Bookin' It in 2015

I read the following 19 books in 2015. The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris
2. Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers
3. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock
4. The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage by Rob and Kristen Bell
5. A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown by Julia Scheeres
6. The L Word: Welcome to Our Planet by Kera Bolonik
7. Yes Please by Amy Poehler
8. Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming
9. Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
10. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield
11. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross
12. In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court by Brittney Griner with Sue Hovey 
13. The Out List: Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Interviews by Sam McConnell
14. The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians by Kate Fagan
15. Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis by Alexis Coe
16. The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller
17. My Exodus: From Fear to Grace by Alan Chambers with Leslie Chambers
18. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir by Carrie Brownstein
19. Troublemaker:Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini

Quote of the Day

Recently I saw a band play on Saturday Night Live.  It's mostly one guy but he tours with 9+ people, all of them men.  Every one of them wore T-shirts.  If a group of nine women wore T-shirts on a national TV show, people would 1) ridicule them for not trying to look pretty, or 2) think it was an art project.  At the very least it would be notable.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 192

Quote of the Day

Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective.  Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience's part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary.  When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she's not performing as herself, and if she's not performing as herself, then it's not her who is wooing us, loving us.  We don't get to have her because we don't know exactly who she is.  An audience doesn't want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness.  Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening.  When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 165-166

Quote of the Day

The role of a woman onstage is often indistinct from her role offstage -- pleasing, appeasing, striking some balance between larger-than-life and iconic with approachable, likable, and down-to-earth, the fans like gaping mouths, hungry for more of you.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 138

Quote of the Day

My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood in your veins.  This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 5

Quote of the Day

The role of the fan is still to be a participant, and to participate is to grant yourself permission to immerse, to willingly, gladly, efface and subsume yourself for the sake of the larger meaning but also to provide meaning.  It's symbiotic.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 4-5

Quote of the Day

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 4

Quote of the Day

My story starts with me as a fan.  And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved.

-- Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, p. 3