March Reading

Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
This is the second book in the Bayern Book series. I read the first, Goose Girl, in January. I liked this one better than the first (meaning I really enjoyed it) -- only because it was not as predictable to me as the first (because both are interesting stories).
Hale picks up the story of a periphery character from the first novel and tells her story of learning a language of the earth (fire). The main character of the first novel appears in this story and while it is not crucial that you read the books in order, reading them out of order would ruin part of the plot of the first.
Once again, it was a very easy read. Either this is Hale or just indicative of youth novels (although Hale's adult novel, Austenland, was also an insanely easy read).

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
I picked this book up mistakenly believing it to be a continuation of the Bayern Book series and desperately needing some easy reading for the month of March.
As it turns out, it was not part of the series, but another Grimm fairytale that Hale transformed into a book.
SOOO much better than her Bayern Book series. I loved this book and would recommend it without reservation.
Told in first-person by a servant, she tells how she and her mistress are locked in a tower by her mistress' father when the daughter refuses to marry the man her father has chosen. He sentences her to 7 years in the tower until she changes her mind, leaving her a maid to care for her in her confinement.
It was such an interesting tale. It had a quick pace and was not a book that I could easily foretell what would be happening.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I was a little shocked how much I enjoyed this book.
I mean, I knew it had to be good ... it is a classic and I don't believe books easily become classics, but I didn't think that I would revel in it as much as I did.
I don't typically overly enjoy the theoretic book or books that have been analyzed to death. But I find myself wanting to analyze this book.
For those of you unaware of this books premise, it is about a time in the future when books are banned and firemen are now the people who go to houses with illegal books to burn them. One fireman begins to see the nothingness of their lives and looks for answers in books that he has stolen.
The saddest and most telling part for this former journalist? When one character tells our fireman that it started when people stopped caring about the newspapers. It was easy for the government to tell them what to think after that point.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Once again, shocked how much I enjoyed this book.
Is my enjoyment of the books this month because I was in a weaker state in the month of March? I don't think so, although if you feel I am too loose in handing out my praise, feel free to use that logic.
I would readily recommend this book.
I know it is a women studies book and there are many who would not read it because either they see it as dry or some feminist novel spouting theories they don't care to listen to, but it is neither of those things.
I admit, as a non-fiction novel of women's studies, I thought the book would be difficult and rough in places. I was so wrong! The examples Ulrich gives of women making a mark in history are fascinating. She never lags, but keeps a steady pace of amazing women through history -- who either left a mark intentionally from their actions or accidentally as they stepped outside the norm of their time.
Admittedly, the last 30 pages of the book -- devoted to second-wave feminism -- could be seen as one-sided on Ulrich's part. However, that is not how I took her analysis of history. Merely, she pointed out the merits, downfalls and triumphs accomplished by this movement.
More importantly, neither Ulrich (who won a Pulitzer for A Midwife's Tale) nor her examples made this housewife who stays home with her children and cares for her home feel as though she is some submissive character or of little value in history.
My favorite quote in the book came from Virginia Woolf: "For all the dinner are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children set to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All is vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie." (from A Room of One's Own, 1929). And should it be this way? No. Why is it impossible to find examples from women in history who lived the everyday? Surely these women, albeit silently, left their mark as well.