Reading in the Garden

 Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky ✨✨ It’s almost scary how thrilling it was for me to get into the psyche of a woman heading to the edge of a mental cliff. Claire Oshetsky’s buoyant and amusing conversational tone put a spell on me and had me glued to each page in this whip-smart, addictive read. By the end of the book, the protagonist, Celia, had reached hero status. I love her! I love the book!    In 1974, nineteen-year-old Celia was mechanically moving along in the roles she’d been assigned—obedient wife to a controlling husband and obedient billing operator in a phone company where she was tethered to her headset, lorded over by a male supervisor—until the murder of a co-worker awakened a dormant defiance in her and life turned in unexpected ways. Her mini assertions went a  step further than her ability to cut people's phone service, or "rip their lips off," as it was known. Yet, they were  not dramatic exclamations. They were just enough to anger her hu...

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton was my January Author Birthday Challenge book, meaning I chose to read a book by a famous author whose birthday corresponds with the month.   Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862.    I truly enjoyed The House of Mirth, but it was a challenging book for me because Wharton’s writing style seems much more sophisticated than her other books, The Age of Innocence, and definitely more so than Ethan Frome. The musings are at times, confusing, with her word-play as twisted as a knot of ropes. It took some concentration to decipher the meaning at times. Forget  Wordle, crosswords, or Sudoku!  Challenge your mind with this book.    Yet it was so worth it!   Lily Barton is a Gilded-Age socialite trying to hang on to the pretenses of a lifestyle she can no longer afford. She’s basically a gold-digger searching for wealth, ignoring the urgings of true love. There’...

  How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair    This book is a true account of a girl growing up under her father's strict Rastafarian beliefs, which turned to fanaticism. Smoking weed was acceptable; eating meat was forbidden. The main tenets of the sect are disdain for “Babylon,” white people’s influence and Western ways. Yet even in their homeland of Jamaica, Safiya and her siblings were outcasts for being Rastafarian, ostracized by other Jamaicans for not cutting their hair and wearing dreadlocks.   Like many religions controlled by patriarchal dominance, girls and women were held to higher and hypocritical standards and forced submissiveness, living under fear of the father's rule.  It was their mother who set them on a quest for knowledge and education in which they excelled. Safiya eventually became a poet, exemplified in this book as her words flow and form into a beautifully expressed narrative.  Overcoming such a childhood and thriving as an adult offe...