My project is called Reading as an Elder. I interviewed my grandmother, great-aunts and grandmother’s friends. I was interested in seeing what they liked to read and how their reading habits have changed since the shelter-in-place laws, perhaps assuming they all had started reading more, like I have.
One thing most of them mentioned was how much the accessibility of books and audiobooks have improved in recent years. They also mentioned how endings to stories have been more negative and less clear-cut than they used to be. When asked, “Do you have any observations about how writing has changed? Or not?” my great-aunt responded, “some fiction now does not have a clear ending, less happy endings.”
Another thing my grandmother mentioned is how few books about girls there were when she was growing up, and therefore, how much books such as Candy Woodland and Little Women meant to her.
I believe elderly women’s opinions are usually ignored in favor of millennial women. In fact, no book recommendations by elderly women came up when I googled it. This may be because we live in a culture where people feel the need to read books that are posted on social media. All in all, I hope my project shows how underrepresented elderlyl women’s taste in literature is and what could happen if we pay more attention to their opinions.
Flood, Allison. “Digital Reading Driven by Older Women, Study Claims,” The Guardian, Guardian News & Media Limited. 15 April 3016, Accessed 18 April 2020.
“People Age 65 and Older Are More Likely to Read for Personal Interest,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, D.C. March 05 2018. Accessed April 18 2020.
Bump, Philip. “The Most Likely Person to Read a Book? The College Educated Black Woman.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group. 16 January 2014. Accessed 18 April 2020.
For my final project, I am interested in interviewing old women of different education levels about how much they read of each hendre. I will also ask what they read as kids, what they think of e-books, and how their reading habits have changed since the quarantine.
I am interested in this idea because elderly women are often ignored in the literary landscape—book recommendations always seem to be based of off what Millenials are reading
and reading is a crucial activity in culture right now. I am interested in expanding who we think of when it comes to reading habits. I will start by interviewing my grandmother and finding interview subjects through her. I may also research English professors online.
While researching, I have noticed that older people are seen as less trusting when it comes to reccomedians, and less likely to have good taste. I think it’s a good goal to change whose opinions we most trust.
The dark flood rises starts off with a depressing picture. It describes her and her sick friends, while expressing determination they feel to be the ones in control. It talks about the torment Fran feels about things she still hasn’t accomplished as she grows old.
The story goes slowly and I can’t really think of anything to say about it.
Olive jitterakadge starts with a description that immediately pulls the reader in: “For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes earlier and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.”
His wife, olive, is introduced, obediently talking to him in the kitchen.
It later shows the impression she made on her former student: [m]rs. Kitteridge. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high-cheekboned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back.”
Olive is shown throughout all the details to be brave and independent.
“A different road” has an unsettling start;”[a]n awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine, and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill. Still, after a year had gone by, people in this small New England coastal town of Crosby agreed: Both Kitteridges were changed by the event. Henry, if you met him at the post office now, only lifted his mail as a hello. When you looked into his eyes, it was like seeing him through a screened-in porch. Sad, because he had always been an open-faced and cheerful man, even when his only son had—out of the blue—moved to California with his new wife, something people in town understood had been a great disappointment for the Kitteridges. And while Olive Kitteridge had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite, she seemed less so now as this particular June rolled around. Not a chilly June this year, but one that showed up with the suddenness of summer, days of dappled sunlight falling through the birch trees, making the people of Crosby uncharacteristically chatty at times.”
I’m originally from new York, and liked reading about how nervous olive was to go there for the first time at age 72. It ends by reflecting on how much young people don’t know about old women.
Written in 1950 by Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet is a critical look at women’s relationship with religion. The Hearing Trumpet tells the story of Marian Leatherby, a ninety-two year old ex-patriot British woman in Spain being given a hearing trumpet, right before her son’s family forces her into a nursing home, a religious community in Santa Brigida called Lightsome Hall. She then gets a private interview with a doctor at her retirement home, who obsesses over her glands. Then, another woman at the retirement home dies. They then find out that woman was actually a man. Marian feels like she spend her whole life waiting for something that never happened. “A great deal of my life has been spent waiting, often quite fruitlessly” (page 12) narrator feels like she spend her whole life waiting for something that never happened. “A great deal of my life has been spent waiting, often quite fruitlessly” she waits for adventure, but it never happens. 1950s American culture failed women, making them expect great things that weren’t actually likely to happen. Religion often sets the followers up to believe miraculous things will happen to them. Women in the 1950’s often ended up with nothing but controlling husbands and domestic chores. In my opinion it is not good to completely admire anyone, including God”
I do not know of any religion that does not declare women to be feeble-minded, unclean, generally inferior creatures to males, although most Humans assume that we are the cream of all species. Women, alas; but thank God, Homo Sapiens! Most of us, I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed, leaving us with the thankless hope of pleasing a male animal, probably of one’s own species.”
I do not know of any religion that does not declare women to be feeble-minded, unclean, generally inferior creatures to males, although most Humans assume that we are the cream of all species. Women, alas; but thank God, Homo Sapiens! Most of us, I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed, leaving us with the thankless hope of pleasing a male animal, probably of one’s own species.” This shows the start of women declaring their own rights in religion after early rules of religion favored men. Women’s sexual ties were excessively controlled, and most women were primarily valued for their ability to sexually please men, give birth and do domestic chores.
At first, I was distracted by worrying about my appearance on the zoom camera. Then, I began to enjoy hearing all the perspectives. Even though, I sensed Patricia Powell might’ve thought my question was stupid, I liked hearing her cultural perspectives.
I like the cultures of old women we’re learning about. I hope my writing will grow to include these perspectives.
The Hearing Trumpet starts with the narrator being given a hearing trumpet. She then describes where she lives in a strange digression. She narrates unusually like a personal dialogue.
She then goes on a routine visit to Carmilla, her friend who gave her the trumpet. Their conversation is described so tediously that you can feel their desire to escape their lives.
The narrator mentions feeling like she spent her whole life waiting for something that never happened. Angered after her family decides to institutionalize her and her son says she’d be better off dead, she visits Carmilla again, and thinks how much she will miss her. Packing up her things, she finds her trunk and flashes back to when she bought it in New York. In the institution, she is horrified by how they treat another woman there. It then shifts to arguments with the doctor, then continues to idly describe the boring activities she does. There is then a horribly long speech by a visiting young man that I could not stand to read. Then, a woman at the home does. Another woman, Anna, starts accusing the narrator of things she couldn’t do.
The ending loses me and I can’t comprehend what’s happening.
: “[t]new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summone.”
It flashes to a compzell
ing look into her past: “[y]esrs ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinoi zzz s. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no.”
It’s mysterious and hard to guess what direction the story’s going, or what the writer’s intention is. Then, it reveals the main character has postpartum depression. It gives a tedious explanation of her struggles breastfeeding. It gets quite slow-paced and ends with a positive message of aging:”[n]one would be able to stop her if she picked up Baby and walked out the door. She could turn herself into her grandmother, for whom sleep had become optional in the end; she could turn herself into her mother, too, eating little because it was Baby who needed nourishment. She could become a fugitive from this world that had kept her for too long, but this urge, coming as it often did in waves, no longer frightened her, as it had years ago. She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself. She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her”
“Stepping past” starts off seeming like a stereotypical story of friendship: “[t]hey had become sworn sisters in Ailin’s backyard 50 years ago, her being the oldest of the three and the one to come up with the idea. They were 12 going on 13, their bodies just beginning to fill the grey Mao jackets handed down from their mothers.”
Like many stories, it mentions clothes as an important part of girls’ identity.
The story keeps a pleasant tone while going back to a photograph: “[and{ they could smile on the wall in the indifferent eyes of foreign strangers, as if time had stopped at the photographer’s cramped studio 50 years ago, Ailin thought.”
Coming to Age 