Country music star Brad Paisley and rapper LL Cool J

It seems that a Starbucks worker gave him, or the protagonist of his song, a hard time about wearing a Confederate T-shirt, launching Paisley into a lyrical litany of self-defense. He wears the shirt because he’s proud to be Southern, and besides, he’s a Skynyrd fan, he sings. “It ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin.”

And if it doesn’t, you need a book. Or two.

Well, OK, Brad. That’s fair enough. But how about driving a mile — to your local library? You’ll find all the empathy you need in the Fiction section.

When I wrote my controversial historical novel “The Jewel of Medina” about A’isha, the youngest wife of the Prophet Muhammad, reporters often asked why I’d written a novel instead of a non-fiction book about her. My response: non-fiction deals with facts. Fiction deals with truths. By taking us deep into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of people not like us, novels give us empathy for others. We become them for those few, tantalizing hours between the covers when we live their lives.

I dare you, Brad, to read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and come away without any understanding of how it feels to be treated less than human because of the color of one’s skin. For a black woman’s perspective, try Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” For a black man’s point of view, how about Ralph Ellison’s  “Invisible Man?”

Once you’ve gotten a toehold on the African-American experience in this country, perhaps you’d like to move on to other cultures and lifestyles.

“The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan explores Chinese-American identity AND women’s issues, giving you two for the price of one. Ha Jin, who grew up in Communist China, has written a number of books set there, including “Waiting,” about a doctor during the Cultural Revolution torn between two women, and ways of life – the traditional vs. the new. Who among us hasn’t grappled with tradition?

For the Muslim experience, Khaled Hosseini has written two excellent novels in “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which will force a burqa on you and break your heart. My novels “The Jewel of Medina” and “The Sword of Medina” will turn you into a young girl married to her elderly father’s best friend, the Prophet Muhammad; then a young woman falling in love with her husband; and then a warrior, fighting to preserve her dead husband’s legacy. Who among us hasn’t struggled to find the strength and courage to be ourselves?

Anywhere you want to go, the fiction aisles can take you there. Isaac

What you find may surprise you!

Bashevis Singer will show you the world through wry Jewish eyes. “Cheri” by Colette may make you feel like a beautiful woman past her prime trying to hold onto the love of an exasperatingly spoiled, much younger, man. Want to know what women really want? Skim for the “good parts” in a steamy romance and find out.

Having lived, for the hours it takes to read a novel, in someone else’s skin, you might find yourself thinking twice about flying any flag, on a T-shirt or otherwise, that evokes nostalgia for a white-supremacist society that dehumanized an entire population and fought hard for its “right” to do so. (You also might avoid wearing swastikas, for the same reason.) And no one will have to tell you to throw that Confederate-flag-waving T-shirt in the trash or, better yet, to burn it. You’ll just know.

The mind boggles, Brad Paisley, to think what might happen next as you continue to read novel after novel, story after story. Maybe you’ll come out in support of equal pay for women, or write a song empathizing with gays who can’t marry the people they love. One thing’s pretty certain: You won’t be shrugging off the oppression of others with songs that say, “Sorry – I just can’t relate.”

Like what you read? Subscribe to Sherry Jones’s blog!

Sherry Jones is the author of three historical fiction novels and one novella, including FOUR SISTERS, ALL QUEENS, about four sisters in 13th-century Provence who all became queens. She is now at work on her fourth novel, about the 12th-century Parisian lovers Abelard and Heloise, debuting in 2014 from Simon and Schuster/Gallery Books.

4 HISTORICAL PAGE-TURNERS

Actress Bonnie Somerville takes a break from her day job to share her favorite historical fiction novels

Photo by Getty Images

What? You thought it was the performer herself on the stage? Technically that is true, but, thanks to her costume’s design, the choreography, and some inventive camera angles employed during the much-lauded song-and-dance, it was the singer’s Crotch that took center stage.

Now, I’m not a TV watcher, so I haven’t seen Beyonce on screen since the movie Dreamgirls, which impressed me with her vocal range and, somehow, also led me to think of her as a class act. Not any more. Now I think of her as a complete sell-out, using her body to sell her music, and the Pepsi-Cola Company as her pimp du jour. Who pays? The American public, all of us, not only girls and women but also men and boys who view this objectification with not only approval but outright enthusiasm.

Lest you think me a prude — and I confess, I feel like one right now — I want to say that I think sex is a natural and, at its best, enjoyable, human function that we have somehow confused with morality. I would never judge another for his or her sexual choices, as long as everyone involved were adult and the sex, consensual. But what Beyonce and her coterie of gyrating, scantily-clad cohorts did on that stage was reinforce before 111 million viewers the notion that women exist for one reason, and that is the sexual gratification of men.

Did I say that she did so needlessly? With her voice and her performing abilities, Beyonce could have pulled off an equally stunning show without giving top billing to her Crotch. From the opening camera shot that approached her from below and zoomed slowly on her black-patched, protruding crotch, to the costume whose skirt cut up and over the aforementioned Crotch for obvious reasons, to her gyrations and acrobatics — at one point lying sprawled on the stage with her Crotch pointing at the faces of her audience — Beyonce’s Crotch stole the show, and that is too bad.

It’s too bad because the performance reinforces, for men and women, that female value resides in sex appeal. While much is made over the fact that an all-female band and all-female dancers accompanied her on the stage, as well as Destiny’s Child, the effect on our culture is the continued objectification of women before viewers of every age, including boys and girls.

That sad and distorted message was broadcast during an event which also featured, in the stands, the most sex trafficking of any event in the country, according to the U.S. Attorney General. While Beyonce was waggling her Crotch and seducing us with “fuck me” looks in our living rooms, sex-slaves, many of them underage, were being pimped in the crowd, some raped by 25 to 50 men in one night.

And let’s not forget all those at home, where, arguably, the danger of domestic violence against women, if not the violence itself, increased. In recent years some have disputed the decades-old notion that Super Bowl Sunday sees an upswing in attacks against women in the home, but others say these cries of “balderdash” are merely a backlash and ignore the fact that Sunday is the very worst day in general for domestic violence all year round.

As I averted my eyes again and again from the sight of Beyonce, a woman I had admired, offering her Crotch like some kind of sexual Holy Grail to an adoring public, I couldn’t help thinking of my own daughter, who, at 19, is a strong and smart and, yes, sexy young woman who thinks feminism is no longer needed in a world where women have so many opportunities and advantages for which my generation had to fight.

Sometimes, she speaks so passionately about the egalitarianism of her own generation that she almost convinces me that we no longer need to fight the fight for equality. In fact, I want to believe her. But, after seeing what everyone else is seeing, and loving, on television, I’m telling her now, with great sorrow, that it just isn’t so. We’ve come a long way, but we have oh, so much farther to go.

Sherry Jones is the internationally best-selling author of Four Sisters, All Queens, White Heart, The Jewel of Medina, and The Sword of Medina. Visit her website here.

At any rate, Kat read my new book and loved it, and was kind enough to write about it on her blog. She’s included it with other books of “Middlebrow American Women’s Fiction,” giving me, and now, you, more books by authors new (to me) to add to my to-read list. Enjoy!

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“Mirabile Does Middlebrow” is a new bimonthly feature here.

I’d rather be reading middlebrow!

I  am a fan of middlebrow women’s fiction, and though I rarely write about it, I certainly read my share of popular novels.  With a cup of tea in the middle of the night and none of the men awake to tease me, I curl up with the novels of Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Gaskell, Monica Dickens, or Mary Stewart.

I also try lots of contemporary women’s fiction.

Sometimes middlebrow contemporary fiction is a good fit for me, sometimes not.  I can’t for the life of me read Jennifer Weiner or Joshlyn Jackson.

I intend to be honest, and hope you will find some good books here, some by famous people, some barely known.

And so here’s the round-up of middlebrow novels for January:

1.  Emma Tennant’s Confessions of a Sugar Mummy.  This delightful “chick lit” novel is for women of a certain age, or at least for women who know they may someday be that age.  The wittyConfessions are narrated by a sixtyish interior decorator who falls in love with a 40ish man.   She tells us that Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, but failed to invent the Jocasta complex, “to look at the situation from the point of view of…his mother.”  In her work as an interior decorator, she meets the gorgeous French tile maker, Alain, and immediately wants to sleep with him.

But she gives us very good advice.

“On no account rush to the loo and apply Touche Eclat or whatever the ruinously expensive foundation is called, the one that claims to remove your wrinkles and fill in the vertical lines down to your mouth, the result of a fifty-year nicotine habit.  You will look strangely different, it’s true, but not for the better, as they claim.”

She considers trying Botox, settles for a new facial creme, and then resolves to interest Alain by making  a fortune selling her flat in her gentrified neighborhood.  She thinks she can buy a house for herself, Alain, and possibly his wife.  He is very interested.

Yes, she’s out of control, but she’s very, very funny.  B+

2.  Hilma Wolitzer’s An Available Man.  You might think it is no coincidence that I  read a novel about a man in his sixties after reading a novel about a woman in her sixties, but I assure you I’m still clinging to my spry half century.   Hilma Wolitzer is the mother of Meg Wolitzer, one of my favorite writers, and Hilma’s  light, romantic novels are usually quite good, so I picked up a copy.

When retired science teacher Edward’s children place a personal ad for him in NYR under the name Science Guy, he is annoyed, because he has not gotten over Bee, his late wife, and he doesn’t want to date.  But he goes ahead with it, and meets several women who are not quite right for him, among them a teacher who jilted him years ago; a beautiful older blonde whose extensive plastic surgery repulses him; and a widow whose insistence on showing him photos of her dead husband makes him feel he is at a bereavement brunch.

Edward is a kind, sensible, “nice” character, and this short entertaining novel is very “nicely” written. Occasionally an unpredictable moment redeems this novel as we see Edward change and grab life again.     B+.

3.  Angela Huth’s Invitation to the Married Life.  This novel was compared to Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, and though it was nothing like it, I very much enjoyed Huth’s shrewd observations of her characters’ rocky marriages and realignments of love.  My favorite character is Rachel, a charming woman who spends her days sleeping on 300+ count sheets in a beautifully redecorated bedroom, because there are certainly days when I, too, would like to dream all day.  Her husband, Thomas, who is quite nasty to her, has affairs with younger women and falls in love with an artist’s work and schemes to seduce her. Rachel embarrasses herself at a party making a pass at a man, but that is not the end of the world.

We meet other characters, among them unhappy Frances Farthingoe, who gives a lot of parties and decides she needs a custom-made gray awning at her ball, while her quiet husband takes refuge in studying badgers at night.

Marriage is not the end-all when you’re ill-suited, and that is what Huth shows us so charmingly.  Grade:  A-

4.  Sherry Jones’s Four Sisters, All Queens.  Sherry, a Friend of Our Blog , was kind enough to send me a copy of her historical novel, Four Sisters, All Queens.  As a  fan of Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, and  Philippa Gregory, I knew  I’d enjoy this novel set in the 13th century about four queens.

I enjoy historical novels about queens to the point that I once considered spending a year reading only historical novels…but I did something else!

And I ended up racing through Sherry’s well-researched, deftly-written novel.  She spins the story of  the four daughters of savvy Beatrice of Savoy, the countess of Provence, who raised and educated her daughters as sons, ensuring that they would learn Latin, French,  history, and other subjects that would help them participate in the political process..  She was the “queen maker” though she would have preferred to make kings, and her four daughters were expected to make political marriages.  Indeed, Beatrice married them so well that it should have strengthened Provence.

The four sisters grew up to be Queen Marguerite of France, Queen Elenore of England, Queen Sanchia of Germany, and Queen Beatrice of Sicily.  Marguerite’s husband, Louis IX of France, is impotent.  His mother has a way of showing up in the garden as they are kissing.  Marguerite also has to contend with this evil queen politically, as she tries to edge Marguerite out of  meetings and sends Marguerite’s uncles home.

My favorite character, Eleanore, has to walk a treacherous path:  her coronation is crashed by a madman who claims the coronation is illegal because Henry is betrothed to his daughter. Henry was engaged to her, and broke it off, saying she was too closely related:  The Pope is  reviewing the document.   Marguerite tries to stay cool, and is astonishingly smart, managing to attract all the attention back to herself.

The other two queens, too, have problems, and as they grow older, the politics are even more complicated.

This novel is fascinating, great vacation reading, take it to the Caribbean (in my case the couch).  Sherry, a former journalist,  is an excellent writer.

Grade:  B+

5.  Jo-Ann Mapson was kind enough to send me a copy ofFinding Casey, the well-written sequel to her  award-winning novel, Solomon’s Oak. In Solomon’s Oak,  Mapson tells the story of Glory, a grieving widow who bakes pirate cakes and plans weddings to support her farm; Joseph, a retired wounded cop with pain management problems; and Juniper, a rebellious adolescent whose sister disappeared some years ago.  In Finding Casey, Glory and Joseph have married and adopted Juniper and moved to Santa Fe, and there isn’t at first much tension in their happy family life.  Glory is pregnant, Joseph volunteers on the board of a women’s shelter, and Juniper is in college.

But a new character is introduced, Laurel, a brainwashed young woman who has been horribly abused by a cult leader at “the Farm,”  and  when she secretly brings her daughter to a hospital against the wishes of the sadistic Seth, she finds help from a social worker.

Mapson has a calm voice and a simple, poetic style.  She understands suffering and describes it quietly.  I did figure out the plot almost immediately, but that isn’t a bad thing.  Though there is suspense, you know she will help her characters.

Finding Casey continues the story without much ado, and perhaps doesn’t quite stand alone.  Is is more loosely plotted, because we already know the characters.

So read Solomon’s Oak first. It’s just better to read them in a row.

Grade:  B+

Now, events in my personal life have made me resolve to reach more deeply into my own heart this year, dredge up all the empathy and compassion I can find, and increase my love for others if I can. Perhaps that’s why I dreamt last night of a mass killing in Spokane Wash., where I live.

First I came across the dogs, then their police officers, and then the bodies sprawled on the sidewalk along 2nd Ave., shot to death and still bleeding.  I averted my eyes and crossed the street, but found only more carnage on the opposite side. The little girl with the blond hair in the pretty orange coat, face-down in a pool of blood, will haunt me forever.

I went into a shopping center, still trying to get away, and found an even more horrific scene. Bodies covered the floor, hundreds and hundreds of them. Beside them, survivors knelt and wept in utter silence. I began to cry out, and others joined me, filling the rooms with our mournful wails. With shaking hands I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and called my daughter to make sure she was safe. Her phone rang and rang and rang before I awoke, shuddering and feeling utterly alone.

The pre-Christmas killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School wounded me, too, far more deeply and traumatically than I had realized.

Of course I was upset when I heard about those 26 adults and children killed in Newtown, Connecticut last December. I cried, yes. I went to Facebook and asked how many more children we would sacrifice on the altar of the almighty gun. I got about 100 comments, many from Christians claiming they need their guns to defend themselves against burglers, anarchists, and the federal government. Is this “turning the other cheek”?

Other Christians, either forgetting or ignoring Christ’s admonition to “judge not, lest you be judged,” tried to blame the lack of prayer in schools for the killings of those innocents, as if God were not love, after all. As if God might have stopped Adam Lanza from shooting those children, but decided not to.

Today I wrote on Facebook about my terrible dream, and about the profound effects of this tragedy, so far from my own home and experience, on my psyche. Surely countless others share this sense of loss, the disorientation and terror that I felt in my dream, and feel now. Or perhaps we are growing numb to it all. Perhaps our capacity for empathy and compassion — for love — diminishes with each new round of carnage. After all, the United States has been steeped in violence,  killing, and hatred — in blood — since Sept. 11, 2001.

A lot of so-called Christians are quick to leap to the defense of guns, which have killed 18 people in the U.S. every day since the shootings at Sandy Hook, and of religion, as if the two belonged together. Godlessness is to blame, these folks say, then describe how they would use their own gun(s) to kill anyone who broke into their home. Really? Is this what Jesus would do?

Whom would Jesus kill? A burglar or armed robber, after telling us to give not only our coat to the man who would take it from us, but our shirt, as well? A police officer, after healing the ear of the Roman soldier his disciple cut trying to defend him? The President of the United States, after advising us to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”?

We don’t have to ask what kind of gun Jesus would carry, because he wouldn’t have used a gun. Anyone who believes he was the son of God knows that he had the power to call in armies of angels to defend him against the Romans, and to prevent his crucifixion. Instead, he turned the other cheek.

Why didn’t Christ fight back? Because he came to show humanity that God is love. Understanding this is what it means to be “saved.” Loving others — feeding the poor, healing the sick, helping those who can’t help themselves, treating others the way we would want to be treated — is the only path to heaven. This is what he meant when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Clearly, guns and God don’t go together — not for a Christian, at least.

Jesus went to his death in an act of passive resistance after a lifetime of it, demonstrating how God wants us all to live. He was one person who didn’t let his ego get in the way of his love flow. As for me, I’m still working on it. Every day, in 2013.

Sherry Jones is the internationally best-selling author of “Four Sisters, All Queens”, “The Jewel of Medina,” and other historical fiction books. Visit her website here.

I’m probably the worst book group member of all time. I’m so busy reading, writing, and researching for my next historical fiction project that I have little time to read for pleasure — and when I do, it’s a novel I want, and not just any novel but a damned good one because my time, did I say? My time for reading is very limited.

It’s the writer’s dirty little secret: The reason we started writing in the first place was because we love to read, but now we have much less time to read than before we became writers. The good thing is, writing a novel is even more enjoyable than reading one.

When I found that my book group, The Drinking Club for Literary Women, would discuss Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder,” however, I downloaded it instantly onto my iPad and began to read. Having loved, loved, loved her “Bel Canto” and having devoured “The Magician’s Assistant” and “The Patron Saint of Liars,” I knew this book would be good.

I didn’t, however, expect it to be THIS good, or our discussion last night — after several glasses of egg nog and a terrific Pendulum 2010 red wine, also surprisingly delicious — to be so stimulating.

“State of Wonder” is an amazing and powerful book, Ann Patchett’s best yet, which takes the reader deep into the heart of the Amazon jungle where Dr. Marina Singh goes looking for a colleague who has died there while on a mission to check into the research progress of the formidable Dr. Annick Swenson, her own former medical school professor. Resonating with images, themes, and even characters evoking Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” “State of Wonder” gives us the dense, dark, deadly jungle as metaphor for the self, for our own dark secrets and dark longings, and the letting go that we must do — of the past, of self-doubt and guilt, of who we think we are — to live authentically. This beautifully written book will haunt my thoughts and dreams for a long time.

ON another note, I do apologize for taking so long to announce winners of my “Jewel of Medina” 4th anniversary giveaway. I began renting my a writer’s studio away from my home without internet, which has been great for my work-in-progress but bad for everything else.

Those of you who signed up for this book, please send your mailing address to me at sherry@authorsherryjones.com, and I will mail your signed copies to you very soon. I promise.

Keep reading!

Sherry

Thanks to David for including me in this series of blog posts by authors answering the question we all love to hear: What are you working on now?

What is the working title of your next book?

“The Song of Heloise.” That’s the title today. I’ve also titled it “The Seduction of Heloise,” “The Song of Abelard,” “Banish the Night,” “The Power of Destiny,” and “Heloise and Abelard.”

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I first learned of the tragic love affair between Abelard, the controversial and charismatic 12th century Parisian philosopher and Heloise, his brilliant young student in a Teaching Company lecture. What drew me in, besides the considerable drama, was Heloise’s spirit. She dared to live – and love — on her own terms in a time when doing so could be dangerous, especially for women.

What genre does your book fall under?

This is a an erotic biographical historical novel. Heloise and Abelard had a very passionate love affair.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I imagine a French film, with French actors. Because this tale is very, very French.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Before Romeo and Juliet; before Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard shocked the world with a passion so consuming, it threatened to destroy them both.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I am under contract with Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still working on it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Not a book, but a play: “Romeo and Juliet.” Or an opera: “Tristan and Isolde.”

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

None other than Heloise herself. A 12th century intellectual who turns down her lover’s marriage proposal because she prefers “freedom to chains”? That’s kick-ass!

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

These famous lovers have been written about many times, but mine will be the first novel telling their story since the scholar Constant J. Mews revealed more than 100 letters and fragments of letters written between the couple while their love affair was in full bloom. These letters are full of beauty, romance, and passion, and have deeply affected my writing.

Now I’m off to tag five more authors to write posts of their own about their Next Big Thing. Stay tuned for details once they’ve all agreed…

I’ve got 2,000 words to write and I want to, I really do, more than I want to deal with the four plastic grocery bags full of pears that have been ripening in my refrigerator for weeks and that are now, you guessed it, ripe. Someone has to peel them and can or freeze them or make chutneys or dehydrate them before they turn to mush. That someone is, you guessed it, me.

It’s NaNoWriMo and yet the IRS has requested documentation of the deductions I claimed on my 2010 tax form. As disorganized as anyone you know, I have already spent hours and hours stapling receipts to sheets of paper and printing credit card statements and getting bank statements sent to me and entering data into a spreadsheet. I have maybe two hours of work left before I can send it all to the tax examiner. Did I mention that it’s NaNoWriMo, and I’ve got a personal goal of 2,000 words a day?

The cupboards are getting bare as I delay grocery shopping in favor of writing; I have a contest to enter for FOUR SISTERS, ALL QUEENS, deadline coming right up; and 10 winners of my JEWEL OF MEDINA contest are still waiting to receive their signed copies from me. Heck, I still have to announce the winners. Heck, I still have to choose them. And 2,000 words to write before the end of the day.