Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
In my professional life, I work at feminism: at the recent conference I organized, for example, all five keynote speakers were women, and generally I teach at least as much writing by women as by men (fall 2016, fall 2018). This post isn't about that, though, and anyway there's tons of room for improvement in my practices, so I'm not fishing for a gold star.
At book club, though, across eleven years this is the first time that Beer and Books has seen consecutive months with books by women: Clare Clark's The Great Stink, and now Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. A lot of women's book clubs, of course, do read a lot of books by women, and so do book clubs that aren't single-gendered, so it's not as simple as all that.
Worth noting, perhaps?
Anyway, Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach is a terrific novel, one of my favourite straight-up reads this year, though it's also a terribly weird experience for me. I'm an intentionally provincial reader, most…
At book club, though, across eleven years this is the first time that Beer and Books has seen consecutive months with books by women: Clare Clark's The Great Stink, and now Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. A lot of women's book clubs, of course, do read a lot of books by women, and so do book clubs that aren't single-gendered, so it's not as simple as all that.
Worth noting, perhaps?
Anyway, Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach is a terrific novel, one of my favourite straight-up reads this year, though it's also a terribly weird experience for me. I'm an intentionally provincial reader, most…
