Some Books

I have been finding it hard to get into books since March, which overlaps with the Big V, though it is dubious to just blame that.  There has been a general practice over the years with so much more reading online for it to crowd out book reading. I still have read some books (at least around 15-20 a season) though back in the day read more. In the midst of the Internet Age, did read the novels of Jane Austen, except for most of her stories written as a teen.  One useful approach here is finding set times to read, which used to be during traveling on the train or during meal breaks.  More recently, found it helpful to read some when I first get up.

In the last few months, many books didn't take. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was the most recent.  I watched a televised version years back, so far back that I do not think it was version that was part of a series that starred "Emily" from Friends* so it seems to be the 1982 version.  But, I just remember seeing it and basically nothing else. Anyway, the first seventy pages or so was okay, but got tired of it.  In part, it was a matter of being tired of the usual citation of background details present in many mysteries.  But, the story itself annoyed me and skipped ahead didn't improve things.  The 7% solution Holmes book was easier in that respect.

After reading a biography by her daughter (though her daughter's book on her world-wide travels during WWII was too overwhelming for me), I tried a book on the Curie women particularly.  I didn't like it either -- in part, it was because it only tells part of the story, particularly focused on the coming to the U.S. and years afterward.  The incomplete account was not helped by the writing style.  So, Marie Curie and Her Daughters was another pass though I would like to read more on the subject.

Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, Regulating Desire explores the legal regulation of young women's sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order.

This is sort of a collection of essays in a fashion, only 150 pages, dealing with five specific case studies.  It is not a complete analysis of the subject matter; after all, there was a free love movement in the 19th Century.  But, overall, I found it interesting and well written.  She more recently co-wrote a book on "abortion regret" (many accounts speak of childbirth regret)  and wrote on on teen choice regarding abortion that she summaries here. She cites a book that came after that one, Girls on the Stand, which I spoke about on this blog.

With the libraries closed, though I did have multiple books out to read, re-reading some stuff I have and purchase have filled the gap. Some failed too, including The Amendment That Failed To Die (14A; a somewhat rambling book). Others including The Color of Rain worked better. Another was a little book by someone whose brother was murdered that later because an advocate of forgiveness.  Coffee Shop God was followed by a documentary about her experience, including meeting the murderer.  A short video on her website is probably suggestive of the wider effort. She continues to speak out from flags that come up of her recent experience, the book in question published in 2009.

Next up is Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the version having extra material including from the author and illustrations.  That should be safe.  I watched the original movie years ago as well as a lesser t.v. movie version with the guy who perhaps best know as Doc Martin but also did various other stuff.

(Starting to read it, there is a lot of overlap, but some differences including the sort of details used to fill in an extended film. His wife did help promote his popularity and sense of humor, e.g., but their meeting was different as was the use of a foreign born professor. A bit about him being ill at ease in punishment was generally referenced but not the keeping them from a key sports event that was highlighted in the film.) 

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*  Season 10 of Friends is later dealt with separately.