Divided into sections titled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering," Changing My Mind is a book of "occasional essays," which Smith describes as "written for particular occasions, particular editors." Because of this structure, the collection doesn't feel particularly unified, but that isn't necessarily a weakness. Different readers will likely find different essays to love, but even those that don't grab the heart tend to engage the brain. Not having read any George Eliot, I found "Middlemarch and Everybody" hard going at first, and all the essays in "Reading" are pretty unapologetic about the specialized knowledge they require for full enjoyment. On the other hand, Smith's writing usually had the effect of making me really want to read the book she was talking about, especially Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Smith writes,

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...

Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

A more evocative description of literary identification I've never read, and Smith's examination of the ways her blackness does and doesn't influence the way she reads Hurston will resonate with anyone who's ever found a "sister" on the page, of any race. It also provides a corrective to the opposite but equally restrictive notions that we can only enjoy books whose writers we identify with culturally, and that cultural identification has no place in the literary experience.

There was a strain of nastiness in Smith's novel On Beauty — characters who lacked physical self-confidence sometimes seemed like the novel's whipping boys (or girls) — and that nastiness occasionally resurges in Changing My Mind. In "Two Directions for the Novel," it's pretty clear that Smith thinks writer Joseph O'Neill has chosen the wrong direction. Of a passage from his novel Netherland, she writes, "an interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing." "Two Directions" makes an interesting argument for Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder as a model for fiction that gains new flexibility by breaking through the restrictions not just of attractive language but of human psychology. But can't fiction writers learn to praise one kind of writing without denigrating another? Is literature really a zero-sum game?

In a way, though, Smith's meanness just added to the growing conviction I had as I read Changing My Mind: that I was being granted a peek into the idiosyncratic brain of a very, very interesting person. This conviction reached its apex with Smith's film reviews. Smith claims in the very moving "Dead Man Laughing" that at her audition for a comedy troupe at Cambridge, "I wasn't funny. Not even slightly." She appears to have rectified this. Here she is on Get Rich or Die Tryin', addressing Fiddy directly:

I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: "I'm in it for the money." "For what?" "Sneakers." "Anything else?" "A gun." "What you need that for?" "I don't know." I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voiceover: "Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war." I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: "So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid."

And sometimes Smith is just bizarre. In her review of The Weather Man, she writes,

I think I found the film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, the film's central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in the film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It's an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagine Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years. I don't want to tell you any more about it — it's best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind.

This is basically an anti-review, and Smith's general approach to film reviewing is so funny and ad hoc and fucking weird — yet so frequently spot on — that it made mean wish she hadn't quit doing it in 2006. More than that, it made me wish I still wrote film reviews. Changing My Mind may be most inspiring to other writers — I don't know of anyone else who actually likes essays on writing, even ones as smart as Smith's "That Crafty Feeling." But anybody who appreciates frank and well-informed and slightly off-center thinking will likely find what I did — that Smith makes one want to read more, think more, and generally be smarter, which is about the best thing a writer can do.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Amazon]

It's risky territory, as there's a fine line between crushing and actual jealousy. And Shafrir acknowledges that the cultivation of a girl crush isn't always simple. She writes,

[A]s we grow older, finding women to look up to becomes, like everything else, a trickier minefield to navigate. As a journalist in New York City, I've found that media is an especially fraught industry for these kinds of relationships. Looking for a formal "mentor" seems forced; worshiping someone from afar, creepy; deciding one of your friends or co-workers is really cool and doing everything she does, single white female-y. And frenemies and backstabbers lurk behind every door. The intern you thought was interested in learning the ropes from you is actually just interested in taking your job.

However, the bulk of her article turns out to be, not a Lucinda Rosenfeld-style envy-fest, but a sweet exploration of women's admiration for other women. She quotes attorney Jasmine Moy, who says, a girl crush is "pretty much any woman who is funny and smart and talented and successful and pretty. Crushes are the things you get if you're not the 'I'm jealous, therefore I hate them' kind of person." Several women she interviews report crushes on author/illustrator Luann Shapton. Shapton is an art director at The New York Times, a novelist, an Elle columnist, and the co-owner, with her fiance, of "a beautifully restored farmhouse in North Salem, N.Y." There are plenty of ingredients for haterade here, but Shafrir's interviewees offer only love. "She just seems to have a really lovely life," says one Shapton admirer.

Shapton, for her part, is gracious in crush-dom. She says,

I've received a few emails from younger women which is nice, but weird since I certainly don't feel like I have anything figured out. If they ask for career advice, I try to explain that I didn't really plan a career-I was able to make up my jobs along the way, and I advise them to do the same. I didn't ever decide on a single course of action. But that basically makes you-for a long time-broke, obscure, somewhat unreliable and scattered. Trying to answer the question 'What do you do?' would give me hives.

It wouldn't be that hard to make fun of this, to imagine Shapton lounging around her farmhouse, saying "oh, this old thing?" But one of the great canards of armchair sociology is the idea that women don't help each other, that the glass ceiling stays in place because women are busy catfighting each other beneath it. So it's nice to read about women being nice, and not fake-nice either, but actually sincerely in awe of and respectful of one another.

If I had to pick a celebrity girl crush, it would probably be Zadie Smith — fantastically successful young novelist, married to another successful young novelist, beautiful, likes Fawlty Towers, and once toured with They Might Be Giants. But one of my biggest girl crushes was not on a celebrity — it was on a girl who transferred to my college when I was a senior. She had complicated, impressive hair, dressed like a visitor from a more awesome universe, had her own website, published a zine as a teenager, wrote fiction, took photos, and after graduation moved into an apartment with her boyfriend (now husband), where they read Eliot to one another and covered the walls with art by their friends. I was sure she was too cool to ever be friends with me. Years later, after we'd already become close, she confessed she had thought the same thing about me. Now we both have our own websites, and although I think she still has better hair, I get to give her advice about teaching and making clam pasta. Sometimes the best girl crushes go both ways.

Fantasy Girl Crushes [Daily Beast]

Included are clips from Monty Python's "dead parrot" sketch, several Fawlty Towers episodes, and Smith's brother's comedy routine. Performing under the name "Doc Brown," her brother delivers a bizarre rap on "equestrian dressage." Smith says their late father would have liked Doc's act because it uses no bad language. She also says that comedy is one of the few places where people feel comfortable talking about death and despair, and that she envies comedians for the "pure enjoyment" they give people. [The New Yorker]

Smith's father was the kind of man who "took a perversely British satisfaction in the diagnosis of cancer: absolutely nothing good could come of this, and the certainty of it seemed almost to calm him." The comedy he liked was similarly dark, and after Smith went to college, the comedy they both enjoyed was the only thing they could still bond over.

Hancock and his descendants served as a constant source of conversation between my father and me, a vital link between us when, class-wise, and in every other wise, each year placed us farther apart. As in many British families, it was university wot dunnit. When I returned from my first term at Cambridge, we couldn't discuss the things I'd learned, about Anna Karenina, or G.E. Moore, or Gawain and his staggeringly boring Green knight, because Harvey had never learned them — but we could always speak of Basil.

This seems to be a common experience of children who are the first in their families to go to college, and one that's seldom discussed. Though Smith's essay uses comedy as a lens to discuss her father's death, the story is bittersweet and only occasionally funny. The one funny thing (not funny haha) she does talk about is keeping her father's ashes in a Tupperware sandwich container, and taking a taste of the ashes.

I put my finger in the dust of my father and put the dust in my mouth and swallowed it, and there was something very funny about that — I laughed as I did it.

But alas, Zadie never tells us what her father tastes like. We wonder if it's chicken.

[Image via Britannica]

Dead Man Laughing [New Yorker — not online yet]

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

• The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

But even if more books are written and purchased by women (Byatt's assumption that schoolchildren are taught more women's literature is just wrong...look at any high school reading list), the fact remains that only eleven women have won the Nobel Prize for literature, and that novels focusing on "women's issues" continue to be critically underrated. In the past ten years, three women have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for those counting at home, that's 30%). Even the judges of the Orange Prize themselves are complaining about excessive number of "domestic dramas" written by women.

Kirsty Lang, the chair of a panel of judges (including, um, Lily Allen!) for the Orange Prize, told the Guardian, "Reading 120 books I did find myself thinking, 'Oh god, not another dead baby'...There were a hell of a lot of abused children and family secrets." But then Lang corrects herself, saying, "Yes, there were a lot of domestic dramas. Do I have a problem with that? Not really. Most fiction readers are women and we like our reading to reflect our experience. Women will write about domestic life because that is the reality of women's lives. I'd like to say the opposite, but it wouldn't be true."

But what makes one book inherently more valuable than any other? Does a subject matter of politics or war make for a categorically "better" novel than one about "abused children" and "family secrets?" Shouldn't the quality of the writing and the structural integrity of a book be the most important thing? Until all books are judged equally, I don't have a problem with women getting their own cash prize for fiction. Harriet Hastings, the "project director" of the Orange Prize had the best attitude towards the critics, "Although major prizes have been won by women, the value of the Orange is as a celebration of women's fiction." I'll drink to that.

Women's Fiction Prize 'Infected By Misery Memoirs' [Times of London]
Tim Lott: Orange Prize For Women Is Sexist [Telegraph]
Women's Fiction Prize 'Infected By Misery Memoirs' [Guardian]