Global Feminist Ethics, edited by Rebecca Whisnant and Peggy DesAutels, is one of the most recent works to grapple with the complexity of establishing [moral] feminist constructions to explain and solve key problems facing women globally and in their particular cultures.  There are some very interesting contributions in this volume that fully examine issues ranging from the feminization of poverty to peacekeeping and a feminist ethic of care.

One can see that pleasure reading and recent research on gender and dance mingle in these, my favorite books of the last few years: Havana Heat, Bronx Beat by Hernando Calvo Ospina, describes the history of salsa from slave ship to commercialism.  It tells of a colorful music history and explains the origins of passionate lyrics.  I also admit to loving Kiss and Tango by Marina Palmer, soon to be made into a movie. This novel is based on Palmer’s experiences with men and dance as she rises to tango stardom in Buenos Aires.

For pleasure I read historical mysteries and have recently been reading Ariana Franklin’s series. She sets her mysteries in 1171, medieval England and her main character is a female coroner, a woman trained in Salerno as a doctor who ends up in England investigating murders for King Henry.

A recent scholarly read  that I recommend for anyone interested in women and history is Gerda Lerner’s collection of essays Living With History, Making Social Change.  Gerda has collected a series of essays in which she reflects on her life work and the important of women’s history to the historical profession.

Chicana/o Cultural Studies is a theoretical reader that brings together different perspectives related to an emergent area . The essays represent a broad range of perspectives on culture focusing on media, performance, visual studies, and literature as they capture the shifting terraine of Chicana/o cultural studies.

Menendez's first novel, LOVING CHE, probes deeply into what some have perceived as Cuba's continued infatuation with Che Guevara. The novel provides alternating narratives of intrigue and romance as the protagonist attempts to reconstruct her family history. The writing is innovative and fresh in that it offers a perspective that transcends the somewhat reactionary posture which has been prevalent in other works and represented by the media at large. Simply stated, one leaves this novel wanting more.

In Ordinary Violence, by Mary White Stewart, the author convincingly and eloquently links the "taken for granted realities that shape the lives of men and women in every society" and shows us how these cultural structures assure that there is no place in the world where it is "safer or better to be a woman."

I loved A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, author of another of my favorite books, The Sparrow. In the story of Charlotte Blum, a Belgian teenager who hopes to escape the Nazis by trudging over the Alps to Italy, Russell gives us a haunting novel about real communities in Northern Italy and the ordinary heroes who sheltered thousands of Jews during WWII.

I belong to a book club and the texts selected at our monthly meetings make up most of my non-academic readings. Most recently, I read Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland which is set in post 9/11 New York and London describing a young Dutch banker's flawed attempts to keep his life together. Characters and settings are very well observed and the precision and beauty of O'Neill's language is remarkable.

I also enjoyed Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. The novel begins in Paris in March 1854 when beautiful Eliza Lynch meets Francisco Solano Lõpez , one of the richest men in Paraguay and then follows him to Asunciõn . Intriguing characters and plot and language that alternates between the poetic and the ironic.

In 2005, two Black British women writers, Helen Oyeyemi and Zadie Smith, published brilliant examples of novels that "write back" to the classics of English fiction. Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl uses situations drawn from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) to address the plight of a creative, but troubled, young girl who feels equally unwelcome in Lagos and in London and who conjures up a malevolent Nigerian "double" as her companion. Smith's On Beauty reframes E. M. Forster's Howards End(1910) as the story--sometimes serious and sometimes satirical--of a bi-racial academic family moving between Massachusetts and London, while dealing with cultural, racial, and gender politics in a post 9/11 world. Both are extraordinary works that demonstrate the continued power of the novel as a genre for women authors and readers.

Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism
One of the first and best studies of British feminist fiction of the late 19th Century, by a scholar on the University of Delaware faculty.

Lensey Namioka, Who's Hu?
An unjustly neglected comic novel about the coming-of-age of a Chinese-born teenager growing up in suburban America of the 1950s, facing racism and sexism on her way toward becoming a mathematician.

Academic title - GIRLS: FEMININE ADOLESCENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL THEORY  by Catherine Driscoll

Driscoll presents a theoretical analysis of the cultural construction of feminine (as opposed to female) adolescence. Girlhood, Driscoll argues, is made up and she looks at some of the many forces that contribute to the emergence of feminine adolescence and girl culture as twentieth century categories.

Novel - AMERICAN WIFE by Curtis Sittenfeld

Sittenfeld is the author of widely acclaimed PREP.  In AMERICAN WIFE the main character is based on former first lady Laura Bush. The book is both entertaining and thought provoking. The reader (or at least this reader)is left wondering how closely the thoughts of the fictional first lady represent those of Laura Bush herself.