Monday, December 22, 2008

75 Books Every Woman Should Read - My Picks

Continuing with the theme of procrastinating by posting lists, check out this list of "75 Books That Every Woman Should Read" from jezebel.com. It's in response to an Esquire list of books that every man should read (which, for what it's worth, includes THE GRAPES OF WRATH because of the "titty" -- it's like the magazine stereotypes itself).

List, with my comments, is below. I've read thirteen -- how many have you read?

  • The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  • White Teeth, Zadie Smith - I loved this book - perhaps one of my favorites on this list!
  • The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende - sitting on my to-be-read (TBR) shelf, and has been for half a decade
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
  • Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
  • The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath - not exactly warm and fuzzy, but a great read
  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  • The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri - I of course felt compelled to read this when I moved to India, but I didn't like it as much as I apparently should have
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  • Like Life, Lorrie Moore
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen - I would lose my romance card if I hadn't read this
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë - this book is great, even if it's a bit strange to fall in love with someone whose insane wife is locked in the attic
  • The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
  • A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor - I've read a couple of stories out of this collection, but I won't count this as a full read
  • The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
  • You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee - amazingly, we actually read this in high school, although I believe we also watched the movie; this was one step up from THE SCARLET LETTER, which we watched rather than read
  • Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
  • Earthly Paradise, Colette
  • Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
  • Property, Valerie Martin
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot - TBR
  • Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
  • The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir - TBR, sitting on the main TBR shelf; maybe I'll get to it this year
  • Runaway, Alice Munro
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  • The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë - I've read this, but don't remember liking it as much as I thought I would
  • You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott - I loved this book; I also loved LITTLE MEN, which took place after Jo married and started taking in orphaned boys, but it's a totally different story
  • Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
  • The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
  • I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  • A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith - is it bad that I've never read this?
  • And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie - I LOVED this mystery, even if the title was originally something that had to be sanitized several times for a more politically-correct audience
  • Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
  • The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
  • The Group, Mary McCarthy
  • Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
  • The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
  • The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank - I've read it and seen her house in Holland
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley - yes
  • Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
  • In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck - I adored this book, and wrote some college entrance essays on it -- even though China was worlds away from my small-town life in Iowa, I've always been fascinated by the lure of the land and tales of generational conflict
  • Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
  • Three Junes, Julia Glass
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Sophie's Choice, William Styron
  • Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
  • Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell - yes
  • The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
  • The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera - TBR
  • The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather - one of the great books I read as a teenager; it also lead to a fierce argument with my best friend's mother over the pronunciation of "Antonia"
  • Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I liked this book, although I'm surprised that it was picked; ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is perhaps my favorite book of all time
  • The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
  • Spending, Mary Gordon
  • The Lover, Marguerite Duras
  • The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  • Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
  • Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
  • Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
  • Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
  • I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith - I haven't read this, but I saw the movie and liked it
  • Possession, A.S. Byatt
Given that I used to be a completely avid reader, thirteen is nothing to write home about. But, my avid reading phase stopped sometime in college, and many of these books are too depressing for my current, sadness-avoiding tastes.

What about you? What do you think is missing? Are there books on the list that shouldn't be?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i have a lot of reading to do apparently. there's a lot on this list i haven't read!

- i LOVED and then there were none. we had to read it for school in jr high i think and i finished it in 2 sittings.

- i HATED 100 years of solitude. i cant even explain how deeply i dislike this book.

Sara Ramsey said...

@ricecakeconfessional: yes, AND THEN THERE WERE ONE was perhaps my favorite Agatha Christie book, and I read almost all of them (well, heavier on the Poirot books; I wasn't quite as big on Miss Marple, although I did like the few books she wrote with Tommy and Tuppence Beresford - did you read those?)

I'm surprised you didn't like ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE -- although I suppose the story wasn't exactly uplifting :)