The Secret Loves of Geek Girls edited by Hope Nicolson was so wonderfully geeky! The book is a nonfiction anthology done in a delightful mix of prose, comics, and illustrated stories. We have the likes of Margaret Atwood drawing and telling about refusing to wear glasses and then discovering contact lenses.
There are pieces by Mariko Tamaki (This One Summer), Trina Robbins (Wonder Woman), Majorie Liu (Monstress) and lots and lots of others. The stories are about friendships and romance and finding self confidence, finding your tribe, discovering sex and sexuality (a wide variety) all within geek girl culture.
I felt old, but not so old because a number of the contributors were clearly close to my age. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a bit envious of the younger generation having the internet and online fan fiction and cool online role playing games available to them. As a pre-internet geek girl I didn’t know any other girls who read science fiction or fantasy. They were all boys and they weren’t the kind of boys you wanted to be seen hanging out with if you were trying to pass as not geeky or nerdy. Also, these boys’ social skills tended to be close to nonexistent when it came to girls.
In college I stopped trying to pass. I gave up crushing on the preppy types since the only guys who ever asked me out were geeks and I could never figure out how they knew. Did I have a scarlet “G” somewhere? One summer in college I met regularly with a small group from work at my summer job to play Dungeons and Dragons. I was the only girl in the group. I pretended nonchalance because I wanted to play while they all tried to not be overly excited about having a girl in the party. We all had a great time and summer was over and I was on my way back to school before one of them finally got the nerve to awkwardly ask me out on a date, which I graciously turned down because leaving in two days dude.
Finally I found geek love in Bookman who has spent far more hours playing Dungeons and Dragons than I have. He even had the dungeon master’s manual and his own set of dice. Sexy! When we met we discovered we had read many of the same SFF books and well, the rest is history.
It worked out okay for me but it would have been nice to not have felt so lonely. But then feeling lonely as a geeky girl seems to be par for the course if the women in Geek Girls can be seen as representative.
The stories are all pretty short and made for great before sleep reading at night. Some of them are sad, others are empowering, still others are hilarious. If you are a geek girl or know and love one, you will very likely enjoy this collection and find many moments of recognition.
This sounds good.
I also was an outsider in my youth. It was so hard to connect with others who thought differently back then. In this way, I believe that the world has changed for the better.
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Brian Joseph, it was pretty fun and though I am well past the stage of lonely geek girl, it still felt like a warm and cozy blanket.
It’s hard for all kids who are a little different. In some ways the internet has been a miracle for finding like-minded people but in other ways it also magnifies differences too and we’ve all heard the stories about cyberbullying and the sometimes tragic results.
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This sounds great. I was a somewhat pre-Internet “Geek Girl” because I didn’t have it in my house until high school and, even then, I couldn’t use it for much. It was dial up and we got kicked off every 7-10 minutes for some reason. It’s definitely different now.
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I don’t know……internet trolling and bullying are big debits set against the good that is the liberation of geekdom! This does sound like a really good anthology to read about an important and interesting cultural development.
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Ian, yes, sadly with all the good has come a lot of bad too and what used to be a local bully now gets amplified on the internet. It’s really sad. The book is a lot of fun and definitely interesting from a cultural perspective.
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AMB, oh the days of dial-up! Yeah, if you had call waiting whenever someone called it would kick you off the internet. My sister liked to play MMORPGs in college and they were all text-based then and the dorms didn’t have internet yet so she had to play in the computer lab late at night. Those were the days!
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Sounds like my type of read.
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Raney, it’s lots of fun!
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I believe you. I’ve already added it to my to be read list.
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Ah, this sounds good and I love the story of young GG Stefanie, though I’m sad you were lonely. 🙂 I wasn’t a geek but I was rather square and also prissy. Ha ha! Have always been lucky enough to have good friends though.
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Helen, it was a good book. Ah thanks, I had a couple good friends even though they weren’t geeks themselves they loved me anyway and I am still friends with one of them. I am sure we all have stories, yes? it isn’t easy being young! 🙂
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Oh! Gosh! Stefanie….this I have to get my hands on! I still continue to be very geeky though somewhere from college to work I became also a social butterfly with a social calendar that continues to be the envy of many! Not sure how I managed the two opposite polls but I continue to tread on it. The worst part is the continued crushing on preppie guys …well preppie men now, even though I know it is so veeeerrryyyyy pointless. For all my partying, I still read Shakespeare and Steinbeck and have strong political and social views, which again plants me firmly back in the nerd world! LOL!! Life is kind a weird, but it is good to have some form of sisterhood to support you along!
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cirtnecce, I don;t think you can be a reformed geek. Once a geek, always a geek and being a geek doesn’t mean you can’t have a busy social calendar either! As for those preppy guys, they will always be cute so crush away! I just always found my crushes were unrequited and it always stung when they would make a careless remark poking fun at the things I loved.
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Trust me when I say that Preppy Guys + Nerdy Girls = Unrequited Love on the part of the latter. LOL!
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heh, I suspected as much but I didn’t want to burst any bubbles! 😀
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This sounds like a fun comic to keep up with as you wait for more Saga installments (I think I will have to save the last two Sagas for 2017 at this point). It is cool that there are so many diverse comics to choose from these days!
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Danielle, sadly this is just a one-off anthology. But it is a good one! I do love that comics have gotten so diverse and can tell so many stories now.
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