My fellow scholars, how are you?
These past few weeks I’ve been absolutely consumed with books. Both by choice and by course requirements. As much as this has been strenuous, it’s been quite a gift at the same time. Since my minors are in Psychology and Women in Gender Studies, quite a bit of my homework is reading feminist work. I suggest giving all of these a chance, but even if you try only one, I’d love to hear back on what you thought!
The first two are books I am reading currently, while the next two are books I plan on reading this semester/year. I hope you enjoy :D
This book is the exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. This being the second edition of her diaries, the first was published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes. This collection of journals includes her thoughts and feelings both generally through her years as a writer/poet and also specifically through her time at Smith College (a private woman’s liberal arts college!), and her life before and after children and a husband. I am only roughly ⅓ of the way done with this book, but I love it dearly and am obsessed with her words.
This series of work was written collectively by Barbara and Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, and Alicia Garza. Included is also the Combahee River Collective Statement. This book is required for my feminist theory class, but nonetheless, I am entirely captivated by it. The content of this book is interviews with the four women about black feminism and the framework each of them has provided for the movements related to black feminism. Both Smith sisters along with Frazier together wrote the Combahee River Collection Statement, while Garza was the co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter. I have only read the first interview so far with Barabra Smith, and I love it. It doesn’t even feel like homework!
Written by Abbi Jacobson, this essay collection holds pieces together about love, loss, work, comedy, and figuring out who you really are when you thought you already knew. This book is a series of essays written while Jacobson is on a solo road trip across the country in order to ‘find herself.’ I am really excited to read this and I imagine it will be very comforting with my own sense of identity.
This book…gives me feels- and I haven’t even read it yet! Ocean Vuong writes this novel as an ongoing letter to his mother from the narrator’s perspective, “Little Dog.” I first heard of Vuong during a Women’s Resource Center event when a friend of mine read his poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” aloud. I was instantly obsessed and have been holding him and his poem close to my heart ever since. I plan to read this very soon, I’ve just had this book stored away in my mind because I know I will need to devote my entire brain to it and I just know that at the moment I don’t have the capacity with the schoolwork I have to do.
I hope you enjoyed this list, let me know if you end up coming across any of these reads :)