Wednesday, September 24, 2008

75 books every woman should read

I love lists... and crossing things off, so when I saw that Jezebel had compiled a list of books women should read I had to repost
  • The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  • White Teeth, Zadie Smith
  • The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
  • Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
  • The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  • The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri [x]
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert [x]
  • Like Life, Lorrie Moore
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen [x]
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  • The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
  • A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
  • The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
  • You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston [x]
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee [x]
  • Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
  • Earthly Paradise, Colette
  • Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
  • Property, Valerie Martin
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
  • The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Runaway, Alice Munro
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  • The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  • You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott [x]
  • 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
  • And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie [x]
  • 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 [x]
  • The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
  • The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank [x]
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
  • In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck [x]
  • 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 [x]
  • The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
  • The Red Tent, Anita Diamant [x]
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • 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
  • Possession, A.S. Byatt
I haven't read many of them... I'm going to get on that.

Any you think are missing?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was SO excited about this list, especially because my favorite GWTW was listed. Margaret Mitchell was an excellent writer - it's really too bad that she passed away so early. http://www.gwtw.org/margaretmitchell.html

Anonymous said...

You have read...Namesake.
I've read loads of them!! Great list. I'll pass this along to my bookclub too.

xx Nicky said...

Yeah I read all the ones with the [x] ...

Anonymous said...

AUSTEN! It's a crime they didn't include her--"For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" Handily explains our fascination with celebrities, don't you think? :-)

Also--Frank O'Hara. I know he's a poet, but he has written some of the most amazing poems I've ever read--"Steps" is one of my favorite NYC poems ever written.

Anonymous said...

Whoops--well, read my Austen comment as one endorsing the choice. :-) That's what I get for speed-reading through the list.

Emily said...

GWTW is my all time favorite too.
Great list- going to the library today