Dreary Tuesday, makin' up a meme (kind of)

[grammargirl]

I've done this meme so many times with must-read book lists full of old white dudes, I thought it might be nice to do it with Jezebel's list of 75 Books Every Woman Should Read. I've done the usual bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read, underline the ones you loved thing.

The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith (Didn't actually love this in its entirety, but it contains one of my favorite sentences ever written, so it counts.)
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
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore ("How to Be a Writer" is one of my favorite short stories.)
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin (Porn with literary pretensions is the best kind!)
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor (I haven't read this whole collection, but I've read the title story and a few others.)
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 (This is on my unofficial "books to reread every few years" list.)
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Earthly Paradise, Colette
 Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Property, Valerie Martin
Middlemarch, George Eliot (One of these days...)
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
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 (See To Kill a Mockingbird)
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
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
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
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 (It's actually pretty appalling I haven't read this.)
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
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 (I have read One Hundred Years of Solitude, though.)
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

Huh, looks like I do better with the old/dead white guys, who knew? I'm surprised The Handmaid's Tale isn't on here, but otherwise, good list.

Comments

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Yay, Lorrie Moore!

You don't want to read The Shipping News, Melanie. Trust me on this.

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Dude, italicize this shit. You need to read this book. Especially if you're going to read Persepolis anyway.

Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I have read One Hundred Years of Solitude, though.)
I'm the opposite.

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

Part that cracked me up is how many of the not super famous ones I'd picked up but not gotten around to putting on my official list or that weren't near my list but I'd read something by the author.

Personally, I firmly thing Blanche McCrary Boyd should be represented on there. And Trash is the far better of Dorothy Allison's books and possibly more relevant to the list. There is also strong argument for Emma Donoghue. And at least Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson. Possibly one of Joanne Harris's books too though that's more iffy (I think you should read them though if you haven't...not because they're super deep and meaningful but because they're interesting fiction with a mix of whimsical and abraisive I rind really entertaining).

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Hooray, Blanche McCrary Boyd! Oh, man, and Jeannette Winterson.

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

Oh hoorah for someone else knowing Boyd! For years there's only been one other lj hit for her, and nobody ever seems to know who she is (I've bought multiple extra copies to inflict on folks I'd like to understand me better.) Granted she's out of print, but she wrote the 2 books I love above all others. She'd promised to write the third in that series, and if she doesn't I'll be heartbroken.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I only read The Revolution of Little Girls and didn't realize there was more Ellen out there!

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

Yup! Terminal Velocity isn't that difficult to find yet (my favorite used bookstores often have it in, and I *think* the NYPL still has a copy or two). That book is just delightful. I go back and forth as to which of the two is my favorite.

Also out there though tougher to find, not with Ellen and I don't think nearly as polished are three other books. The Redneck Way of Knowledge (a series of memoir pieces...similar in humor) and Mourning the Death of Magic (a disturbing book with a few moments of brilliance and others that didn't really do it for me) are at the NYPL usually checked in at the Midtown branch. Nerves, her first novel, I've only seen in a bookstore once but is available for a few dollars online (abe books as recommended by grammargirl had several copies). That one's interesting in a dated sort of way and more interesting by way of comparison to her other stuff.

[dianora2.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised The Handmaid's Tale isn't on here

Heh -- as I was getting near the end of the list, I was thinking Why isn't Handmaid's Tale on here? Or at least Cat's Eye, geez.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

No Joanna Russ? Phooey.

The Female Man and How to Suppress Women's Writing are musts.