Recommend Books, Please

[queerbychoice]

It's that time of year again and my mother is demanding a birthday list from me. I have an old list that I've been using for years and just crossing things off as they were bought, but I'm bored with everything left on it so I want to compose a new one from scratch. Recommend some stuff I should ask for, please. Especially books. Usually 85% of what I ask for is books.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I was forced to read Susan Faludi's Backlash for a Women's Studies class and found her writing style terminally boring. Later when she wrote her book about the hardships that boys endure I was sufficiently surprised and interested by her change of topic to revise my opinion of her and decide she might have something interesting to say after all . . . which is possibly a terribly wrong reason to revise my opinion of her, and in any case I haven't actually sufficiently gotten over my revulsion at her writing style in Backlash yet to have quite dared to try her again.

I haven't read any of those (including Ayn Rand :P) but I've read some really fantastic poetry by Margaret Atwood (on someone's LiveJournal, actually) and have been meaning to go try more by her.

[subtlyironic.livejournal.com]

a double reccomendation on howard zinn's a people's history. best general american histoy book ever.

p.s.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

For your birthday list: you should read:
When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten
and: everything Amy Bloom has ever written.

Reason:

Best. Blowing. Apart. Of. Mainstream. Concepts. Of. Sexuality. Ever.

EVER.

But those are novels. To accomplish the same thing in nonfiction, I highly recommend Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia edited by Gilbert H. Herdt. Which I haven't actually finished reading yet. But never mind that; it always takes me six months or more to finish nonfiction. Novels are more my thing.