Rebecca Solnit

“And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.”

“When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued show more and devoured like a drug”

“Men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.”

Men are scum. After reading books like this and watching current events, where this is played out every moment of every day, this is the only conclusion I can have. Yes, I am a male in America but I have try to be respectful and considerate toward the opposite sex. Probably not perfect but I do try. I love Solnit's writing. She pulls no punches and describing her experiences, as a young woman establishing her self in a male-dominated world, where many of her female friends had been sexually assaulted, or demeaned or ignored, is quite eye-opening. An important book. show less

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit I loved this book because I have that magpie kind of mind that likes shiny bits of information and this book has them in droves. Intelligent, thoughful and humane is how I’d classify this collection of essays.

There is nothing trite or entertaining in here at all, which is not the same thing as saying that this is not to be enjoyed. You will need to engage your brain and your morals to get the most out of this book. It is not show more highbrow or academic, it is like talking to a really intelligent friend who can explain complex things without patronising you. A friend that you always look forward to spending time with.

If you don’t read this book this is just tiny iota of what you will be missing: “….there are many kinds of invisibility. There is the invisibility of what is so taken for granted that few see it, the custom of the country, the water in which the fish swim. Thus to perceive that the United States is an empire on a permanent wartime basis is be alien to, or become alienated from, the mainstream…..”

Gets a bit of a slagging on Amazon but Goodreads shows a bit more respect.

Get an axe, smash up your TV then read this book. If it is not too late for you then at least a thousand things will jump out at you and you will shout, “I need to know more about this”.

If that doesn’t happen then buy another TV and get back to those really, really, exciting cooking shows. show less

Impossible to convey how much I enjoyed this book; the prose lifts off the page and straight into the mind, balancing sparkling, romantic images with some of the most cutting social criticism I’ve read in a long time. Sonlit is angry (and why shouldn’t she be!) but she remains so measured and calculated in her excoriation of patriarchy that her talking points blend seamlessly into a deeply personal narrative about living (as a woman, as a writer and a historian, as a multiplicity). This show more book feels like sitting down with an intelligent, compassionate stranger, and hearing them speak until you feel yourself morphing into a new, better person.

There are authors who I read who make me excited and happy to experience literature, and I’m very happy to have found many this year alone. show less

A short collection of essays provides fertile ground for growing new ideas.

When I first started reading Solnit's essays, I felt angry. That's okay; I'm used to feeling angry. What I liked about this collection is that she goes beyond anger, which can lead all too easily to feelings of despair and hopelessness, and she does provide hope for a brighter future, as well as an impetus that we all keep doing our small part because everyone's work toward equality is important. Many reviewers have show more commented on "Woolf's Darkness" as an outlier piece in this collection, but it was the essay I most highlighted, because it talks about how creative work gets done and ties that into the limitations placed on women, and also because it introduces the idea that the future is dark. We cannot know what will happen in the future or how our actions now might make a difference. We are all spinners in a web, and how those threads come together, we just don't know, but those threads are all necessary, so we cannot stop our work, whatever it may be. We all make a difference.

Solnit says in this essay: "To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable."

"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future, in Gonzalez's resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans..."

While this essay spoke volumes to me, my favorite essay was "Grandmother Spider," which begins by showing how women have been erased from family lines and thus from history, and ends by honoring the work of women, all of it, and how it taken together weaves an intricate and beautiful web:

"Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt."

An inspiring collection for all people. show less