Before T day

The best thing about Thanksgiving is that it feels like a bonus holiday, an almost magical time when I can catch up with my reading without the guilt that comes with not spending time with family and not doing anything extra special. My reading list this year includes books that I haven't read since I was a kid such as  George Sand's La Petite Fadette.What makes  George Sand's writings particular is that the reader can sense that she is making tremendous efforts to restrain her passion by molding it into something more earthy. Strangely, every time I read Sand, I think either of Colette or Kate Chopin and I realize that her writing has more bite than theirs. If I were to speculate on the reason for that difference, I would say that George Sand probably never saw herself as a woman that could write, but as a writer that happened, by a mistake of fate, to be a woman and which therefore was entitled her to be capricious and demanding because of her talent as a man would have been allowed to be. After, a  woman has to believe that she has balls,  to put things crudely,  to say No to Musset, to drive Baudelaire crazy, and not to sacrifice herself totally and eternally for Chopin.