i’ve been reading a book of award winning literary short stories and a book of kinda trashy post-apocalyptic speculative fiction short stories and guess which book displays more jaded contempt for humanity hint it’s not the one with all the nuclear fallout
#how do people survive without sci fi#i have no fucking idea#seriously all these lit shorts are so weirdly cruel and cold#people living and dying and loving each other and apparently that’s meaningless and absurd#all the great machinations and dreams of human beings and the lives they build with one another amount to nothing#meanwhile in the wasteland people are reinventing love#dancing in the acid rain and diving for the scrap metal prayers of a distant age#and learning over and over again how to live#those are stories worth reading#those are stories worth telling#sigh
My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.
Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.
”—Bilbo Baggins is a girl: Until children’s books catch up to our daughters, rewrite them. (via sashimigrade)