Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

4 - On Not Knowing Greek - Virginia Woolf: blogged Elsewhere, although technically this is an essay rather than a book.

One Perfect Day - Rebecca Mead

This was my deliberate antidote to all the wedding nonsense. Mead is a writer for the New Yorker and she has gone and researched just how insane the wedding industry is. Now, the UK isn't in quite such dire straits as the US, but it's going that way - and certainly the context of the ever-increasing commodification of the bride and groom makes me aware of our attractive state in terms of people wanting us to set up wedding lists and so forth (currently battling against G's natural tendency to minimalism).

Incidentally, if you want to know the sheer range of tat available and being sold as indispensible to brides (and believe me, it is to brides and not grooms), go have a look at Beverly Clark Bridal. Words fail me. Note, for instance, the small "honorary ring bearer" pillow for dogs.

Anyway. This was meant to be a reminder of the fact that weddings are an industry, there are questions of sustainable and responsible consumption at play here, and the rhetoric of said industry is aimed at getting you to spend as much as they can get you to. And that's that more or less accomplished, in well written and entertaining prose to boot.

Comments

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Ahh, you also being pressured to have a wedding list. I'm trying to argue my way out of one on the basis that our apartment has no space to put any stuff thus acquired, but "your older relatives won't know what to do without one". Sigh...

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Oh, crikey, yes - "people expect it and they'll only phone you up and ask you if you don't have one!"

I'm still trying to work out the best way around that one...