Hullo,

Since it’s the summer, here are some reviews of books that you might like to read on holiday or in a sunny park. There’s maybe only one book you’ll want to read here, but all of the links here are really good, so I’d recommend reading them and then settling in with a book of your own choosing.

I bought Spinster  last week, and wish I’d read this excellent review before I’d done that (because then I might not have done that):

[M]any magnificent spinsters and their unnamed sisters expand the range of femininity far beyond the familiar territory of the cute, cool, or easily commodified, and ignoring or shunning almost all of this classic spinster pantheon — as Bolick does — has political consequences. Above all, it domesticates the threat that the spinster poses to normative systems of love, sex, and power. There is a reason the word “spinster” has long been a queer-tinged insult with a straight-slicing edge — a reason why Katharine Hepburn, one of cinema’s great spinsters (Summertime! Desk Set! The African Queen!), was devastated in The Philadelphia Story when her ex-husband called her a “married maiden” and her estranged father called her a “perennial spinster.” Historically, spinsterhood has meant a kind of radical unavailability to straight men, implying either rejection of them or rejection by them or both.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/on-spinsters

Here’s a book by interesting person in her own right and identical twin Caroline Paul. She and her twin also make the Wikipedia page on “twins with differing claims to fame”, featured a couple of weeks ago:

Caroline herself is an exceptional person: a former firefighter who spent many years as one of only fifteen women on San Francisco’s 1,500-person Fire Department, a fearless pilot who flies experimental planes, and a terrifically talented writer, author of the memoir Fighting Fire, the historical novel East Wind, Rain, and the funny and poignant micro-memoir Lost Cat, illustrated by her partner and frequent Brain Pickings collaborator Wendy MacNaughton. Yet under the tyranny of celebrity culture, we idolize not the writer, pilot, and firefighter but the Hollywood actor; we lionize the fictional lifeguard on television while her real-life twin spends her days saving real lives from burning buildings and writing excellent books about it.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/17/caroline-paul-almost-her/

This is not a book review but I expect Jess Zimmerman will write a book at some point. She writes about how women erase themselves, how it felt for her to unerase herself, and what we mean when we say “midlife crisis”:

We have the privilege to care about feeling fulfilled, but we don’t always have the freedom to try—and by the time we’re old enough to realize what we might want and believe that we deserve it, it feels too late.

http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/midlife-crisis-any-other-name

Have a great weekend,

Alex.