Winter Wonders; the Accidental Feminist; We Others; Dangerous Laughter

Another Grace Chapel Inn book by Melody Carlson, "Winter Wonders" has the ladies looking forward to a little winter break in January after the holidays, but it wasn't meant to be. Cynthia, Louise's daughter, is bringing a famous home and garden guru (think Martha Stewart) to the Inn to try to get her the peace and quiet she needs to buckle down and finish her children's book (which Cynthia is editing). Then Alice gets involved in animal rights issues when she discovers deplorable conditions at the local dog racing track. There was actually quite a lot going on in this one.
"The Accidental Feminist" by M. G. Lord took a look at the films of Elizabeth Taylor from a feminist standpoint. It was interesting, although some of them were a bit of a stretch. For instance, she insists that "A Place in the Sun" is a movie about abortion. Well...I think that's just one small part of that film. It's more (at least in my mind) about class struggle. Anyway, Lord admits that she doesn't think Taylor picked her parts specifically to advance any sort of agenda, and it was a different way of looking at familiar films.
I actually read Steven Millhauser's "We Others" a few weeks ago, except for the last story, which I didn't quite get to finish. It was one of his older stories from "Dangerous Laughter", so when I finished that one today I figured I could now in good conscious say I had finished "We Others" as well. It was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, and I really enjoyed it. Normally I'm not a big short story fan, but I liked almost all of his in both collections. He has a great way of building up tension and making you wonder what comes next. Some of my favorites were "The White Glove", about a boy and a girl who start dating and she starts wearing a white glove on her left hand, which intrigues him. He dreams of sneaking into her bedroom and peeling it off to see what she's hiding. When she finally does reveal her secret, he is so repulsed he never speaks to her again. "The Next Thing" was a treatise on consumerism and just how far we're willing to go and how much we're willing to give up in the name of progress. "Dangerous Laughter" had some really good ones, too, like "The Room in the Attic", about a girl who refuses to be seen in daylight and "The Tower" about a society that, over the course of many generations, builds a tower that pierces heaven. Good stuff.