New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 16

Day 16: Favorite Female Character

Liz:

Hey look! I get to go first today! Gianna's love connection attempts to find me a soul mate will have to wait at least a paragraph or two. (I've convinced friends to play board games with me for the first time in six months and need to finish my half of the post before Gianna's ready.) 

Today's topic is our favorite female character, and this one's easy for me. I'm going to reveal here for the first time that Stieg Larsson modeled his protagonist from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo after me.  Naturally I love myself.  Shall we look at the evidence?

Liz....beth.

1. Lizbeth Salander. It even sounds like Elizabeth Sullivan.
2. Lizbeth has a twin sister named Camilla. I have a twin sister named Kathryn.
3. Lizbeth is brilliant.  I know, this one's obvious.
4. Lizbeth is socially awkward and tends to behave outside the bounds of social norms. I once gave a presentation to nuns in which I discussed Harry Hole.
5. We have rage issues.
6. We are both single. Daniel Craig may or may not have been our true love.
7. Lizbeth has a dragon tattoo. The dragon is my Chinese Zodiac sign.
8. Lizbeth's heritage is dark, the daughter of a Russian mobster and prostitute. I grew up in East Texas.
9. Gianna is in love with Lizbeth. Gianna is in love with me.

I feel such relief. The truth shall set you free and all that. Please don't send me fan letters, though. I want to maintain my privacy. 

Gianna:

I try not to read books with female protagonists, so this category will be tough.  Okay the first few that come to mind, and I know Liz is going to totally make fun of mine, but she only makes fun of me because she has a not so secret crush on me. Also, I have not seen Liz’s picks yet, but twenty bucks says she picks Mrs. Dalloway. [wow....how wrong was I?]

Okay, you are a punk if you don’t love every single female character in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Ruth, Idgie, Evelyn, Mrs. Threadgoode, and of course ‘secrets in the sauce’ Sipsey.

I love Lillian from one of my favorite novels, Away by Amy Bloom. I think Lillian is the kind of woman (or man, really) that I aspire to. She’s smart and fearless. She escapes Russia after the murder of her entire family, including her daughter. While in New York she meets a woman who claims Lillian’s daughter is still alive in Russia. Lillian is able to “negotiate” transportation all the way to Alaska, but with no other option she must walk the rest of the way along the Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. 

The last two thoughts in my head about awesome ladies are; Jo, from  Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and pretty much any woman that Margaret Atwood writes. If you have to ask why you’re in trouble.

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 6

Day 6: A Book That Makes You Sad (well this should be fun....)

no, not sad like this...

Gianna:

Today we are going make you sad. More than normal, if we do it right! We are choosing books that make us sad (yes, Liz has a heart). [Libel is a felony, LaMorte.] 

sad like this!

We are going to have to do some major narrowing down here because any good book worth its weight should make you sad. No, not Nicholas Sparks sad, but truly deep, can’t-get-away-from-it sad.

We have to disqualify memoirs and biographies because where would we begin (or end)? In fact, let's disqualify any non fiction because the first two titles that come to mind are We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch, and Alex Kotlowitz’s There are No Children Here, a book which is (sadly) still relevant all these years later. Let’s not go down the non-fiction road. [Coward.]

too sad.

The perfect kind of sad

I will stick with fiction. Perhaps I will simply choose the saddest title and go with the classic, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Wait, we just want sad not suicidal. The Road by McCarthy is too obvious so that’s out. I guess any John Steinbeck will do, but how to narrow his work down to saddest? Oh, geez, how about Anna Karenina? Yea, you’re right, it’s too obvious again. In fact lets just stay away from the Russians altogether.

Ok, I have decided that it has to be a book I read at least two years ago, that I still can’t think about without getting sad. I end up with a three-way tie: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

The "this could happen"
 kind of sad

"can't shake" kind of sad

All three are fantastic books…all three are incredibly sad. Who wants to read these back to back to back with me? Show of hands? Yea, me neither. [Um...Liz?]









Liz: 

Okay, let's face it, I would guess that 98% of the books I love are "sad" according to most people. Gianna already picked several of my favorites for today's post.  No problem.  Let's talk Joyce Carol Oates.  Has she ever written a "happy" book?  I certainly hope not.  

I've decided to pick one of my favorite JCO novels, and the one that follows the life of one of the most tragic lives of the celebrity-obsessed 20th Century.  Blonde fictionalizes Marilyn Monroe's troubled life, making her both a believable, intelligent woman of aspirations, and a woman abused, scorned, dismissed, and destroyed. People sometimes are shocked to learn that Monroe was a book lover, but since all of you reluctant readers of our little blog shouldn't struggle with the idea of sex symbols as bibliophiles.  People are often overwhelmed by my beauty.  Shut up.  Hollywood is beating me down. Elton John wrote a song about me ("Tiny Dancer," obviously).  Marilyn Monroe married a baseball player...and my future husband is Hunter Pence. Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller...and I like to sing showtunes to the cat.  The only question to ask now is who is sadder, Liz or MM?

You don't have to answer that question.