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amarrymeinbostonwriter · 1 year

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Yesterday, I started reading Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment by Rose Collis. I'm only about 35% way through the book so far.

Mostly the book follows the life of Sir Victor Barker (or Colonel Barker), who becomes a female husband at the age of 28. He lived the first 27 years of his life as a woman. He was even married twice and had two kids. Both his husbands were WWI veterans and abusive towards him. He estranged himself from them and then took his inheritance from his parents to become a gentleman in his own right. He also marries Elfrida, his first wife in 1923- whose account of her husband is mentioned above.

Collis also added stories of other female husbands from the late 1800's and early 1900's and wove them into Barker's story. 'Female husband' is a historic gender category which covers many more distinct gender identities today. A historic female husband could be a butch lesbian, a masculine bisexual woman, a more masculine leaning AFAB nonbinary person or a straight or bisexual trans man by today's standards. Because we cannot ask the female husbands how they would identify today, we have to go by historic record- if they left anything behind. The female husbands were born female and took on traditionally masculine dress and roles usually to get better jobs only available to men and to be able to openly romance and marry women.

Sir Barker's case is a bit unusual because he left behind many personal records. His words are used directly in this book as well. Though the page I picked to share was mostly his wife, Elfrida's words. His photograph was on page 88.

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nitrosplicer · 3 years

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Since high school, I’ve had a strict policy on pleasure reading: if I’m not enjoying a book, I will stop reading it after trying for an hour. It’s been oddly cathartic. I wanted to post my list of books read in 2020, with the caveat that this is a non-exhaustive list and does not include most of the academic books I’ve read across the year. I’m also including re-reads, marked with an asterisk.

1. Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

2. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

3. My Sister The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

4. Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich

5. Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment, Rose Collis

6. How To Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan

7. Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

7. The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom

8. The Body Papers, Grace Talusan

9. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern

10. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

11. The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

12. The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

13. Tentacle, Rita Indiana

14. I’ve Got A Time Bomb, Sibyl Lamb

15. Catspaw, Joan D. Vinge*

16. My Meteorite, Harry Dodge

17. Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli

18. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust

19. The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon

20. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

21. Venus Plus X, Theodore Sturgeon

22. Such A Fun Age, Kiley Reid

23. Life Beyond My Body, Lei Ming

24. The Topeka School, Ben Lerner

25. Something That May Shock And Discredit You, Daniel Lavery

26. Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston's South End, Sylvie Tissot

27. Fear, Gabriel Chevalier

28. Regeneration, Pat Barker

29. The Fellowship of the Ring*

30. The Two Towers*

31. The Return of the King*

32. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

33. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte

34. Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

35. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan

36. The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan

37. Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin

38. The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin

39. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou

40. The Madwoman In The Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

41. Out of Salem, Hal Schrieve

42. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys*

43. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman

44. Redefining Realness, Janet Mock

45. Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

46. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, Rebecca Wragg Sykes

47. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

48. The Secret History, Donna Tartt*

49. The Red Dragon, Thomas Harris

50. The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris

51. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf*

52. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski*

53. Life On Mars, Tracy Smith

54. HERmione, H.D.

55. Nature’s Remedies: Healing Herbs by Jean Willoughby

56. Winter Botany by William Trelease

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amarrymeinbostonwriter · 1 year

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Books read in February 2023.

I finished 6 books in February.

I forgot to add my copy of Tales in the City but I finished that this month too. I finished it the first week of this month and totally forgot. This February felt really long for some reason.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen was an audiobook I listened to.

Wow, most of the books I read this month were either very depressing or otherwise disappointing. Kitchen was the best fiction book I read. While both Hall's and Barker's biographies were well written, engaging and sometimes shocking, they were both pretty sad. After reading about their lives, I feel pretty bad for both of them.

I'm still reading One Last Stop, Old Man and The Sea and The Common Reader.

I DNFed two books (my textbook for a class I dropped and The audiobook version of The Art of Loving because it seemed extremely dated and didn't apply to me at all).

Hope everyone has a good March and that they find books that they enjoy reading!

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