The 10 Best Books for Young Feminists

At a book festival last year, I bought Rookie Yearbook One, edited by Tavi Gevinson. I had heard about Rookie, the online magazine for teenage girls that Gevinson started in 2011 to fill the gaping void left by the absence of Sassy, the late '80s/early '90s glossy that spoke to girls about sex and sexuality, politics and activism, current events and more without being coy or condescending.

"Our content respects a kind of intelligence in the readers that right now a lot of writing about teenage girls doesn't," Gevinson told the New York Times in 2011. Indeed, Rookie has gone on to cover street harassment, transgenderism, bodily functions such as menstruation, drug and alcohol abuse, surviving in a small town, coming out, and being biracial while also featuring interviews with Aubrey Plaza, John Waters, Joss Whedon, David Sedaris, Daniel Clowes and others, and how-tos on zine making, thrift store shopping, and more.

The best of Rookie's online content has been gathered in Rookie Yearbook One, published in 2012 by Drawn & Quarterly. Flipping through it at the book festival and later in the comfort of my home, I caught myself smiling at the clever, self-aware writing and being thankful that teenage girls today have a publication that speaks to them intelligently about weighty matters and encourages them to be whole human beings. For this reason, I'm not surprised that Rookie Yearbook One is among "The 10 Best Books of the Year for Young Feminists" as determined by the Amelia Bloomer Project, which is part of the American Library Association.

In addition to Rookie Yearbook One, other books the Amelia Bloomer Project picked as being among the best for young feminists include A Little F'd Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word, by Julie Zellinger; Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond, by Lilly Ledbetter; Dolores Huerta: A Hero to Migrant Workers, by Sarah E. Warren; and Womanthology: Heroic, by various authors. These books and five more were selected for their significant feminist content, excellence in writing, appealing format, and age appropriateness for young readers.

To see all 10 of the best books for today's young feminists, go to THIS LINK.

* Above image from rookiemag.com

What Books Are on John Waters' Bookshelf?

Baltimore's native son John Waters is known for his outré tastes. The filmmaker is also famous for being a big lover of books. So one can only imagine what bizarro selections make up Waters' personal library. But...you might be surprised.

Image of John Waters via http://www.post-gazette.com

Waters, along with other celebrated artists and authors, have collaborated with New York's Strand Bookstore to curate literary collections that are collectively known as "The Author's Bookshelf." John Waters, comics artist Art Spiegelman, and authors Junot Diaz, Chuck Klosterman, Gary Shteyngart and many more have put together a selection of must-read books that can be seen (and purchased) in person at The Strand or online at the bookstore's website.

Looking online at John Waters' picks, I can that say some are hardly shocking: there's Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, by Jimmy McDonough; The Sluts, by Dennis Cooper; And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder, by Deborah Spungen; and Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, by Emily Toth. 

Yet there are other books from John Waters' bookshelf that, going by his often campy public image, I didn't think that he would be into, including: Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short; The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by Douglas Brinkley; and Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry, by Mel Watkins.

Introducing his picks, Waters says, "Here are books that will help you become a well-rounded, happy neurotic who can finally reject your own guilt and shame and embrace the outer limits of human behavior." I don't know about eradicating guilt and shame, but the books he chose will definitely enlighten you about the lives of outsiders, whether they're poor African Americans, ostracized authors, punk rock groupies, or makers of soft-core porn.

To see all of the choice selections on John Waters' "Author's Bookshelf," go HERE.

John Waters Reads from 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'

On the occasion of Banned Books Week, which runs from September 30 through October 6 this year, John Waters appeared at a San Francisco bookstore to read from an often-banned book, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

John Waters with more wholesome reading.
Photo source: http://www.thefader.com

The cult filmmaker, compiler of quirky CD collections, and occasional voice actor was at City Lights Bookstore, itself no stranger to controversy over books deemed obscene. (In the most famous instance, City Lights was targeted by both local and federal authorities in the late 1950s for printing and selling Howl, a slender and subversive book of poetry by countercultural icon Allen Ginsberg.) On Wednesday, October 3, 2012, Waters sat down to read from Lawrence's sexually frank literary masterpiece at City Lights. You can watch a video of the in-store reading below.