Discovering bell hooks

A friend suggested I check out bell hooks after a really good discussion at work. I'm in the middle of reading "All About Love: New Visions" and "Feminism is for Everybody."

Neil and I started reading "New Visions" together, and the same reasons that I love it so far are the same reasons it drives Neil crazy. Go figure.

It's the first noon-fiction work I have really gotten into. It doesn't read like a text book, but I don't think hooks is exactly preachy, either. She simply tells the reader what she thinks, how she's feeling, and why, drawing heavily on personal experience and quoting a few other authors, sociologists and psychologists along the way.

Hooks contends that Americans no longer know how to love - that we confuse affection and care with love. Someone who is abusive does not love the person he or she is abusing. The short book focuses on different subjects every chapter - familial love, passionate love, greed, religion and spirituality, etc. Love should be more about respect -- you should cherish those who stand by, who you feel most comfortable around ... when it is all too easy to take them for granted and take things out on them. But doing that is not love.

This isn't to say that I agree with everything she has to say, and I don't think you have to in order to enjoy this book. It simply challenges you to question our society's views on love, how the media perceives love, and what it means to love.

More later, once I finish it.