Friday gimp blogging

One of the bonuses of not being bipedal anymore is that my shoes last forever and I can justify buying nice ones if I will love them and wear them for the next decade or more. It's not that I never wear out shoes -- I recently threw away a pair of Born fisherman style sandal shoes that I bought in Tempe, AZ, back in 1996. I just wear them out differently and much more slowly. The soles of my shoes never die, the seaming somewhere eventually gives up or the leather wears away. The red Doc maryjanes pictured above took away the sting of losing the Borns.

It was back in September that Jen Burke of A Life Less Convenient issued the challenge for bloggers to share photos of their bookshelves. Here's part of mine. What you see is mostly books on disability studies, though there is some poetry, fiction, middle eastern/Islamic history, and other randomness at the bottom.

No Pity by Joseph Shapiro is probably still the book I like best for summarizing the history of disability in the United States. Mary Johnson's Make Them Go Away offers the best, most enraging picture of cultural attitudes about disability in America today. But neither of those excellent writers are gimps.

Written by disabled folks themselves, I like Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, edited by poet Kenny Fries, whose Body, Remember is on that bottom shelf. My "to read soon" bookpile is not pictured, but I'm excited about Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, Simi Linton's My Body Politic and the Nebula Award winning sci-fi novel The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, which has a main character with autism.

I met Linton briefly at a disability studies conference in Oakland and cornered her in the bathroom to mention how much I'd enjoyed her first book, Claiming Disability. Oh, the shame.

An excerpt from Kleege's book appeared in the fantastic collection Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture, edited by Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Jo Epstein, and I've thought about it many times since. So, I know Blind Rage will be a cool mix of memoir, history, disability and well, I think, feminism.

To extend the challenge: What does your bookshelf look like?