Frankenchicken

I've been reading a fantastic book by Rebecca Skloot called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It tells the history of the artificial growth of cancerous human cells for the purposes of research, of the dying woman the cells were harvested from, without her knowledge or consent and of her family who found out about the existence of the cells years later and never saw any of the money made from the growing business of selling HeLa cells, as they are still called. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, at the age of thirty-one. At that time segregation was still lawful and she ha been treated in the 'colored' section of the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. She came from a small tobacco growing town and had five children, the youngest  still only a baby.

Pink books are for boys. Girls prefer blood.

Do you read chick lit? I do. I've read all the Shopaholic books. I've read things I don't remember the name of but that tell the story of a recently divorced woman who finds love after lots of comical mishaps, or of a younger woman who finds love after lots of comical mishaps. And there are always friends involved: the sassy girlfriend, the gay best friend, the enemy from high school who's rich and anorexic, the parents, etc. These books satisfy my need to have a number of written words entering my head everyday -  can't all be good words! And they sometimes make me laugh.

I used to recognise these books in the shop by the cover. Just like you can recognise a sci-fi book because it's usually dark blue with some exploding orange star or spaceship in the middle.
But that's no longer the case. Now most books written by a woman are pink. Just so you know, if you're a man, or a serious woman, to avoid them.

I bought a new copy of Emma, the other day - I recently had to refill the Jane Austen gap on my bookshelf, not an actual physical gap, you understand - haven't had one of those since I was about four. The book was off white, with a black silhouette drawing of the kind that you sometimes see in fashion magazines, and details were coloured in pink.  The back cover spelt out the main lines of the story in a very chick lit kind of way. Emma's attractive, gets into trouble, finds love.

Now I'm all for the pimping up of classics so that more people read them. But surely turning Emma into chick lit is ensuring that less people read it, no? Unless we assume that only women read women novelists in the first place.

Part of me doesn't have a huge problem with  what that says. That is, I tend to read mostly women novelists. I also tend to think of some writers, like Hemingway, Salinger, John Irving, as 'boy writers', i.e. people who write books that boys like. As opposed to just 'great writers'. Now I know that's not fair, that it reflects double standards, as I wouldn't want writers I love to be dismissed as 'girl' writers. And even if I thought that so-called great male writers were only fun for boys, I wouldn't say something like that in a public forum, like err, on a blog. It wasn't me who wrote I thought most great novelists were women novelists.

But whatever you think about John Irving, Jane Austen's novels aren't just for girls. They're not a way to pass the time and giggle on the train - although they'll be that too. They're for discovering, thinking about, growing old with. Reading Austen is good for us, it helps us mature intellectually and emotionally.  So the thing is, if only women read Jane Austen, we'll end up with a world full of wannabe Elisabeths, and Eleanors, and truck loads of Bingleys and Willoughbies to match!

I feel this can all be avoided somewhat if we ditch the pink covered Emma and turn instead to this:

I got a book for free the other day.

We just don't have a great library record in the family. What with my sister being chased out of them by ghosts and my great great great uncle Washington ending up with that  huge fine...

Not that I don't read. I do, all the time.

But I'm not that good on libraries. Every time I go into one, I marvel at the fact that they'll let me take some books home for free. Any book I like. Even crime fiction. That is truly wonderful.

What I'll mostly be reading this summer

Right. I've found another weekly meme writing type thingy to do. Which is good because Marianne is going to do the Sleep is for the Weak Writing Workshop from now on. This one's called called Weekend Assignment and the topic is Summer Reading.

Here's the instructions:

Okay, yes, I know, it's still spring, but this is when I begin thinking about what kind of summer reading I might like to have on hand for those too-hot-to-clean days of summer. So, for this week's assignment, I want you to share with us the kind of summer reading you look forward to the most. Sci-fi? Horror? Political Thrillers? Romance? It's all good. Now, tell me more!
Extra Credit: Okay writers, get to work! Write me the opening paragraph, just (1) paragraph of a summer read you would like write yourself. Again, any genre works fine, have fun with it!

Huh, that's a good one. Summer reading. As in: it's summer, you can just lie about with a beer and a huge pile of books. As in: you're not going to have to work or chase after children on the beach all day long and drop exhausted as soon as the sun goes down. (It goes down early in Turkey, even in summer).

Ok, I'm playing martyr here. I am looking forward to summer reading, even if I won't be spending that much time on it.

Actually, I ordered some books from Betterworld books specifically for the summer. I ordered a guide book to Florence. Yes! I'm going to Prato, just outside Florence, in August, all by myself. I'll have two plane journeys and 6 whole days there with no children to worry about. Ok, I probably won't be doing that much reading, as it's a conference, and also, I'll be wanting to look around a bit. But still. I've ordered books. I ordered books I've already read, many times, just because it was Florence. So I ordered A Room with a view. And Where Angels Fear to Tread. And Howards End. (Nothing to do with Florence but I quite fancied re-reading it and it just so happens I didn't bring any of my E.M.Forster books to Turkey with me. But let's face it, by the time the books are out of the box I'll be half way through them. So maybe I need something more substantial.

Er, Dante? I suppose that's substantial and he's from Florence. I've read bits, but never cover to cover. Except I can't read it in Italian, so should I read it in French or English? Too much trouble to decide, I think. Or I could read that big fat book called the Dante Club that's been sitting on my bed side for nearly two years now. It's about translating Dante in America and black flies that eat people. Except there's a good reason why it's still on that pile: I didn't like it. But it looked like on principle I should like it so I left it on the pile. What do you do with a book you don't like? Can you give it away before you've read it? Advice welcome.

The book I'd really like to read if someone would bother to write it:

The authors of this book, out the kindness of their hearts, will proceed to teach you, clearly and concisely, but with plenty of cool, not-exactly-real-life case studies, how to stretch time, so that you can actually read more books in the summer, be relaxed as you're reading them, and remember more than just the title three months later. The book will go through various techniques in just enough details so you can try it at home but not so much you will be able to blame them if it doesn't work – after all, we know that you don't have time to do anything properly! We will start with how to put your children in suspended animation through yoga and simple relaxation techniques while you just finish that chapter (and maybe another one). Then we will take you through a step by step explanation of how to get the elves to do your work for you without having to pay them (this might also help take care of the children so you can read more than one chapter at a time). Last but not least, Mary Poppin's method for housework (finger clicking, spoonful of sugar song singing) will be described (but if you actually want to learn it, you'll have to pay a monthly fee of 30 dollars to some weird internet company).

But what I am really looking forward to reading this summer , or as soon as I can get my hands on it after it's published, is Charlaine Harris's latest instalment of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series: Dead in the Family!Dante be damned!

Oops, I think The Dante Club is somewhere in that lot...