RW for November 2019

[Trevor]

Sincerest apologies for not getting this done sooner. Thank you Andrea for the reminder :)

Our word for November is 'Labour' or 'Labor', whichever way you spell it

Happy reading

https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8...

[Andrea]

Woohoo and the hunt begins!

[Emily]

The library has TONS of old Labour political party tracts and pamphlets, but I found two fiction books, one of which wasn't on goodreads so of course I had to choose that and add it (it won't come up on search yet), "Labour of Love" by John Stroud.

[Andrea]

I also found a bunch of political Labor books, but with the pile I already have going I knew I wouldn't ever read any of those. I did find Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, but not having high hopes on getting it done. I did find a kids graphic novel The Twelve Labors of Hercules that I will read today just so I can actually get one done for a change.
Love's Labor's Lost
The Twelve Labors of Hercules

[Emily]

Finished it! Labour of Love
Quite a short novel, interesting as it has 60s morals and psychology which is sometimes funny and sometimes horrifying. Gentle little story about a woman running one of a group of homes for looked after children, and struggling with emerging bureaucracy; her own life; the children's parents, wishes and troubles, and day-to-day routine. It's not idealistic, there are real problems and some of them are tackled and some glossed over. I want to know what happened next, but alas there is no sequel.

[Niffer]

I'm a couple of days late, but I blame the chaos of my sister's heart surgery this month. I feel lucky I managed to get any reading done.

I read Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. My review:

I really enjoy books like this, that look at a societal generalization and say, "Well, let's look at history and see what's what." In this case, the generalization is "dating is dead," and the author explores the history of dating, beginning around 1900 when the word began to be used to mean "men and women going out together" all the way through contemporary time. She shows that each generation since then has had a slightly different approach to what it meant to date, and that as the new generation changed the rules the previous one gasped, clutched at their pearls, and believed the changes were wrong, bad, would lead to terrible things, etc.

There were a few times in the book where Weigel's logic seemed a bit strained, or she seemed to wander off on what seemed like a tangent and never seemed to circle back to her point. There were also a couple of times when she made somewhat global statements that I would have liked her to elaborate on. But overall I found the book readable and very interesting. I took some notes of the books she used for sources and will likely be delving more into some of the issues she discussed.

4 stars