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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Rebecca Solnit's Mother of All Questions explores a number of issues—should we be trying to live happy lives? how does language shape us? how does art create us?—from a contemporary feminist perspective.
Some of the essays haven't aged well in certain respects, though not in ways that Solnit could necessarily have predicted: here she hails Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari as feminist men, plus... well I presume you've lived through the last few years, too. Given the backlash against feminism and women and you know... sanity... that's taken place since 2017, I find it real difficult anymore to reach the level of optimism that Solnit expresses at certain points here.
Some of the essays are much stronger than the others, but all are worth reading and Solnit's voice is smart and warm. I especially enjoyed both the opening essay on motherhood, and “80 Books No Woman Should Read" is funny and contains a succinct and beautiful take-down of Hemingway:
Some of the essays haven't aged well in certain respects, though not in ways that Solnit could necessarily have predicted: here she hails Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari as feminist men, plus... well I presume you've lived through the last few years, too. Given the backlash against feminism and women and you know... sanity... that's taken place since 2017, I find it real difficult anymore to reach the level of optimism that Solnit expresses at certain points here.
Some of the essays are much stronger than the others, but all are worth reading and Solnit's voice is smart and warm. I especially enjoyed both the opening essay on motherhood, and “80 Books No Woman Should Read" is funny and contains a succinct and beautiful take-down of Hemingway:
The gun-penis-death thing is so sad as well as ugly. The terse, repressed prose style is, in his hands, mannered and pretentious and sentimental. Manly sentimental is the worst kind of sentimental, because it’s deluded about itself in a way that, say, honestly emotional Dickens never was.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
I grabbed this for the opening essay which was delightful, and I enjoyed the some of the other content in the remaining essays. Fortunately for all of us, reading this in 2023 is a world away from what things were like before #metoo as most of these stories are 2015 or earlier. I’m grateful for the contribution this book and author had in helping us get here. While problems persist, the popular analysis required has completely shifted and it’s a peculiar Time Capsule that evokes gratitude and impatience.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is the third Rebecca Solnit work I’ve read in 2022. A new writer to me this year - I thoroughly enjoy her work. Fun but biting, deep but accessible. A great read!
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I came for the interesting title, stayed for the funny (but accurate) commentary on the current shape of feminism.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
In reading Solnit's work, I'm torn between amusement and pity. I feel the former because she is, for an educated person, amazingly ignorant of the biological constraints on human sexual and subsequently gendered behavior (there are several research-based disciplines dedicated to this). When she stumbles into biological realities in her work, she flippantly dismisses them as "just so stories" but doesn't actually respond to the content or data supporting these theories. I feel pity because she seems to have arrived at her very dissatisfied state because she had a tumultuous upbringing in the 60s/70s Bay Area that Joan Didion chronicled as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."
Although I take time to read the work of contemporary radical feminists hoping to find something interesting, I am usually disappointed by the knee-jerk blank slate-ism, radical skepticism/subjectivism, and hackneyed grievance politicking. They seem increasingly engaged with some internalized dystopian fever dream rather than the world as it is. The only portions of these essays worth engaging with seriously is the literary/film criticism, which is of course limited by its total dependence on queer and feminist theory. However, this is at least a realm where subjectivity can provide interesting perspective and analysis.
Although I take time to read the work of contemporary radical feminists hoping to find something interesting, I am usually disappointed by the knee-jerk blank slate-ism, radical skepticism/subjectivism, and hackneyed grievance politicking. They seem increasingly engaged with some internalized dystopian fever dream rather than the world as it is. The only portions of these essays worth engaging with seriously is the literary/film criticism, which is of course limited by its total dependence on queer and feminist theory. However, this is at least a realm where subjectivity can provide interesting perspective and analysis.