“Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I actually haven't seen many Tina Fey movies and none of the television she's involved in (unsurprising as this is Australia (resisting the impulse to capitalise those last three words as if I were talking about SPARTA)), so I was a bit lost for a great portion of this book. I've never watched any Saturday Night Live, so all of the references were pretty much lost on me altogether. That aside, it was a good read; Tina Fey's sense of humour and writing style were engaging, and, even if I was not entirely used to her rather brusque sense of humour, I enjoyed it. A good read.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I saw the movie of The Help before I read the book - surprisingly I don't prefer one to the other! I liked both movie and book about equally, though the prettiness of the early 60s dresses nearly tips the movie over further into my favour. I found it a very human, believable story. It sucked me into the world of Jackson Mississipi, good and proper and got me hooked. One thing that annoyed me about it, a little, was the focus on how the antagonist looked all the time. I know, I know, it's a novel - descriptions are meant to serve a thematic purpose and everything was from the first person perspective of one of the three main characters anyway, but it just bothered me. One bit of narrative went on about how the antagonist dressed in kiddy clothes - another pointed out her big bottom. It annoyed me. Women picking on how other women look in this manner just doesn't seem like a mature way to deal with conflict. I might grouse a bit about Lady Gaga wearing a meat dress, but I don't consider her a personal enemy. Nor do I think myself particularly mature for finding fault in her wardrobe. Just a minor annoyance.

“When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”

Just wrote that enormous rant about Lewis Carroll.

But I've actually read a lot more than just that one book recently.

I can't actually remember most of the books I've read, which is quite sad.
Besides the Lewis Carroll biography I know I've read:

How to Be a Woman (really can't figure out which parts of that need capitalisation.
I am very tired.)

Caitlin Moran is a brilliant writer. Her writing style is entertaining (though the flashbacks in present tense were just plain annoying) and she chooses her topics cleverly, like a the editor of Dolly magazine or something. (I am really very tired!)

How to be a Woman is basically just a book about her personal experience of growing up as a member of the female gender and her opinions about it, expressed colloquially and intimately. OK, so she spends most of the book talking about female body parts and what we should call them, with a little bit of chat about motherhood and porn and other interelated things. Of course Moran is waaaaaay over on the left, (for the interested, I like to think of myself as apolitical, which is a lazy way of saying I think both sides of the political scope are morons) saying things like 'porn is not bad if it objectifies men and women equally' which is, in my personal and colloquial opinion, absolute rubbish, but hey, she says it pretty entertainingly.

I don't want to come down on people who drink or anything, even if they do it regularly, (alcoholism is not OK, though) but I just find it difficult to take seriously that new brand of comedy that some women seem to be espousing recently - the kind in which every paragraph contains a humourous reference to drugs and alcohol. Seriously? Can you have any sort of fun whilst sober? Do you have to be off your face in order to be funny? I don't drink much - mostly coz my crowd ain't a drinking crowd and I don't really like the taste anyway. So I don't get all this 'being a liberated woman means being allowed to abandon diginity in a slobby drunken mess on the floor all the time' stuff. I don't think that's a good thing for persons of any gender to be doing. And if you need alcohol in order to have a good time I think you might be the one with the inhibition problem. Jokes centred around drugs and alcohol, whether the comedy issues from men or from women, just aren't what I find funny. It's like listening to junior high schoolers make jokes about sex. It just seems immature and unfunny to me.
And that's what this whole book felt like, after I had finished it. When I was reading it I didn't agree with much but enjoyed myself rather. At the end I was left with a pervading sense of bitterness and emptiness that bothered me in a special way. Probably because of the abortion chapter, in which the author tries to approach abortion from a thoroughly pro-choice viewpoint and ends up just sounding wretched about the whole thing, despite, or perhaps because of her repeated disclaimers that her personal experience didn't haunt her at all. I couldn't take lightly the death of her baby, and when she tried to it just felt sick and more than a little tired and sad.

I'd love to read more of Moran's writing, because she is quite funny, and sometimes insightful, but I won't be recommending this book to anyone who feels any confusion over 'how to be a woman'.