvious and therein lies a lot of the humour. This one is definitely worth the read.

“Women of colour live in the dangerous intersections of gender and race” (Smith, 2005 pg.1). The mainstream anti violence movement has failed to fully understand the impact of race and how it corresponds with violence (Smith, 2005). Andrea Smith claims in her book that colonialism is both racist and sexist. She says that most of the focus has been on how colonialism affected Native men leaving the women largely behind. Colonizers came with ideas about race and gender and applied them to the Native Americans they met. Colonialism though thought of as a past occurrence never truly stopped; it only changed forms. Changing to fit into the current ideas of the time. First off, colonizers killed Native people. After a time, a different route was tried, kill the culture and convert to Christianity, make the savage civilized; enter residential schools. Taking away the land or polluting it came next. After (and during) came sterilization, kill future generations, or at least curb population growth. After sterilization became faux pas, long-acting hormonal birth control is handed out like candy at a July 1st parade; meanwhile American Indians are being used as test subjects for pharmaceutical companies. Finally, if all else fails, send them to prison.

This was required reading for a course I’m taking right now. This was my intro paragraph for the paper I had to write about it. It’s worth the read.

I really enjoyed this book.  It was a perfect blend of easy reading humor and useful information.  I will preface this review by saying I have a strong bias towards survival books of any kind since I am a bit of an appocolypse junkie.  I found some of the information in Emergency was common sense or things I have read before, but the author not only provides wilderness/urban survival and planning advice, but also very helpfull stay off the grid, offshore account, second passport kind of advice.  Neil Strauss covers a wide range of topics and scenarios, however, specifics for a global pandemic or threat from the American government towards it’s own citizens were lacking.  I also would have liked to have seen some more complete examples based on historical accounts of what happens when a civilization collapses.  The fall of certain Empires were mentioned, but that was about it.  I did love the quotes from the Epic of Gilgamesh at the the beginning of each chapter.  What this book did exceptionally well was inspire.  I found it really lit a spark in me to continue aquiring supplies and knowledge and made it fun again.  I love the way the author showed how he made a schedule for himself to practice and improve the skills he had acquired.  While most books tell you how, Emergency showed you why doing it now is important too.  I’m sure even knowledgeable appocolypse planners will have a steep learning curve when they need to translate what they know into doing.  Make your mistakes now, not when the world ends, ha ha. I would recommend this book to anyone just getting into the genre, as well as to those that have done their research.

Wuthering Heights was a pleasant read and remarkably easy to loose yourself in.  The start is a bit slow but the characters and relationships are very intriguing and uniqe and quickly become hard to put down.  I’m not a huge romance fan, but if you throw in enough tragedy, inner conflict, pride, circumstance, and self loathing it makes a very potent romance stew.  I have previously read other books similar in style and scope to this book, but I feel like I have read them backwards.  I’m sure most of them were influenced by the writtings of the Bronte sisters and I probably should have started with them first.  I must confess (with proper literary embarrassment) skimming nearly all dialogue from Joseph.  After the first painful attempts at deciphering the colloquial dialect, I chose for the sake of pace and continuity not to bother.  I read for knowledge and pleasure, and feeling like your mind is stuck in mud while you slogg through his dialogue was neither knowledgeable or pleasureable. Fortunately, he only seemed to have one reaction or response to everything which made skimming easier.  While I probably won’t read this type of book often, it definitely satisfies when you are craving a romance not based on flowers and rainbows.