Yo ok what if there was a Cinderella story where Cinderella is a trans woman and that’s really why her stepmom treats her like shit and won’t let her go to the ball and when the prince and his men come around looking to try the slipper on every woman in the land her stepmom tells the prince there aren’t any women left in the house because she insists that Cinderella is a man, but Cinderella comes out and the prince recognizes her and says something along the lines of “well I’d say that’s a woman if I ever saw one”
“Ella is transgender. She’s known since she was young; being a woman just fit better. She was happier in skirts than trousers, but that was before her stepmother moved in. Eleanor can’t stand her, and after Ella’s father passes she’s forced to revert to Cole, a lump of a son. She cooks, she cleans, and she tolerates being called the wrong name for the sake of a roof over her head. Where else can she go? An opportunity to attend the royal ball transforms Ella’s life. For the first time, strangers see a woman when she walks down the stairs. While Princess Lizabetta invited Cole to the ball, she doesn’t blink an eye when Cinderella is the one who shows. The princess is elegant, bold, and everything Ella never knew she wanted. For a moment she glimpses a world that can accept her, and she holds on tight. She should have known it wouldn’t last. Dumped by her wicked stepmother on the farthest edge of the kingdom, Ella must find a way to let go of the princess and the beautiful life they shared for an hour. She’ll never find her way back. But it’s hard to forget the greatest night of her life when every rose she plants is a reminder.”
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
Yeah! Like, a chronological history atlas. Each chapter covers 100 years or whatever (probably longer periods the farther back you go), and the start of each chapter is a world map, with brief summaries of all the stuff going on, with page numbers to turn to the relevant section. So you could read Egypt’s sections in each chapter only, and get a decent overview of the history of Egypt, or read each chapter wholly and get a sense of what was going on in the world/on a given continent or whatever.
There would have to be careful organization and good writing to help the reader keep track of people and civilizations that span multiple chapters, so that reading about the Roman Empire in the 100′s BC doesn’t feel totally out of context, and especially for groups of people that moved around a bunch. Probably would be done with footnotes, like, ‘hey, last time we saw these guys, they were over here doing this, see section (page number)’.
Ideally, it would cover political/traditional history (wars, important people, etc.) technological history, and social history. So not only do you know what was going on in China when Augustus was emperor, you also have an idea about how the average Roman or Chinese person lived at that time.
That would be such a huge project and would involve so many scholars but it would be SO COOL
A new book has just been released by Cambridge University Press entitled Women’s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia An Anthology of the Earliest Female Authors!
It is an anthology of translations from the ancient Near East of various writings by women. The translations include letters, religious hymns, inscriptions, prophecies, and various other types of texts. All of them considered some of the earliest examples of writing done by women in history. The only downside is that the book is quite expensive right, but hopefully that will change in the future and/or a paperback edition will soon follow.
reblogging this again because this is from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and I’m reading it right now and it’s incredibly awkward to read about my entire life’s problems neatly described by a complete stranger
Fuck this is literally meeeeeeee
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents is right at the top of my psych books list along with Why Does He Do That and Trauma and Recovery.
Would you like to read a book in which this happens?
It’s one of my all-time favorite books. It’s called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. He describes it as an “progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.”
It is written in the form of letters between the citizens of the fictional island of Nollop, an independent nation off the coast of South Carolina and home of Nevin Nollop, who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” That phrase is written in tiles over a statue of Nollop in their town square, and when one night a storm causes one of the tiles to fall, the council decides that it’s a sign from Nollop that they are no longer allowed to use that letter, in speech or writing, on pain of progressive punishments including public beating and up to banishment.
Then another tile falls. Then another.
The citizens, who are all very attached to their words and writing, mount a campaign to come up with a phrase that uses all 26 letters but is shorter than Nollop’s, thus proving that he was not divine and negating all the edicts.
Because the novel is told in the form of letters the citizens write, and this is the genius part…the author must also stop using the letters as they fall. So the book gradually stops using letters until at one point I think they’re down to just five.
The resolution literally made me get up and dance around the room.
It’s clever, creative, and a not-really-veiled-at-all parable about monotheistic oligarchy. It’s not a long book, you can read it in an afternoon.
GO READ IT RIGHT NOW.
WOW I want to read that book
Very rarely is there a book that I must read at any cost This is now one of them
Note: locate book
I actually bought this book because of this post and let me tell you, it was a fucking great decision. Besides having a brilliant concept, it’s also so well written that in the beginning you don’t even notice when another letter is removed. There was one part I had to re-read because I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a single ‘d’ in the last five pages. Seriously, this book is fantastic
I had to read this for high school and I loved it. I have no idea where my copy went though 😦
I’ve owned 5 copies of Ella Minnow Pea because the people I’ve loaned it out to have refused to part with it, ha. Ended up investing in a copy for the Kindle where it’ll always be safe. But yes, it is a very cleverly written book!
This is a great book, all about the work of spinning and weaving, how it developed, and how and why it was women’s work. It makes the great point that women’s work is ephemeral – food, cloth, it’s all things that don’t survive archaeologically, so that it’s something that gets overlooked. The author also knows how to weave herself, and has tried out weaving some ancient cloths, pointing out that it’s only by doing something like that that you can work out practical issues.
One of the things that was really great was the author pointing out that the most plausible reconstruction for the Venus de Milo is of her spinning:
Even better, is that since the book has been written, an artist who makes 3D printed sculpture has made a 3D model of what she would have looked like – and you can buy one for yourself:
just moving along like everyone else 