20books16 Challenge #3 - A Book Recommendation from Matilda

As a kid, I always read books with main characters similar to myself, which is why I enjoyed the silliness of Junie B. Jones, the curiosity of Nancy Drew, and most of all, the book nerd in Roald Dahl’s fictional character, Matilda.

But while I simply admired Matilda’s genius, I was overly fascinated with her extensive and mature reading list. This is why, as an adult, I’m still hung up on it. I’ve chosen to read a book on young Matilda’s list for our 20 books in 2016 book challenge – a book I heard about from a fictional character.

Set in Victorian England, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy is considered a classic. As I started reading, I realized quickly that this book contains some seriously heavy content for a young girl to be reading – even if she is fictional. Dahl definitely wanted his readers to grasp Matilda’s maturity.

In the book, beautiful and naïve Tess Durbeyfield is seduced by an upper class man, which leads to a child out of wedlock. This event makes her poor life even more difficult as she falls in love with another man only to be shunned by him, becomes entangled in a murder, and eventually dies a brutal death.

Like I said, a heavy reading topic for a girl in elementary school.

Though Tess of the D’Urbervilles contains some intense material and difficult language, I do not regret reading this one. It reveals the twisted nature of society’s rules and the condescending and hypocritical attitudes of men towards women in Victorian England. Matilda has many books on her list like this one with strong female leads, including Jane Eyre.

So thanks, Matilda, for the book suggestion for our 20 Books in 2016 challenge.

(In honor of e-book week, I would also like to add that this was the first book I read completely in e-book format.)

Adele Briscoe Looscan, Daughter of the Republic

What better way to kick off Women’s History Month than with Adele Briscoe Looscan, the first female president of the Texas State Historical Association! 

A “woman of her time,” she was “a combination of nineteenth-century tradition and twentieth-century progressivism. She flourished in the society of both women and men. She earned the respect of both. She was shaped by circumstance and by her heritage as a daughter of the Republic of Texas and was motivated throughout her life by her dedication to it.”

Adele Briscoe Looscan: Daughter of the Republic by Laura Lyons McLemore - the fourth in our Texas Biography Series - is now available!

James Farmer on the Civil Rights Movement

"The dead will not return, and our martyrs will stay at peace. We survivors have got a second wind, and the young will draw their first.

Martin left us with a dream unrealized and a promise unfulfilled. Our nation deceives itself with the fiction that the task is complete and racism is dead and all is well. The myth surrounds us that America has suddenly become color-blind, and that all that remains is an economic problem.

No greater lie has ever been told, and the tellers of it, if they have eyes to see and minds to think, must know it.

The tired among us must recharge our batteries. The uninitiated must learn to gird their loins. We have not finished the job of making our country whole.”

excerpted from Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement

My Blind Date with a Book

As a single girl trying to forget that Sunday was Valentine’s Day, I was super excited when TCU Press hosted a “Blind Date with a Book” sale.  I knew that if I needed to I could just say “yeah, I have a blind date” when people asked about my un-exciting Valentine’s plans. Part of the thrill of getting a new book is not knowing what’s going to happen in the book, and the event just added to that excitement. And man, it was hard to choose a book! I wanted to take the entire table home with me, but that seemed a little unrealistic.

But it turned out that I was really lucky. I wound up getting the book that I had stared at a dozen times at the Press and had wanted to read. And no, I didn’t cheat and look for this book before it was wrapped up (though I was tempted to). I was good and made sure that I chose a book that would be a surprise.  But the best surprise was that Dearest Virginia just so happened to fit perfectly into our #20books16 challenge! Our TCU Press #20books16 challenge is an awesome list of challenges that range from “a book with a purple cover” to “a book from your home state,” and as a native Texan and a Horned Frog, I could cross that one off of my list. Dearest Virginia, edited by Gayle Hunnicutt, is about her family who lived in the Fort Worth area. The letters in the book are from the 1940s, which I haven’t read about much so I will be getting a new narrative from my “adopted hometown” (though I’ll still always be a Houston girl).  

Now I’m not going to lie and say that I have the book all finished, with my English-major class load I’m already swimming (or drowning) in books. But Dearest Virginia has been a wonderful book to use as a break from my studies. It's a wonderful story composed of letters from a solider home to his wife. I look forward to getting to know the story more and, of course, for my next book challenge on the list!

-Kit

The Story of a Freedmen's Community in Texas

Family members pose with a reaper, used to gather hay in the fields. This is the only known photograph of the original Cheney residence, which burned in 1946.

“As the name suggests, the Garden of Eden was always a fertile place, both in terms of its rich soil that produced bountiful vegetation for decades and in terms of the strong people who occupied the land. . . .

Major and Malinda Cheney, the patriarch and matriarch of the Sanders family.

We had been steeped in the teachings of family, understanding from an early age that there was something special in that clan that had survived and flourished against incredible odds.

Bob Ray Sanders has not only had a significant career with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram but also with KERA public television and radio. Bob Ray is shown here at the microphone shortly after KERA-FM went on the air in 1974. Courtesy KERA.

I was patriarch Major Cheney’s great-grandson; Drew was his great-great-grandson, and we knew that we were part of a legacy that was still being built by my father and his. We grew up knowing the stories of how this was a family which, although descendants of a slave, had no fear of white people, and thus was a family in a position to help people of all colors. . . .

A. J. "Drew" Sanders, the author, with a family automobile circa 1955.

This is the story of a family - and a community that grew up around it - whose ancestors shook off the shackles of slavery, refused to be cowed by prejudice and discrimination, and resisted the temptation to hate even those who sometimes hated them.

Drew’s book tells the true tale of a family tree deeply rooted in a garden - The Garden of Eden.”

20books16 Challenge #1

Surprise, surprise! We decided to kick off our #20books16 Book Challenge with a book with a purple cover, History of Texas Christian University by the inimitable Colby D. Hall. What better way for a Horned Frog to celebrate purple than with a history of our own beloved institution?

20 Books in 2016

Calling all bibliophiles! 

Join us in our 20 Books in 2016 Book Challenge!