91:100 Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi

Firdus grew up poor in Egypt and learned early on that men were the only ones who mattered in society.  She wanted to go to school and her uncle helped her but she soon found out that, again, she was subject to the whims of the man her ruled her life. She was thrown out because of the jealousy of her uncle's wife and now must learn how to survive on the streets as a woman in a patriarchal society. It's not long before she realizes that without a husband, her prospects are limited and she ends up a prostitute. Rather than diminishing her though, she is able to realize her own power in that position and is able to be beholden to no one until a man comes in and decides he will now be her pimp. Firdus can only take it so long before she kills him in order to reclaim her own agency. As a result, she is sentenced to death. This is a man's world after all and her agency does not matter.

A true story told by Firdus as she sat on death row. She wanted no clemency, since to have that was to give up her agency again and she would prefer death. Firdus suffers constantly due to the men around her but because she is a woman, that is her "place".  A moving and powerful story that is too familiar to too many women around the world. I can't say I enjoyed it because it's a hard read but it was gripping and important.


Page count: 142p/22,239p ytd/330,936p lifetime

130:120 To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ

Read for book club, this is a book of essays collected from a few decades by Joanna Russ about her thoughts of women writing sci-fi.  She narrows down her selections for most things to less than a dozen authors and stories in most places.  The essays themselves are well thought out and articulated and me trying to summarize them in any fashion would be to do them a great disservice so I won't even try but will instead simply stick to my overall thoughts of the books.

Of the stories that Ms. Russ refers to, I've only read one of them as sci-fi does not tend to be my go to genre of choice and that is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed.  With regards to the essays themselves, I found it to be a mixed bag.  Some of the essays were dealing with the rampant misogyny of the time and themes that play into that with many examples of stories and how they show it off.  Mostly these were stories that I have never heard of, likely for the reasons she was citing, and even if I had they were generally not something I would choose to read anyway.  There was also an essay on the Gothic romances, those that have basically turned into the bodice rippers of today, and which is generally a genre I run far away from.  That essay was the most painful as it went in depth on all the reasons I hate that style of book and gave many, many examples.  The essay on Mary Shelley was interesting and I enjoyed the one comparing different women's general Utopian sci-fi worlds to each other and how those differ from the general Utopian worlds of men at that time period.


Page count: 200p/33,071p ytd/247,987p lifetime