frigatetoutopia-Christian-Science-Monitor

This is a questionnaire tag by Miss Dashwood for her Anne of Green Gables Week (see the link in my side bar). I'm always delighted to celebrate the Anne-girl and my beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery in any way, so here are my answers.

1. How many of the Anne books have you read, and how many of the films have you seen?

   I've read every one of the books, some repeatedly. (Unless you count that there are a few short mostly-not-about-Anne stories in The Blythes are Quoted that I haven't read yet. That's a book of short stories which is not part of the series, but mentions the Blythes a few times, for the information of the uninitiated.) But I've only watched the first film. I'm a purist. It gets my ire up to hear how much the story was changed in the sequels.

2. If someone yanked your hair and called you carrots, what would you do to him?

   I'd remember that I have raven black hair and an alabaster brow and my name is Cordelia, so why should I notice lowly, prosaic and unromantic schoolboys? Seriously, I'd probably go Ilse Burnley (minus the temper) and call him names he couldn't understand. “You troglodyte and nefarious miscreant! I will defenestrate you with obloquy.”Ah, Ilse does it better.
   

3. What would you do if Josie Pye dared you to walk the ridgepole of a roof?

I'm very much afraid I would do it. :( I have reputation to maintain, though I can't say precisely what it is.

4. If you had the opportunity to play any AGG character in an AGG play, which role would you choose?

   Not to be vain, but I've been told I look like Anne and have her imagination. Though I'd really like to be Miss Cornelia Bryant and be able to say, “Isn't that like a man?” every few paragraphs/minutes.

5. If you were marooned on a desert island, which AGG character would you want to have as a companion? (Anne, Gilbert and Diana are not options. Let's keep this thing interesting. Not that they're not interesting.... oh, yay, now the disclaimer to this question is longer than the question itself. Lovely lovely lovely.)

   Lol. Dare I take a moment to commit treason and say I've never found Diana interesting? Ilse Burnley (of the Emily trilogy) gets my vote for best friend. Okay. Maybe I'll take Susan Baker. She could make me some very yummy food, would be utterly loyal and would chase away Whiskers-on-the-Moon if he ever dared come near our island. Or maybe Paul Irving and his imagination would be the best companions. Or maybe lively, capricious Philippa Gordon. Can't I just take all the Island people?

6. If there was going to be a new adaptation of the Anne books and you could have any part in making the movie, what would you choose to do? (screenwriting, acting, casting, costume-making are a few possibilities)

   Screenwriter, I guess. Because much as I love film, I'm ultimately a purist to whom the text is everything, and is to be kept inviolate.
   

7. What are, in your opinion, the funniest AGG book/movie scenes? (choose one from the books and one from the movies)

I haven't watched the movie in years. :( The GREEN hair is wonderful in both! Anne's apology to Mrs. Lynde is a thing of beauty! How about Anne falling half-way through a roof in Anne of Avonlea? Miss Dashwood's answer reminded me of the wonderful “scene” in Anne of Windy Willows where she babysits two creatures from hell. “Miss Cornelia Makes A Startling Announcement” always has me in stitches. And I was just reminded of poor Rilla Blythe having to carry a CAKE through town (oh the disgrace!) I could go on for eternity. Lucy Maud, you are the joy of my life! So it was supposed to be ONE scene, by Gog and Magog!

8. What are, in your opinion, the saddest AGG book/movie scenes? (choose one of each again)

Really, it's been too long since I watched the movie to say anything on that. While Matthew's death is probably saddest it's the relationship between Anne and Marilla that's most touching - Anne giving up her plans to be with Marilla and Marilla acknowledging how much Anne means to her. As Margaret Atwood has pointed out, Marilla is the one who changes more than Anne. It's unromantic Marilla who actually has the fairy-tale transformation.

It's been ages since I've read Rilla of Ingleside but I remember growing to love Walter a lot, so I must have been pretty sad about his death. I think I found Una's quiet grief especially touching.

9. Which AGG character would you most like to spend an afternoon with? (again, Anne and Gilbert and Diana are not options for this one--think secondary characters)

Spending an afternoon with Miss Lavender at Echo Lodge would be like spending an afternoon in fairyland, but I'd also be content with an afternoon in the kitchen of Susan Baker or Rebecca Dew.

10. What is your definition of a kindred spirit?

    Someone with whom you can be comfortably silent, but to whom you can say whatever comes into your head, no matter how fanciful, or ridiculous it would appear to those not of the race that knows Joseph. A kindred spirit must have loyalty, grit, gumption, high ideals and a sense of humor.

Well, I'm reminded how desperately I need to reread the whole series! Here's to the Anniest of Annes!

Jillian at A Room of One's Own recently came up with the bright idea of a Classics Club to "link together the bloggers who blog classics voraciously". She recommends listing a minimum of 50 classic books that you plan to read within five years. I've chosen 125 classic works, mostly from the Western canon, and including poetry, plays and novellas. My list starts with all the novels in Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind. (I'd originally listed "read all the books in WEM" as a goal in my 101 in 1001 list, but then realized that with roughly 150 titles in the book, that might be impracticable if I wished to read anything else.) With the other titles in my classics list, I've tried to go more with books I've wanted to read (or reread) for a while, rather than books I know I should read. However, the list is subject to change at any time.

I'm setting my completion-goal date as March 12, 2016. However, this too is subject to change if I find that that ugly beast Real Life is keeping me from reading as much as I would like.

I guess I'll "reward" myself with a nerdy t-shirt from CafePress when I reach 63 books and maybe the same when I reach the end of the list.

Rereads are in red.

The Well-Educated Mind Novel List

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (I know it so well I may not reread it, though I love it, but replace it with The Holy War.)

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I'm in no danger of not rereading this!)

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I'm in no danger of not rereading this – I reread it at least once a year!)

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Native Son by Richard Wright

The Stranger by Albert Camus

1984 by George Orwell

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Sieze the Day by Saul Bellow

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

White Noise by Don Delillo

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Other Well-Educated Mind Titles

Grace Abounding by John Bunyan

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Richard III by William Shakespeare

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Essays by Michael de Montaigne

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself

Up from Slavery by Booker. T. Washington

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey (more for my very big and devastating love for Carrington than for Queen Vicky or even “that disgusting old man”.)

The Sort-of-Alphabetical List

The Holy Bible – King James Version (What do you mean the alphabet doesn't start with 't' or 'h' or 'b'? I was taught you should never put any book on top of the Bible – in the physical sense.)

Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid's Tale

Alcott, Louisa May – Hospital Sketches

Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy

Bronte, Charlotte – Shirley

Bronte, Charlotte – Villette

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett – Aurora Leigh (have to look up if it's actually long enough to qualify under books)

Burnett, Frances Hodgson – The Secret Garden

Burney, Fanny - Evelina

Cædmon - (His hymn/creation account)

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White

Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens, Charles – Little Dorrit

Dickens, Charles – Nicholas Nickleby

Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield

Dickens, Charles – The Old Curiosity Shop

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan – The Hound of the Baskervilles

Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss

Eliot, George – Daniel Deronda

Eliot, George – Silas Marner

Eliot, George – Romola

Eliot, George – Adam Bede

Eliot, George – Felix Holt, the Radical

Eliot, T.S. - The Wasteland

Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays (first and second series)

Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying

Forster, E.M. - A Room with a View

Fuller, Margaret - Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Gaskell, Elizabeth – Mary Barton

Gaskell, Elizabeth – Life of Charlotte Bronte

Gaskell, Elizabeth – Ruth

Gaskell, Elizabeth – North and South

Gaskell, Elizabeth – Sylvia's Lovers

Gilbert and Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic (yes, criticism, but pretty classic criticism that I keep meaning to finish.)

Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones

Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Hardy, Thomas – The Mayor of Casterbridge

Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables

Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World

Ishiguro, Kazuo – The Remains of the Day

Johnson Samuel - Rasselas

Lewis, C.S. - The Chronicles of Narnia

Lewis, C.S. - Mere Christianity

Milton, John - Comus

Milton, John - Areopagitica

Milton, John - Paradise Regained

Mitchel, Margaret – Gone with the Wind

Montgomery, Lucy Maud - Anne of Green Gables Series (reread eight novels and complete one book of short stories)

O'Connor, Flannery – Wise Blood

Orwell, George – Animal Farm

Pepys, Samuel – Diary

Pope, Alexander - The Rape of the Lock

Pizan, Christine de - The Book of the City of Ladies

Radcliffe, Anne – The Mysteries of Udolpho

Richardson, Samuel - Clarissa

Richardson, Samuel - Sir Charles Grandison or Pamela

Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe

Shakespeare, William – King Lear

Shakespeare, William - Othello

Shakespeare, William – Macbeth

Shakespeare, William – Henry V

Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion

Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein

Spenser, Edmund - The Faerie Queene

Stoker, Bram – Dracula

Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair

Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace

Virgil – The Aeneid

Wallace, Lew – Ben Hur

Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisited

Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Grey

Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest

Woolf, Virginia – Orlando

Woolf, Virginia – Flush

Woolf, Virginia – A Room of One's Own

Novellas and Poetry

In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

The Lifted Veil by George Eliot (novella)

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

And a dreadful prognostication on the best laid plans of those who may, or may not, be handsome, clever and rich:

"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were--very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding."

In many ways the novel Jane Eyre is the literary love of my life, so I'm not easy on film adaptations of it. Still, when I drove past the video store and saw posters for the 2011 adaptation, I shivered with excitement and felt like yelling out to everyone, “That's the book that invented me!” I watched the most recent adaptation, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, just before Christmas, but have only now gotten to editing parts of my six pages of commentary into something readable.

Probably everyone is aware by now that the 2011 Jane Eyre adaptation made its first claim to originality by substituting flashbacks for the novel's linear bildungsroman narrative. The first shot is of Jane fleeing Thornfield. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an image of this first shot, but those who know anything about Pre-Raphaelite art will immediately recognize the cloak, braided hair and detail of the door and thicket as strikingly Pre-Raphaelite.

This film also boasts the first red-haired Jane, which fits well with the Pre-Raphaelite influences revealed in the cinematography. I am not the first to notice that Mia Wasikowska looks like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Pre-Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddal. Besides the apt Pre-Raphaelite appearance (which I will elucidate on further below). Wasikowska's portrayal of Jane is solid and should even be commended for bringing her youth and inexperience to the forefront.

I wasn't as impressed with Fassbender's Rochester, although that may be because Bronte/Jane describes him so minutely that my image of him is indelibly carved into my imagination. Fassbender's Rochester struck me as too polite and, yes, too handsome. There is something in both his appearance and some of his conversations with Jane that is too modern and light for Byronic, Vulcan-like Mr. Rochester.

Perhaps the major flaw of this film – extreme attenuation - is unavoidable in the feature film format. However, to leave out the things and persons that contribute to the formation of Jane's character as a child – the capricious Bessie, books and narratives that form her sense of self and justice, Miss Temple's combination of justice and stoicism, and Helen Burn's unearthly renunciation and unorthodox Christianity – is to rob the story of its intelligent dialog with Christianity, the plight of women and of the poor.

Later, when we get to Thornfield, Mr. Rochester's (suspiciously seductive) revelation of his liaison with Celine Varens to his virgin governess is supplanted by a bright, cheerful scene of Mr. Rochester planting a shrub while Jane plays shuttlecock with Adele.

(While this adaptation's emphasis is on pretty, every-day activities, rather than Spinx-like conversations, the gothic, or the supernatural, it does have an interesting way of presenting Thornfield's mystery. Perhaps borrowing a device from the 2006 version and symbolism from Bronte's novel Villette, it is a painting of a voluptuous woman that awakens Jane to the mysteries surrounding Mr. Rochester's past, which is inextricable from the mystery of sexuality.)

The novel's dialog is as piquant and pithy as ever was written, so the dialog lifted directly from the novel for this adaptation was wonderful. But I found the contrast with some of the invented dialog quite laughable. “The flesh is torn as well as cut,” the surgeon Carter says. “Very, very unpleasant.”

There is no Grace Pool in this adaptation, so when Jane asks Mr. Rochester who “did this violence” he can only say, “I cannot tell you." He quickly goes on to banally tell Jane, “You transfix me quite.”

By the time we get to the courtship scenes the sense of danger and biting allusions to slavery are lost in montages of bright sunshine and apple blossoms. I shouldn't have been surprised that there is no “spiteful tearing of the veil” and (which is worse!) Jane appears to wear the extravagant veil for the wedding.

One of the most interesting scenes is when Jane and Rochester talk after the ill-fated wedding. With its combination of desperation, heart-break, and barely-restrained violence and eroticism, it may be the best portrayal of this fraught scene, so like slipping over seething rapids in a canoe. (See my thoughts on how it reminded me of Millais' Mariana, below.)

The depiction of the Rivers family was disappointing. Early in the film Diana and Mary's roles as models for Jane are depreciated when Mary is depicted as a reader of sentimental and gothic novels with “woebegone maidens and dramatic deaths”, rather than the self-taught reader of German and independent governess.

St. John Rivers may be a character harder to portray well than Mr. Rochester. I'm afraid that this film and actor didn't catch St. John's strange charisma and patriarchal authority over Jane or his own cold, hard control over himself. (The best portrayal of St. John is in the 1980s (Timothy Dalton) adaptation, which has the distinction of being the most faithful adaptation, with the best “minor” characters. Unfortunately, neither of the “leads” looks the part.)

The film also cuts out the fairy-tale coincidence that the Rivers are Jane's cousins, which is perhaps only to be expected with its fear of the novel's weirdness.

Jane returns to Mr. Rochester (who in the tradition of Zeffirelli's adaptation appears to be living in the ruins of Thornfield with Mrs. Fairfax) and the film wraps up so quickly you can scarcely notice that Mr. Rochester did not have to sacrifice the hand that offended, and that he looks more like a hobo than a Vulcan or a blind Samson.

It seemed to me that some of the deleted scenes could have added much, such as this conversation between Lady Ingram and Blanche: “The worst of it is that you're given to have opinions... He must know that he can mold and shape you in his vein.”

“Then I shall endeavor to be blank, Mama. A white canvass on which he may paint,” Blanche replies.

(Personally, I think Blanche Ingram is what Emma Woodhouse could have become if she were not rich and independent, with Mr. Knightley to be a true and faithful witness. So while this brief conversation and its implied sympathy with Blanche is nowhere found in the book, I like the attention it draws to the constraints on women of the higher classes.)

I suppose it's clear that this adaptation only confirmed me in my conviction that, to paraphrase Marianne Dashwood, I will never find a JE adaptation I can truly love. Reviewers have virtually fallen over each other praising the adaptation and I long to imitate Charlotte's style in the preface by reminding them that newness is not necessarily freshness, normalcy is not always reality and brevity does not insure pith. From Mrs. Fairfax being the one to call Jane's lot a "still doom" to St. John shouting at Jane, the characters are subtly misrepresented and drastically attenuated by a weak script. (The most perspicacious (though perhaps most critical) review I have read yet was by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor blog and I highly recommend it.)

HOWEVER, I was fascinated by the Pre-Raphaelite elements of the adaptation, so here are some further thoughts on that. I was recently reading in a student's guidebook to the novel (Twayne's or Twaine's - unfortunately I sent it back to the library without copying the quote) that Charlotte Bronte wished to be a painter, but her eyes were too poor. The book went on to compare Charlotte's attention to detail to that of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

Here are several paintings of Elizabeth Siddal, with comparable images from the film.

In the picture and painting above we see the Pre-Raphaelite association of loose hair with eroticism.

The intricate braids of Jane's wedding-day hair are also comparable to the hair of women in Burne-Jones' paintings.

In the scene where Mr. Rochester is desperately trying to persuade Jane to stay, she stands up and he grasps her waist, to which her hands also go, in a posture that reminded me of John Everett Millais' painting Mariana. (The hair also resembles the way Jane wears her hair most of the time in this film.) When it was first exhibited the painting had the following caption from Tennyson's poem Mariana, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.

I've decided to make a monthly post on my reading every month, so I can post short reviews of every book read.

Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World by Lisa Bloom (nonfiction, 235 pages) I got a little carried away organizing my thoughts on this, my first book of the year, so the review is at the bottom of this post, so you don't have to scroll through it if you're uninterested.

Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler (fiction, audiobook read by Bernadette Dunne)

I enjoyed Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club and I had read that Wit's End addresses the questions raised by the fanfiction phenomenon. Questions like: Who owns a character? Who gets to decide the character's future or what's “in character” - the creator or the fans? What makes a character “real”? Wit's End doesn't really answer any of these questions. But it shows that solutions have become virtually impossible in this cyber-age of instant information and constant fan-community networking. While I'm not likely to read any other books by Fowler, her unique descriptions of little details of everyday life made it worthwhile.

A Girl Called Tommie by Thelma Giddings Norman (about 120/130 pages) (Children's book)

I first read the sequel, A Nurse Called Tommie, when I was seven. Even though it was a good Adventist book, it had the lure of the forbidden. Tommie had a boyfriend - a non-Adventist boyfriend! (Oh, the horror!) Furthermore, he may have smoked and certainly did drink. Of course she broke up with him and the next book, A Wife Called Tommie, was about her marriage (to a good Adventist doctor) and motherhood. (The most memorable thing about that one was that she and her husband once used grape juice in the gas tank when they ran out of gas – oh, yeah, and a whole lot o' prayer for the grape juice.) I'd never read A Girl Called Tommie and I thought it might tell more of the story of how she became an Adventist when her dad was bitterly opposed. But it didn't; it was about her mostly idyllic life in the Ozarks, where your greatest temptation is to sneak some fresh molasses and hummingbirds drink from your slice of watermelon. Oh, well, it occupied a Sabbath afternoon.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (nonfiction, audiobook read by the author, reread)

I've got to confess that I'm more than a little obsessed with this book, which I first read back in March 2011. (Here's an essay I wrote about some of the themes in the book.) I guess I'm fascinated by this book because I'm an undisciplined person who often feels like a failure. I'm also a mediocre pianist, singer and violinist, so the story of Chua's daughters' struggles for musical excellence is at once enviable, inspirational and daunting.

Amy Chua has tried to defend herself from those appalled and incensed by her parenting techniques by saying that her book contains self-parody. The problem is that it's sometimes hard to tell if the statements that sound ironic really are. Does she really believe her daughters could not be happy without winning first prizes in piano or violin? It's hard to tell, because just before her daughter stepped onto the stage at Carnegie hall she offered the reassurance that whatever happened now, she would have known she had done her best and put everything into her piano. But she also tells of her revered father commanding her never again to disgrace him by winning a history and science prize rather than an over-all best-student prize. While I do disagree with some of Chua's methods and emphases, my own experience tells me that she's right that a person can't be happy who doesn't feel they've done their best. But “best” to children, and even many adults, usually doesn't mean all that much. Amy Chua raised the bar high, so high that when her younger daughter refused to reach it, it nearly crashed down on the entire family.

The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir (fiction, audiobook)

Alison Weir is a notable historian, so most of this book is very true to historic fact. While most of my impressions on personalities of the era were only confirmed and strengthened, the novel did bring out some interesting slants. Was “the English Josiah” really a cold, haughty child? Actually, it makes sense that he would be, with the hopes of proud, foolish Harry Tudor all wrapped up in him. Perhaps I gained more sympathy for “Bloody” Queen Mary from this, but despite her infamous reign, who cannot pity the girl whose father so cruelly put away her mother? While this novel was about Elizabeth before she came to the throne, my dominant impressions of her as a remarkable woman, but prevaricating “political Protestant” were also confirmed. There was one notable aspect in which this book departed from verifiable fact into sensational conjecture. I won't say what that aspect is, but Alison Weir is certainly not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes with it, since she has always argued the opposite of what she presents here, regarding this particular “legend” concerning Elizabeth I.

Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott (fiction, 288 pages, reread)

Susan Bailey, at Louisa May Alcott is My Passion, chose this book for her first book-club read and I jumped at the chance to reread it. I adored it when I first read it as a 13 year old, partly because of its similarities to the unique Adventist beliefs on morals, health, dress and education with which I was familiar. I admit that maybe I didn't enjoy it quite so much this time around, but it was still a worth-while read. (Here's my post on 19^th century health and dress reform, based on the ideas in the novel, and several posts and discussions on dress and didacticism on Susan Bailey's blog that I highly recommend.)

Our Authorized Bible Vindicated by B.G. Wilkinson. (nonfiction, 258 pages)
I actually started reading this in 2011 with my mom for the 400th anniversary of the King James version, but it's a packed book, so we didn't finish until February. I won't review it, because it's an erudite book that I'll have to skim through again and it's on a controversial subject.

I'm also half way through The Pickwick Papers, a reread of Rose in Bloom, and Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott, so have done more reading than this shamefully-meager list would seem to attest. I'm still hoping to discipline myself in other activities and read more in the next few months, but it may be more audiobooks, since it looks like my life is only going to get busier this spring.


A Review of Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World by Lisa Bloom (Attorney and National Television Legal Analyst)

I found out about this book through a Facebook link to an excerpt in The Huffington Post encouraging older women to nurture the intelligence of young girls. “When you see an adorable six-year-old girl, instead of telling her how much you like her party dress (our culture's standard talking-to-little-girl icebreaker), you'll look into her eyes and ask, 'What are you reading?' Listen intently to her response, ask respectful questions about her opinions on that story, and tell her about your latest favorite book and why it means so much to you. Skip the talk about sparkly nail polish – she gets plenty of that from everyone else – and model for her what an adult female who has an active mind looks like.”

The article provoked some good discussion on Facebook about cultural beauty standards imposed on young girls, and because I'm militantly against those expectations, I ordered the book through the library.

The opening sentences of the introduction are calculated to frighten. “Twenty-five percent of young American women would rather win America's Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty-three percent would rather lose their ability to read than their figures.” According to Bloom, while girls are out-performing boys scholastically, once girls leave school they descend into appearance-obsessed celebrity-watchers.

Thankfully, (being a misanthropic, nerdy, home-schooled Adventist) the ditzy, unashamedly stupid, celebrity-obsessed culture that Bloom goes on to describe is one I see very little of. (The most notable example I've personally come across was in a neighbor in her forties whom I baby-sat for. Her only books were tabloids and Nora Roberts novels, her three year-old daughter watched TV and barbie-movies all day and had free access to sugar-laden “foods” at all times.)

Bloom offers a number of solutions to help women smarten-up. Most of them are viable and sensible. She urges women to read more, read promiscuously, find ways to cut down on housework and cooking and devote the extra time to volunteer activities, exercise and, of course, more reading. The one that I had not before tried to incorporate was her suggestion to read the serious news articles of the New York Times every day. (She quoted a teacher in a novel declaring that reading the Bible and the New York Times alone for a year would render a person well educated with a PhD vocabulary.) News is history in the making and can help alert us to the needs of the less fortunate, Bloom opines. That suggestion was perhaps the only one in the book that would lead me to form a new habit, but I also recently came across a book about How the News Makes Us Dumb . “Read not the Times, but the Eternities,” Thoreau advised. What do you, my readers, think? (I think the problem may be that the way news is presented to us is calculated to nurture our passivity, rather than encouraging us to learn more and change problematic situations.)

Now for the big question: Would I recommend this book to others? Like I said, I don't know many women or girls who need this book. Most of my friends are intelligent Christians who would be turned-off by the liberalism on issues like marriage, sexuality and abortion and by the celebrity scandals mentioned to hook the mainstream audience. And those girls who actually do need a book like this to slap them across the head, may not know how to think for themselves enough to be able to reasonably judge or reject some of the partisan politics Bloom pushes. Personally, while I'm a Christian who draws lines at certain issues, my religion isn't about political partisanship, and I can appreciate Bloom's thoughts on some issues others may shoot down as “liberal”. For instance, I don't believe that the modern environmentalist movement is an unmitigated good, but I do believe mankind was to be the steward of God's creation and that we've been doing a deplorable job of that lately.

As an ardent vegetarian, I also greatly appreciated Bloom pointing out that, according the to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the “number one cause of climate change” is “worldwide livestock farming”.

Bloom's emphasis on the plight of women worldwide, especially in sex slavery, is also extremely pertinent. And maybe I shouldn't be too hard on her for using Angelina Jolie as a hook to shine light on world poverty; after all, I first became alerted to the sex-slave trade through Emma Thompson's work with the Helen Bamber Foundation.

Hm, so I haven't answered unequivocally whether I'd recommend this book or not. I think my conclusion is that it's worth a skim, with a critical eye.