Hey, Bitch!

I've seriously curtailed my magazine purchasing in these recessionary times. When I'm flush, one of my luxuries, which feels almost as embarrassing as porn, is the purchase of expensive European fashion magazines. Slightly contradictorily, I have also mostly stopped the acquisition of the paper version of Bitch Magazine (Feminist Response To Pop Culture). Bitch Media is a nonprofit concern based out of Portland, OR which also has a lending library, a political agenda, and a really wonderful blog.

The blog is really what I wanted to talk about here. It has many contributors, and touches on wide ranging subject matter, but the primary book blogger, Chally Kacelnik, has really blown me away of late. Part of the issue is that our tastes and interests overlap to a remarkable degree (once or twice I've seen one of her posts and said, "Crap! I was going to do a post on _____ this week, too!"). She's written about George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Morgan La Fay, why Harry Potter isn't a girl, crime novels and James Tiptree Jr. She recently wrote a post about romance novels that I just love, as it says pretty much exactly about the genre what I would like to write. About how needlessly dismissed and problematic they are. I don't know much about her, even after some fairly wide-ranging googling. She's an arts student in Sydney who blogs about books, and about being a disabled person. She's awesome. Read her.