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Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

October 24, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Definitely
Length 303
Quick Review Jia Tolentino is the kind of writer who proves the pen can be sharper than a sword. She cuts through bullshit in Trick Mirror, her collection of observational essays on American culture.

Reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino | Skirt | Shirt | Watch | Earrings | Ring

I want to be Jia Tolentino’s friend. a) I think we have a lot in common. b) She’s probably smarter than me, so she’d be interesting to talk to. c) I have a feeling she’s hilarious. Tolentino is a writer for The New Yorker, and after reading Trick Mirror, I’m not surprised. It is a brilliant combination of observation and critique of modern American culture. She spares no one, including herself, as tackles reality TV, politics, feminism, marriage, poverty, religion, the housing crisis, college debt, and so much more.

Trick Mirror is like reading a book about sticking it to the man, but really it’s about the institution of everything. Tolentino has strong opinions but the brains and eloquence to back them up. I have a huge list of quotes, and I could probably discuss this book at length, but I will keep this manageable.

Tolentino is a strong, independent woman, and it oozes through in every part of her writing. For me, the most memorable moments spoke to feminism and gender inequity. Women are at a disadvantage in this world; that’s not knew. Tolentino brings a beautiful perspective to the issue laced with anger.

“When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good – taking pleasure in trying to look good – does, too.”

Basically. You’re fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t. In a busy world of technology and the constant need to go, improve, work, and succeed, optimization seems to be on everyone’s mind. It is even more prevalent for women.

“The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural. Historically, the ideal woman seeks all the things that women are trained to find fun and interesting – domesticity, physical self-improvement, male approval, the maintenance of congeniality, various forms of unpaid work. The concept of the ideal woman is just flexible enough to allow for a modicum of individuality; the ideal woman always believes she came up with herself on her own.”

There has always been a pressure on women, but it has never existed like it does today with the advent of technology and social media. Women are under constant scrutiny from the people they know to complete strangers. Tolentino speaks about the oppression and subjugation women deal with on a daily basis masquerading as free will, love, freedom, and more. I personally identified with the very last chapter, “I Thee Dread” and the sentiment “becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission.” Tolentino doesn’t even spare love.

Fun fact I previously didn’t know: Louisiana still requires children to take the husband’s last name for a birth certificate to be issued. Fuck Louisiana!

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I read a lot. My favorite books tend to be classical literature. In the span of a few paragraphs, Trick Mirror discusses all of my favorite books: House of Mirth, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, The Second Sex, and Tolentino sums up the plight of female characters quite nicely, “Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them. Or, rather, they live under conditions where ordinary desire makes them fatally monstrous.”

If you’re into essays, nonfiction, or reading about how fucked up society is, Jia Tolentino and Trick Mirror are for you. She’s witty and engaging. Bringing her personal stories and rooting them in the problems the world. She’s relatable and interesting. I personally identified with the whole book, but I’ll leave you with this gem, “I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified – not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.”

Memorable Quotes
” Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer.”
“There was something, maybe, about that teenage religious environment, the way everyone was always flirting and posturing and attempting to deceive one another, that set us up remarkably well for reality TV.”
“The Trump administrations is so baldly anti-woman that the women within it have been regularly scanned and criticized for their complicity, as well as for their empty references to feminism.”

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Title: Trick Mirror; Reflections on Self Delusion
Author: Jia Tolentino
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780525510543

Books, NonFiction

Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

October 22, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 281
Quick Review “Text me when you get home” is not just the title of Kayleen Schaefer’s book, it’s a phrase almost every woman has uttered for a lot of reasons, which Schaefer delves into in her look at modern womanhood and friendship.

Hanging out in a Houston Heights gazebo.

Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer | Sunflower Set | Shoes | Purse | Bow | Bracelets | Sunglasses | Earrings

Kayleen Schaefer had me at the title Text Me When You Get Home; The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship because it’s an evolution and triumph in my own life. As a woman who grew up with mostly guy friends, I have found myself solely surrounded by women in my adulthood. I grew up thinking I was a guy’s girl; it turns out I don’t miss being one of the guys at all. Schaefer describes the phenomenon women are experiencing: female friendship is awesome and nothing like the media has been portraying it. Reading Schaefer’s words feels like unraveling my complex emotions and opinions on more than just female friendships but also my own identity as a woman and writer living in a male dominated world.

Text Me When You Get Home seems to be an anthem for women around the world “because women who say, “Text me when you get home,” aren’t just asking for reassurance that you’ve made it to your bed unharmed. It’s not only about safety. It’s about solidarity. It’s about us knowing how unsettling it can feel when you’ve been surrounded by friends and then are suddenly by yourself again. It’s about us understanding that women who are alone get unwanted attention and scrutiny.” I think we’re really saying I’m with you even when I can’t be with you.

Schaefer explores the complexities of female friendships and why they tend to seem so damn hard. It turns out, it’s really not our fault at all. Feminine self-hatred is so ingrained because: the media. At every angle, women are taught by the media that we’re catty, mean, unstable, crazy, hormonal, indecisive, and less successful. This ideology is forced down our throats so much it enters our conversations and how we interact with other women, which only reinforces these ideologies. The fact is, none of this is remotely true. It ends up being a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy rather than biological inability to love and support the ladies in our lives.

Female friendships are more complicated and deeper than male friendships because women are willing to go deeper, do the work, and lean in to one another. Schaefer isn’t afraid to take on the hard topics in Text Me When You Get Home. Friendship is influenced by everything, and women have to overcome all of these difficult topics and societal failures in order to have a nurturing and wonderful relationship. From the data bias (explored in depth in Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women) to the biological “tend-and-befriend” response to New York City’s female only residences (Barbizon, the most famous, is featured in Fiona Davis’ The Dollhouse and was home to Silvia Plath) to marriage to feminism to careers.

The most poignant moments in Text Me When You Get Home are when Schaefer talks about her personal experiences as a woman in a man’s world. The truly touching points involve her own evolution as a woman and discovery of female friendship. Female friends feed the soul in a way a man in any capacity is not able to, “I wanted my friends to consider me as necessary as they had become to me. I wanted them to know that these were long-term relationships and that I’d be there for them, too, in any way they might want.”

In the past century, female friendship has been the in between; women are companions until a romantic partner is obtained. Historically this has never been true. The last century has seen women isolated and conditioned to depend on men in ways we never have as a gender in order to keep the status quo for as long as possible. This new generation of women is calling bullshit. We’re showing up for the good and the bad. We’re saying Text Me When You Get Home.

Memorable Quotes
“Men do not tell their friends to text them when they get home.”
“My friends took me out of the way I was taught to be and turned me into something better.”
“I thought making friends with women would interfere with my career in more ways than just distracting me from work. I thought if I wanted to be a writer, I had to look to men. That’s because real writers were men. No one told me this. They didn’t have to.”
“Marriage was something to look forward to, I was taught. Without a husband, you were supposed to feel incomplete.”
“For the first time in my life, I treated pursuing and tending to friendships seriously.”
“Women aren’t allowed to be jealous, angry, or vengeful, at least if we want to go on being seen as good girls.”
“It’s the incongruity between stopping ourselves from seeming anything but pleasant while ambitious, on one hand, and the belief that all women can’t have good things, on the other, that creates frenemies.”
“We can be protectors.”

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Title: Text Me When You Get Home; The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship
Author: Kayleen Schaefer
Publisher: Dutton (Penguin Random House)
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781101986141

Books, NonFiction

Queen Meryl by Erin Carlson

September 24, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 320
Quick Review Meryl Streep has the most Academy Award nominations of any actor ever. There’s a reason for that, and Erin Carlson dives into the why in Queen Meryl.

Reading Queen Meryl by Erin Carlson in Houston, Texas. | Dress | Shoes | Watch |

Happy Publication day to Erin Carlson and Queen Meryl from Hachette Books. I like Erin Carlson as an author; I like Meryl Streep as an actress. The combination makes for a great and informative read.

Meryl Streep has become an enigma. She is probably one of the greatest movie stars to have ever lived. With 21 Academy Award nominations, it’s hard to argue the contrary. She has had her critics, like all great artists do. Through it all, she has brought characters to life on the stage and the silver screen. She has not let age or Hollywood hold her back from telling complex stories with grace. Erin Carlson brings this magnificent woman to life in her latest book Queen Meryl.

Beginning in Meryl’s formative years, Carlson looks at what transformed Mary Louise, the girl, into Meryl, the artist and actress. Carlson follows Meryl Streep’s career from stage to film, documenting the most important phases in her career and life. Meryl Streep has spent her career choosing films with care to tell women’s diverse stories. From Kramer vs. Kramer to Out of Africa to Silkwood to Mamma Mia to The Devil Wears Prada and so many more.

Carlson allows Streep a voice by quoting her often throughout Queen Meryl. Pulling from speeches, history, friendships, interviews, and more, Carlson creates an image of the woman and the artist fighting for visibility and change through her work and activism. Streep is funny and self-deprecating while still exuding assuredness.

Queen Meryl includes breaks for history lessons, speech snippets, critical responses, and more. The book also includes sketches of Streep throughout her career before every chapter. A few iconic photos are used at key points. Each chapter begins with a memorable quote from the movie Carlson will focus on during that chapter. It is obvious that Carlson is in awe of the legend and the woman; her ability to speak directly to the reader about her own emotions is a good pairing for the seemingly warm and hilarious Streep.

I highly enjoyed reading Queen Meryl by Erin Carlson. I have loved Meryl Streep for as long as I can remember, but there was so much I didn’t know about her life and career. She is inspiring as a person and activist. I hope the world remembers her as the complex and interesting woman Erin Carlson paints her to be.

Memorable Quotes
“Allow me to describe the plot of this 1977 gem of a movie that you should drop everything (except this book) and watch immediately…”
“Despite her perfect image, Meryl wasn’t immune to insecurity – especially during dark nights of the soul when the mind tends to ruminate on uncertainty, regret, and rejection.”
“Meryl avoided doing films that sexualized her or made her a prop to a male lead.”

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Title: Queen Meryl; The Iconic Roles, Heroic Deeds, and Legendary Life of Meryl Streep
Author: Erin Carlson
Publisher: Hachette Books
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780316485272

Books, NonFiction

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

September 16, 2019September 16, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 432
Quick Review The world is full of inequity. Some is intentional. Some is unintentional. Data bias affects women significantly from getting around to being diagnosed to just being inconvenienced. Data is blind, especially when the data doesn’t include women. a

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez | Jeans | Shirt

My best friend told me about this book because he read it and was impressed. I was impressed he picked up a book about women’s issues. He’s no mysoginist; he’s just a man with interests lying elsewhere.

At its core Invisible Women is about discrimination. The data gap may not be malicious or even something done on purpose, but it exists and perpetuates gender inequality around the world in small and big ways most people have not or will ever contemplate. I have lots of feelings and thoughts on Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women. I’m impressed. She pulls from a variety of sources on a variety of topics from snow removal to the lack of inclusion in medical research. I can only imagine the amount of information and studies she left out of the book, but she chose things of seeming inconsequence to things of extreme consequence. The bottom line:

Women are other.
Humanity suffers.

There were so many insanely great quotable moments in the book: Most of my notes are just quotes. I’ll include all of the ones I jotted down at the bottom because they’re just too good. Invisible Women can be completely summed up in this quote on how the data gap “is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millenia and is therefore a kind of not thinking.”

I loved every part of this book. She writes on topics I honestly had no idea about: how snow removal is inadvertantly keeping women from succeeding. She also discusses topics I knew about but hadn’t though of in terms of gender equality: gendered language uses the male form as the default, but nongenderized languages don’t have better equality. To gendered discrimination I have personally experienced: medicine is not geared towards women, making them a priority, or taking their pain and symptoms seriously. (Had a listened to one asshat doctor who didn’t believe me or take me seriously, I would have died.)

Honestly, I would love to discuss all of the points Criado Perez makes in Invisible Women. If you have an interest, hit me up. I’m always up for a gender discussion.

Criado Perez does a great job presenting the data and mostly the lack of data. She makes her points. She rarely includes anecdotes unless those anecdotes were included in studies. She bases all of her arguments in fact, leaving feelings and emotions behind. I, personally, love an emotional ploy. I, also, understand it’s not what fuels change on a systemic level. Criado Perez keeps herself out of the book. She’s acting as an information conduit. Her personality and opinions seep through in small ways. Her phrasing and occasional parenthetical statement packs a punch making it both interesting and a tiny pull at the emotional strings. She has a sense of humor to her writing, and I caught myself giggling more than once.

Caroline Criado Perez has a way with words in Invisible Women. She is persuasive and interesting. One of the more important quotes is the very last sentence of the book: “All people needed to do was to ask women.”

Memorable Quotes
“the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall.”
“Men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all.” hit me in the feels
“it matters when women literally can’t get said at all”
“Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked.”
“When it comes to the tech that ends up in our pockets (I’m ever hopeful)”
“We lack consistent, sex-disaggregated data from every country…”
“we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.”
“And as an added bonus, not forcing women to march in time with men has not, as yet, led to the apocolypse.”
“Different sex: totally opposite result.”

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Title: Invisible Women; Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Author: Caroline Criado Perez
Publisher: Abrams Press (Abrams)
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781419729072

Books, NonFiction

Thank You For My Service by Mat Best

September 6, 2019September 6, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes: Entertaining and Honest
Length 240
Quick Review Mat Best was a Ranger before contracting and becoming known for his youTube channel, tshirt/whiskey/coffee companies, oh, and he made a movie. He’s entertaining as hell in his book Thank You For My Service.

Best is a badass, but I belong to a Marine family. | Thank You For My Service

As military adjacent, I’m interested in military nonfiction and memoirs, but as a critic I’m always wary because I’ve read some racist bulshit masquerading as war memoirs. Mat Best does a better-than-most job at balancing the realities of war with humanity in Thank You For My Service.

Best was a Ranger in the 75th Ranger Regiment for five active military deployments before working and deploying multiple times as a private contractor. While working as a contractor, he created a youTube channel capitalizing on his creative side to document his time, opinions, and experiences as a member of the military. The channel lead to a partnership, which created a tshirt company, whiskey company, production company, a movie, and a coffee company. He’s kind of a jack of all trades, it seems.

The military is a completely different way of life. It’s hard to understand if you’re not in it. Even as a milso, it’s not my way of life, but I am more familiar with it than others. If you’re not into a morbid sense of humor, don’t read Thank You For My Service because that’s a huge part of the narrative and the military. Jokes and rude humor are essential. To be honest, the book would be super weird if he didn’t include dark jokes. Best redacts certain words, even whole sections of text, to maintain anonymity and secrecy. This underpins the fact he had a dangerous job, and even though he’s cracking jokes, people’s lives are at risk every moment of every day.

I decided to pose with Thank You For My Service by Mat Best at the Aviation Memorial on MCAS New River in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

War is war. People killing people. War memoirs tend to dehumanize the enemy in a plethora of ways. It’s part of the job, and it would be hard not to when you see your friends and colleagues dying. Best doesn’t sugar coat the feelings he had in theater, but he also makes sure the reader knows on the other side of his gun are people. The fact he didn’t use racial slurs impressed me. He does er on the side of “kill the enemy,” but that was literally his job.

Best is confident, funny, and smart. He writes about his experiences leading up to enlisting, deployments, Ranger school, loss, getting out, private security, joining and being a private contractor, and figuring out his life. He doesn’t shy away from discussing what he went through getting out of the military. Being in his early twenties but feeling disconnected from his peers. So many military guys feel this way when they get out after their first enlistment.

He and I, I am sure, have a lot of differing opinions, but he’s also a person I would have a ton of fun grabbing coffee with or joking over a bonfire. Throughout Thank You For My Service he emphasizes the sense of community he had in the military. It’s true, whether you’re in or military adjacent, when you meet someone who is military, you have something to talk about or bond over.

Memorable Quotes|
“Thinking you’re going to die and wanting to die are totally different things. I didn’t have a death wish. It’s just that, in my experience, the more you deploy and face the dark realities that exist in life, the more comfortable you become with the idea of death.”
“…being immersed in Ranger culture for four straight years had affected how I saw the world and, more to the point, how the world saw me.”

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Title: Thank You For My Service
Author: Mat Best
With: Ross Patterson and Nils Parker
Publisher: Bantam Books
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781524796495

Books, NonFiction

Escape from Paris by Stephen Harding

September 1, 2019August 30, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 288
Quick Review Joe, an American soldier, and Yvette, a young French woman in the resistance, fall in love at Les Invalides under the most unusual circumstances during World War II.

In front of The Water Wall in Houston, Texas. | Escape from Paris by Stephen Harding | Dress | Purse | Shoes | Earrings |

Escape from Paris | Dress | Shoes | Purse |

Available October 8, 2019

The world has an obsession with World War II. It was a new kind of war revolutionizing economies and industries around the world. The devastation and impact it had is still remarkable. With so many history books, novels, documentaries, TV shows, movies, and more, it can be easy to forget the individuals impacted by each decision, battle, success, and failure. People won the war. People lost the war. People lived lives during the war. Stephen Harding puts faces to these stories in Escape From Paris.

Harding focuses on the 94th Bomb Group, a United States Air Force unit based in England flying missions over Germany and France.

I’m going to be completely biased, I found the French part of this story far more interesting than the American aspect. This has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with my personal interests. As a francophile and history buff, I am drawn to the French bits.

Joe is an American, who enlisted in the Air Force when the war began. His bomber went down over Northern France during an air raid along with several other planes. Most did not survive, but Joe and several other did. Finding the resistance they ended up in Paris at Les Invalides.

Georges and Denise had been the caretakers of Les Invalides for many years when the war broke out. They joined the resistance along with their daughter, Yvette. There were resistance groups working separately and together throughout Europe. This family was in a unique situation as “the “caretakers of Invalides” literally carried the keys to what was arguably one of the safest hiding places in the country” because Les Invalides had been taken over by the Germans during the Occupation, which, counterintuitively, gave this family more freedom to aide the resistance effort while housing and hiding soldiers. It was a dangerous and brilliant plan due to the fact “the Germans never thought to search what they assumed was a completely secure facility.”

There’s a love story in Escape from Paris, but I find it the least interesting bit about this book because personal taste. I did find it a little redundant because Harding felt the need to continually point out that this is a love story and that it’s not just about war, it’s about love too. I get it. He’s building up the human aspect of the story, but it’s not that interesting. The repetition borders on frustrating. The humanity is abundantly clear in his portraits of the people inhabiting this story. They lived lives before, during, and after the war. These were people who loved each other and their country. They fought in any way they could to protect what they believed in. The love story is sweet, but it’s the least impactful part of the story. If it wasn’t in the title, I probably would have forgotten it was in the book. Joe, Denise, Georges, and Yvette were incredible and brave people standing up for what they believed in.

Escape from Paris is riddled with historical facts, airplane terminology, logistics, and more. If you’re not familiar with these terms and this kind of history book, you’ll want Google handy. I enjoyed reading this interesting and well researched book. It’s definitely one to read if you like WWII.

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Title: Escape From Paris; A True Story of Love and Resistance in Wartime France
Author: Stephen Harding
Publisher: De Capo Press (Hachette Book Group)
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780306922169