BAND: Blogger’s Alliance of Nonfiction Devotees

Amy introduced me to BAND recently on her blog. I have decided to sign up. They discuss a different question each month. The January question:is “What book or books have you used or are you using to support a goal, resolution, or project?”

My goal is to broaden my reading to include more global perspectives on women’s lives, especially from women’s autobiographies and memoirs. The reading I intend to do this year will contribute to that goal along with the novels I intend to read.

If there is any larger pattern to my readings over the years it is my interest in women’s own stories, but in the past I have mostly read black and white women from the United States. I like autobiography and memoirs because in them women tell how they organize and interpret their own lives. They make the claim that what they say is true. We cannot just dismiss that claim, but their words are always affected by their own particular viewpoint. For better or worse, their personal “truths” are not always the same as the “truths” their culture, or outside researchers, give them. For me that is the problem and the fun of reading them.

I also continue to read and enjoy men’s stories, but theirs are the more familiar and mainstream voice. Women’s voices give a view from the “underside” of a culture; one the culture would often just as soon ignore. They show how women may support or subvert their culture’s definitions of themselves.