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Good Fiction: Recommendations

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Kitty Hawk

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A thread for book recommendations always seems like a good idea to me, so I'll start one here. As someone who enjoys reading Romantic fiction, I'm always eager to learn of other people's discoveries, in the way of good novels.

Ayn Rand recommended the mystery by Mabel Seeley called The Crying Sisters. AR wrote a screenplay for it, after having convinced Hal Wallis to buy the movie rights to the novel.

Actually, it seemed only an average mystery novel to me. I've since read three other mysteries by Seeley: The Beckoning Door, The Listening House, and The Whispering Cup. The Beckoning Door was on a level with The Crying Sisters. The Listening House was better, and it was Seeley's first novel.

But the best of the bunch was The Whispering Cup. The story is set in Minnesota in the late '30's or early '40's (the novel was written in 1940). One of the main ingredients of the plot is the use of telephone "party lines," where more than one home uses the same line, and can listen in on conversations.

The story revolves around a grain elevator (like Calumet "K"), and one of the main characters is the manager of that grain elevator. He's a business man, and very positively portrayed, although he is one of the many under suspicion for the murders that take place. Another business man is also portrayed in a very positive light. Then there is a bright youngster named "Corny," who is a proto-entrepreneur, with a great sense of life, and integrity. As with most of Seeley's novels, the main character/narrator of the story is a young woman, highly resourceful and competent, and one of the main suspects for the murders. The woman's relationship to one of the men in the novel---the grain elevator manager---exhibits the hero worship that AR described as the essence of femininity:

For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship---the desire to look up to man. "To look up" does not mean dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value-judgments. A "clinging vine" type of woman is not an admirer, but an exploiter of men. Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might lack.

This does not mean that a feminine woman feels or projects hero-worship for any and every individual man; as human beings, many of them may, in fact, be her inferiors. Her worship is an abstract emotion for the metaphysical concept of masculinity as such---which she experiences fully and concretely only for the man she loves, but which colors her attitude toward all men. This does not mean that there is a romantic or sexual intention in her attitude toward all men; quite the contrary: the higher her view of masculinity, the more severely demanding her standards. It means that she never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. It means that a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother---or leader.

"An Answer to Readers (About a Woman President)" Ayn Rand Lexicon, page 166-167.

That description fits the heroine of this mystery very well. As with so many good works of fiction, The Whispering Cup is out of print. It can still be found in the internet used bookstores, though, such as abebooks.com. Give it a try.

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How exactly do you submit reviews to the review section, GC?  Is there an "enter your review" box in the review section, and you just type in your review and  hit "submit"?  Or what is the procedure?

You need to register with the main site, and login -- at which point you should see a "Submit Review" link under the "User Menu" on the left. You can then add your review there. If you have problems, let me know. You can also use the contact page to email me the review, but it will make it easier for me to credit you if you use the website.

Thanks!

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