The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Geeks

HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!

JUMPS UP AND WAVES ERRATICALLY AT ALL MY FELLOW GIRL GEEKS, NERDS, OBSESSIVE LOVERS OF EVERYTHING.

I HAVE FOUND THE FANGIRL FEMINIST BIBLE.

*phew* Ok. I’m tired now. Sometimes being that enthusiastic can be exhausting, but this book gave me ALL THE FEELS. Because ladies, it is all about us! And it’s amaaaaazing. I’m not kidding, I was internally screaming the whole time I was reading, like FINALLY someone stood up and said HEY! We need this. We deserve this. This is ours.

I basically want to post myself at the doorway of every high school and just hand out copies of this book. Because girls need to read it. It would change so many young girls’ attitudes about so many things.

I should probably tell you about it, huh? *deep breath* Ok. Calming down. Just a little bit though.

Sam Maggs is a fan girl. And like many of us, she’s gotten all of the resistance from the patriarchy about being a “fake geek girl.” What even is that anyway? Ugh. So, she’s written a book about how to fly our fan girl flag so high that the guys can have absolutely nothing to say about us being fake. Because we are pretty freaking awesome, ladies, and we should show it.

This book covers all the bases of geek–from cosplay to Tumblr, cons to YA lit. But the real underlying theme is confidence and feminism. It’s time to believe in ourselves and stop letting the world outside tear us down and stop us from being who we really want to be. The most wonderful thing about being a geek is that we love something with everything we have, which makes us different than anybody else. Why not show everyone what that one thing is?

If you couldn’t tell, I really loved this book. It’s coming out on May 12, and you bet I’m going to have this one on my shelf. Are you a fan girl? FLY THAT FLAG!

 

Fulfills PopSugar #24:  A book based entirely on its cover

NetGalley provided this ARC for an unbiased review.

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Jane Eyre

I keep seeing this post floating around on Tumblr about how Charlotte Bronte fell in love with Jane Fairfax from Emma, and so she wrote a fanfiction about her as a governess. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that post was enough to get me to read both Emma and Jane Eyre somewhat back to back!

This is my second read-through (I listened to the audiobook when I was in college), and I love Jane Eyre even more now than I did the first time. Of course I always get more from a book by actually reading than listening.

Jane is such a prim, proper, plain-looking character. If you look up an images search of the way she’s been portrayed over the years, she always looks so delicate. But Jane Eyre is anything but soft. She maybe a woman with very strict ideals–but she fights for those ideals with conviction and a steady conscience. Not much can sway her.

This book is so much more than a love story. Of course, the romance is there, but that really isn’t the important part of the narrative. What else do we have?

1. Child abuse
2. Poverty
3. Epidemic
4. Feminism
5. Mental Illness
6. Importance of family ties and friendship
7. Hypocrisy
8. Disability

And the list could go on and on, but this is the major stuff that I noticed. All this from a Victorian/Gothic novel. You don’t see that happen to often.

I did have one question to pose, maybe someone out there can answer it for me.

One thing I am always curious about with 1800s women’s literature is why they never give the names of places (and sometimes dates). It’s always –shire or S(…setting). Is it a lack of creativity regarding places, or was there some unspoken rule about listing where the setting was? London is always mentioned, and Bath, but anywhere else is left to mystery. It’s always so frustrating to me, and I can not help but wonder why this is!

A Room of One’s Own

A Room of One’s Own…

This is one of those books that leaves me a bit mystified about what to write. Generally, I enjoy Virginia Woolf, but this is more an essay or a lecture than one of her novels. It’s also an adventure in feminism, which is a complicated subject for me. Am I a woman who believes in confidence and freedom for other women? Absolutely. However, I am far from an activist.

The essay was an interesting view into the history of feminine writing, for sure. Woolf is extremely well read, and compares the differences between the egotistical “Professor X” to the prose and poetry, or lack their of, from women through the centuries.

Her biggest point, and the reason for the title, is that in order to be successful, a writer MUST be financially independent and have a quiet room in which to write. This reflects in her own life–she took odd jobs to earn money separately from her husband’s income (interestingly enough, Leonard Woolf isn’t mentioned once that I saw in this entire book) to supplement her book revenue, until she received an inheritance from her aunt. She also had a room to herself to write, in which she spent several hours a day. She says several times in her essay that women throughout history are poor–as in having their own incomes–in comparison to men, and so they can never be as successful in writing. They also have a much more difficult time being alone. Travelling is less common, so their experiences are narrower. And, in her conclusion, she implores her fellow modern woman to stop having 10-12 children; to limit herself to 2-3 so she has more time to write. That may have been my favorite quote in the whole thing, I won’t lie to you.

All in all, I feel this is an important work, if not the most exciting one, especially if you are a Virginia Woolf fan. It definitely shows her state of mind and beliefs about her occupation. It also shows the state of the literature environment of the time and what she was competing against.

Do you have a favorite VW work?

Imaginatively s…

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave on any boy whose parents forced a ring up on her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own