What I've Been Reading

Ok, just on principle, here's a quick update on what I've been reading this week:

1. I finished Beowulf. I know I've said it before, but I really love it. So satisfying in its pre-Christian sort of way.

2. Susan Cooper's Greenwich. Also very satisfying for it's pre-Christian / pagan elements. I think this is my favorite if Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence, a fantasy series that continues to appeal to me. One thing I really am interested in here is that Cooper, for the only time in this series, deals with femaleness / the feminine. And it's fascinating. Arguably, she ends up falling back into very traditional gender roles--woman as nurturer--but I appreciate that she's grappling with this topic in a genre that until recently has focused almost exclusively on the male experience. I like that she allows that maybe there's some sort of femine power that is substantively different from male power. Here I'll show that at heart I am an essentialist, so some of you can take me to task for that. But I do believe that male and female are essentially different in some ways, other than simple biology. And Cooper makes an attempt to explore this in a way that still works for young adults.

3. I've spend much of the past two days reading Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but I'm not ready to write about it yet maybe. It does make me think of the ways in which our biology seems to be our destiny. No matter how hard I try to get away from it, I'm still someone who longs for rather traditional male / female relationships in my own life. I don't know. I'm not articulating this well at all, but it does seem to me that the boundaries created by our bodies are real, are more than simple social structures.

Again, I've just displayed that I'm not such a good feminist. And really, I'm fine with that.