Tuff Girl

I was at a bookstore today. I told my wife that I needed something to read; my stock was getting low, and, to be honest, some of the things I'd picked up weren't quite hacking it. One, a military fiction, was arduous to read; I was actually reading it for a sense of what strategies might be used in a war, but I was having to work my way through it. There are three more books out there waiting to be read, and, sad to say, they're all like that -- about something, but you have to think while reading -- nothing that just glides onto the brain and sucks you into its world. I want to read them -- but it'd be truer to say that I want to have read them.

So, I said, I need something different, some kind of fiction that I don't ordinarily read. Which is how I came to buy a copy of a novel called Gladiatrix, about a woman who is a Spartan gladiator (I think that title's fairly lame), and is roped into fighting in the Roman games. Think 'Xena meets Caesar'. This is about as far as what I normally read as I could easily see, so - we'll try it.

But on the way home, I was thinking about how the underlying message of the book is that a woman can be just as tough and ferocious as a man -- no need to be a weak, simpering person using feminine wiles to make your way through life. This is a message I occasionally give to my daughter, so I thought that perhaps she'd like this book. Maybe not, I thought. I told her about it, and said 'If you want to read it some time, just let me know'. She scanned the back quickly, looked up, and said, brightly "How about right now?"

Don't lose it, kiddo.