K's Books

This was among the last Catholic feminist theology books that I read and purchased, maybe 5ish years ago. The vast majority of other Catholic feminist books, articles, podcasts, etc. reference her but usually with very little detail. Her first book, The Church And The Second Sex (1968), was the first book of this genre altogether; I understand that scholarly books dissecting other scholarly books in the burgeoning feminist movement were necessary to gain academic clout, but I can't stand them. That was the nature of her first book, which I found incredibly boring. Beyond God The Father i s more her own ideas with plenty of scholarly resources. As it was the first time I read it, this was a very difficult book to read. It's dry and dense. Daly complains about Freud 🤮 and celebrates Margaret Murray's inaccurate theories. She's also very white and doesn't realize it. And yet, this was the first. Much better books came along because of this. The first person to start ...

My parents divorced when I was 4, and when my dad picked me up to spend weekends and summers with him, he always took me to the local independent video rental shop beforehand and let me pick out whatever movies I wanted. To him, anything animated was for children. At this time, animated films featuring rodents, such as the Rescuers Down Under and the Secrets of NIMH, were very popular. I was so little that I thought all of these movies were from the same universe, and therefore I asked my dad to rent them for me almost every weekend so I could try to figure out how they were all connected. Watership Down was among these, and the gore in the film didn't strike me as odd since that's how my teachers at school described the crucifixion every day. Then my dad moved from Des Plaines to Savanna, IL and the Hollywood Video there had a much smaller selection. And then he left altogether. In high school I joined the fringe film society, which rekindled my interest in findin...

This is the book that I've owned the longest, somebody gave it to me when I was 2 or 3. At some point I ripped the cover off and there are stains all over the pages. When some cousins were the appropriate age for this book I gave it to them, and when they got older they asked me if I wanted it back - obviously yes! This is much loved and still a lot of fun to read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44186.The_Monster_at_the_End_of_this_Book

It was as difficult to read this after The Autobiography of Malcolm X as I had expected.  The first time I read this was shortly after starting at Alverno College, and this was perhaps my fifth time rereading it. After seeing Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You and Lisa Simpson read it, and many of the second wave feminist tomes I began reading referenced it, I had to see what the fuss was all about. I adored The Bell Jar in college, my friends and I thought copies should be handed out to all incoming students! The feeling of being a fish out of water in an academic setting was relatable at the time. I was also dealing with depression then and Plath's thinly veiled memoir romanticized what I was going through.  In addition to how difficult this was to read after Malcolm X's book, it's also a very different novel after having recently read The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren. The audiobook was very enjoyable, and a chapter is devoted to Plath's t...

This was required reading in high school, one of the few books that my classmates & I thoroughly enjoyed and agreed should be required reading. This is the first time I've reread it since then, roughly 23 years ago. What's struck me most about the book now is just how much more historical context I have. Back then I didn't understand just how little I understood. This took me very long to read because I kept having to put it down to process the context I now have to understand it. Most of that context I learned through intentionally studying Black Liberation Theology, so much of which is now obviously built at least partly on his work. I'm still stunned that I'm now the age that he was when he was murdered, a sadly serendipitous time for me to reread his autobiography. I've watched Spike Lee's film twice and I highly recommend it, although it's very different from the book simply because they're different media.  The misogyny and descriptions of ...

I'm halfway through The Autobiography of Malcolm X , the first time I'm reading it since junior year old high school in '02, and I'm struck by the realization of when he was preaching in Chicago. He frequented both Temple 2 and the home of Elijah Muhammad before Brown vs. Board of Education, while Chicago was still the Black Catholic capital of the US.  He, Elijah Muhammad, and other Black Muslims most certainly preached to Black Catholics at that time. Not only was their understanding of religion different from the Protestants who would've been there, but they also probably had relatives who were women religious. There were two Black Muslim owned grocery stores in Chicago at that time, which were probably frequented by Black Catholics. I wonder if there are any records of this anywhere? These two powerful communities in the same place at the same time must have at least bumped into each other regularly and I'd love to learn about it. The overall arc of my libra...