How to Get Into the Twin Palms
by Karolina Waclawiak
Two Dollar Radio, July 17, 2012
192 pages / $16  Preorder from Two Dollar Radio

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Radio Iris
by Anne-Marie Kinney
Two Dollar Radio, May 2012
208 pages /  $16  Buy from Two Dollar Radio or Amazon

When I was a teenager, I didn’t understand feminism and thought feminists were whiny and annoying. I know from teaching freshman undergrads that this is a common way of thinking. We are told we are a progressive society—sexism and racism are things of the past. I grew up in a household with an Italian matriarch grandmother who regularly attacked my grandfather with household kitchenware. My father was a truck driver and my mother had a graduate degree and made all the money, so it seemed to me that the women were the ones with the power. I didn’t notice the rest of what was going on around me. I thought it was normal to stay with abusive men, men who didn’t come home, who had women on the side, who broke plates over your head. I thought that braving through abuse is just what we, as women, must do. If anything goes wrong, it is the woman’s fault, because men will do what they will. The woman’s job is to stay.

When boys bashed my head into the walls at school, they would hold my neck against the cold tile and ask me, “Does it hurt?”

“No.” I’d say. Steely like I didn’t care. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Every so often I will feel a little pool of hunger open up in me, and the only thing that can quell this need are books by women, about women. There is something that is wanting and it has nothing to do with men. I need a safe space where the line between the story and me is permeable. When I am in these moods, I will trust the author more if she is a woman, in the same way I don’t want someone who doesn’t also have curly hair to cut my hair. I want the person who conceives the book to know me, to know what being a woman is. This is not to say that I don’t think men should write books about women or women should write books about men. I think they should and of course I will read them—we all do. The beautiful thing about writing or reading is the discovery of a life other than your own. Sometimes, though, there are pieces of me that need speaking to, and the timbre of the voice comes from the magical synthesis of me, a woman, reading a book by a woman about a woman.

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IQ84
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2011.
944 pages / $30.50  Buy from Amazon

One

Please do not read this or any other review if you intend to read IQ84. A Murakami novel is best read without knowledge of its plot.

Few books are about life itself.

Part of the reason we live is to see what happens next. Will we go to college? Go on a road trip? Whom will we marry? When? Will we have children? Will we move? Will we get that job? Meet eyes with a girl who reminds us of someone we once knew? What will we have for dinner?

IQ84 is alive with its own life. Start from the beginning and see what happens next. The less you know, the more fun the discovery will be. All you need to know is this:
The book takes place in Tokyo. There are two main characters, Tengo and Aomame. You must bring to this book your own preconceptions about everything—God, existence, love, morality—not mine or anyone else’s. Your reading will be your own.

Your wrists may hurt as you read—the novel is almost 1000 pages. It’s a heavy tome because it’s a whole universe. The pain in your wrists will be worth the wormhole.

Now get out of here.

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