Reading Update #5

Contempt by Catherine Crier is a good book dealing with the religious right and their moves towards the judicial system in this country. Some of the major points it deals with are Roy Moore (the Alabama judge who had the dispute over the display of the Ten Commandments) and the Terry Schiavo case.

Daughter of the Game by Tracy Grant was an interesting Regency, if a bit dark. The major plot twist is pretty well telegraphed by the title of the book, although there are some along the way that definitely come out of nowhere. I am going to read the second one.

Cooking Around The World 8-in-1 is one I've had my eye on, and found on a discount rack.

The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry, is the first of the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt novels. It's a pretty decent mystery (I had the killer narrowed down to two people) although the romance in it is very abbrieviated, although fittingly Victorian. I was not aware that she started this series the same year I was born. Other books in the series have been purchased.

There was also a scattering of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys - I was trying to read through what I had purchased so far.

DV

Love My Rifle More Than You by Kayla Williams

I thought this book deserved its own post.

I managed to read through it in about 3 hours, after starting it while they were doing my oil change, and being unwilling to stop reading once I had started.

The author is a female Arabic linguist (who went to school with the husband and various friends) who served in Iraq during the invasion and afterwards, then got out of the military. It's an excellent book, although I wouldn't want my mother to read it. It's raw and honest, and a lot of times during the book, I was nodding - I'd either lived or seen something similar.

So much of what she wrote was painfully true.

Like the fact that a military woman (especially a single military woman) only has two choices - bitch or slut. (The slut sleeps with everyone, the bitch sleeps with everyone except YOU, as the unfunny remark goes.) You can be a whore, or maybe a "good time girl" - or you can be a frigid bitch. Married women at least get the "faithful wife" category, but even we get pressured and propositioned. Yes, by the same men who say stuff like they'd kill their wife if she cheated on them.

Or how it only takes one bad female to screw things for the rest of us. As long as the guys have met that one lazy/incompetent/easy/whiny/tearful female, they feel free to paint all of us with that brush. There's always that one female who trades shamelessly on her sexualality, who flirts incessantly, and who blames bad behavior on PMS. They screw things up. Never mind that we're not allowed to do the reverse.

It points out for anyone who missed it, why the saying is "brothers in arms", and not "siblings in arms". Because despite the fact that we're their sisters-in-arms, we're women first and soldiers second, too much of the time. As the saying goes, "bros before hos". It's alive and well in this Army.

It's also honest about the job linguists face, the different directions they get pulled in.

She also talks about something that I have come up against before. Just because we are in the military does not mean we agree with all the decisions made by the government. But we do our job, and we support those decisions - because our first loyalty is to the men and women with whom we serve. We do the job so everyone can come home in one piece. That's more important to me than any political decision.

This is hands down the best book I have read about being female and being in the Army. Hopefully, the blonde on the cover with the big weapon will become another female face to this conflict, someone to balance out the 2 big ones we have - Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England.

I hope so, at least.