Review: - How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I'm back! Second post this week, and I'm very excited despite the fact that blogging is now actually costing me money as in order to access the Starbucks interwebs, I have to buy a tea first. Although tea is never a bad thing, it costing me £3 (I always end up having a cake of some sort too...) a go, is. Anyway! Aside from that, I'm really excited about this book.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of How to be a Woman; some loved it, some hated it. From reading these reviews I thought I’d probably love it, and I was so right. How to be a Woman is Caitlin Moran’s autobiography; it is also an acerbically funny look at feminism and the things that make it necessary. I won’t ramble on and on about this book – it doesn’t need me to. Moran discusses candidly all the horrible squeamish bits of being a woman that nobody ever talks about, unless they are very very drunk. She managed to make me squirm in disgust and have a very public giggling fit within the space of five minutes, and I came away from the book feeling like I’d learned a lot. Having grown up with four sisters in the kind of family where you never ever talked about the gross stuff, except by using vague shrugging gestures in the place of the thing you were actually talking about, maybe I just loved this book because it told me all the things nobody else had, and by this I don’t mean that I’ve managed to reach the age of 24 without knowing about periods or where babies come from, but just that it was amazing (and disgusting) for me to read a book that talked about all the horrible bits of childbirth as well as the awesomesauce stuff.

Here is the bit that made me laugh for a full five minutes, and then periodically throughout the day whenever I remembered it. Customers thought I was weeeeeeird that day!

 “Caz gets horrific cramps- she spends her periods in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, covered in hot water bottles, shouting ‘Fuck off’ at anyone who tries to come into the room. As part of being a hippy, my mother doesn’t ‘believe’ in pain-killers, and urges us to research herbal remedies. We read that sage is supposed to help, and sit in bed eating handfuls of sage and onion stuffing, crying. Neither of us can believe that we’re going to have to put up with this for the next 30 years.” (p20)

I have so much love, and as I’m totally hating my current rating system for books, I’m going to go with ‘this is a book that I really enjoyed, and will be keeping forever and re-reading, and recommending to absolutely everyone I can find’. Well done, Ms Moran, you are totally hilarious.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but it struck a chord with me, and I’ll be recommending this book to everyone I come across in the foreseeable future, whether they be male or female. Most of the men I know would benefit just as much as the women from reading about how difficult it is for a woman to know what to call her breasts and other such things.

Wonderful Wednesdays: Favourite Childhood Book

Little Women by Louisa Alcott



I was having a slight problem with this topic, as I have several books that I absolutely loved as a child, but after much careful thought, I decided that I'd have to go with Little Women, by Louisa M Alcott. I doubt there are many people who don't know about Little Women, but at the same time, I don't think there are too many who feel quite the way I do about it.

For me it's not only my favourite childhood book, but one of my favourite books of all time. I call it my antidepressant, as every time I'm feeling particularly down or uninspired I'll start reading the series and not stop until I'm cheered up, and so far, through biannual readings for the last fifteen years, it hasn't let me down once.

The reason I've picked it as my favourite childhood book though, is that it's the first time that I remember reading a book from cover to cover in one sitting. It was summer, as I was sat on our back doorstep, and it took me two hours to read the whole thing. When I got up I couldn't feel my legs anymore. Being brought up in a Christian household, I think that my sisters and I had a lot in common with Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, and as a young child I used to use the book as a model for my own life. I think to some extent, I still do. I know that it's all very quaint, reading about girls who basically just want to be good, and who are very domestic and content to stay home with their parents until a nice young man comes to marry them, but, after years of struggling against it, I've come to accept that maybe that's a big part of who I am as well. As a child, I used to see the girls from the book as very individual and independent, as they are all very much their own people and have their own aspirations beyond wanting homes and families, and although my feminist tendencies have, on occassion, made me keep quiet about my love of this book, I've decided it's time for this to change.

Following reading it, I always have a hugely industrious fit and start embroidering tablecloths or making curtains and suchlike. The most recent reading spurred an obsession with self-sufficiency, which led to me buying a bunch of half price vegetable seeds to grow in the summer. To sum up, reading it, for me, creates only good things and always has done. It makes me happy, motivated, and energised, and so I've decided that in return for this favour, I'll stop being ashamed that it is my favourite!

I'm going to put in a short blurb about it, in case there's anyone who doesn't know the basic storyline, which I have, as usual, failed to even slightly outline in my ramblings!
This is what Goodreads have to say about it, and that's basically all there is to it:

Little Women is the heartwarming story of the March family that has thrilled generations of readers. It is the story of four sisters--Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth-- and of the courage, humor and ingenuity they display to survive poverty and the absence of their father during the Civil War.

Wonderful Wednesdays is a new meme hosted by Sam @ Tiny Library



Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis amazed me. For starters, it is the first graphic novel I have ever read which is not from the fantasy genre. I found the use of the cartoons a hugely effective way of portraying the storyline, and was also stunned by how unexpectedly funny it was, given the subject matter. It actually made me laugh out loud.

The book is basically Satrapi's autobiography, and tells her story from childhood, beginning in 1980, during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all the way through to 1994, when she left Iran to study in Paris. The fact that it is graphic helps to slightly distance the reader from the horrors contained within the story. As a child, Marjane learns about the imprisonment of her grandfather, experiences the imprisonment and execution of her uncle, and has to contend with the Guardians of the Revolution, while out buying Kim Wilde tapes off the Black Market.

The second part of the novel deals with her period of living in Vienna, where her parents sent her to continue her education, aged 14. From the horror and repression of Iran during a war, Satrapi emerges to a society which shuns her as a foreigner: when she fights back against her headmistress telling her that Iranians have no education, she is expelled, and eventually spirals from drugs, a boyfriend who spends all of her money, and who mother hates her for being different, into homelessness,a nd finally back to her family in Iran.

Persepolis is surprisingly humorous and hugely perceptive. It depicts many of the way in which the so called 'emancipated' Western world can be just as repressed and restrictive as the East. For me, it took a period about which I knew nothing, and informed me, while at the same time entertaining me (and annoying my fiance, as I persisted in reading the funniest bits aloud to him.. I know, it's annoying).

The thing that I loved the most about this novel, was the emphasis on books and education. I completely agree with Satrapi when she says 'One must educate oneself'. And on that note, I'm off to rent the film...

Rating: ***** (I'd give it more if I had them!)