Mar. 9th, 2013

jazzfish: "Do you know the women's movement has no sense of humor?" "No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it!" (the radical notion that women are people)
Boys don't read Girl Books and other lies my Society Told Me: "My brother read a lot. And as it happens, a fair number of the books he reads either a) are written by women b) have female protagonists, or c) center on 'girl' issues like 'family' and 'relationships.' This fact makes him the Miracle Boy Foretold By the Prophecy."

Confession time: I read Girl Books when I was a kid. I have clear memories of reading a bunch of Baby-Sitters Club books in fifth grade because they were there, and at a book fair one year I picked up a couple of D&D Romance Choose-Your-Own-Adventure things. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, about two imaginative girls whose friendship is sorely tested by Growing Up, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew there was something vaguely 'wrong' about reading them. I was always worried that someone would make fun of me for it, in a way that was somehow worse than the normal abuse I got for reading, or for reading genre. But I didn't let it stop me.

My choice of reading material may have been the one place in my childhood where I was unquestionably brave. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that books were something my parents didn't ever try to shame me about, or tell me that there was something else I'd like better and shouldn't I be reading that instead. (Tangent: current theory is that books were Play and thus not worth the effort of fighting over; it wasn't until Play started threatening to overshadow Work, in the form of saying I wanted to be a writer, that I got slapped down.)

I always thought I was just a weird kid for doing that. Nice to know I'm not, quite, the only one.

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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