Hi Everyone,
I was looking through my bookshelf and realized the lack of gender variety I have. My bookshelf is filled with everything from Silk Road histories to the biographies of Frederick the Great and Deng Xiaopeng to Liang Qichao and Petraeus' Conflict. To be honest the only female writers I have explored are Woolf, Wollstonecraft, and the very obscure civil war diary of Mary Boykin Chestnut. I think the goal of reading is to open yourself up to new perspectives and ideas, and I have been neglecting the female perspective.
Can anyone suggest any works that you think could open my worldview? I would say I am less interested in reading direct feminist philosophical texts, and instead more interested in reading the female perspective cloaked in a well written work. I would say that I enjoyed a Room of One's Own and Mary Chestnut's Diary, so something along those lines could work. I like reading classics and I am also a big history guy who is interested in reading historical perspectives.
I can handle fairly dense texts. So please feel free to suggest your favourites.
Thanks
by UnsoughtPoet84
17 Comments
The Red Tent
*Jane Eyre* is one I finally read for the first time this year and was thoroughly impressed by how much I enjoyed it. Period fiction is not typically my bag no matter the perspective, but Charlotte Brontë really did a number with this one and I’m extremely glad I read it.
If you’re into sci-fi and/or fantasy at all, you cannot go wrong with Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
If you enjoy non-fiction history and are looking for a female perspective, you might like Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel or The Five by Hallie Rubenhold.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
This isn’t quite what you’re asking for as these are more contemporary. But you might enjoy Sue Miller. She’s written a number of very satisfying novels as well as a memoir.
Girl, Woman, Other, by Evaristo.
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Suzanne Scanlon).
It’s a memoir of a woman who spent several months in a mental hospital in the 1990s. She reflects on her experiences and her relationship to literature about/by mentally ill women.
I really enjoyed it, and I think it will introduce you to a lot of writing in a similar vein that’s from female perspectives that isn’t direct theory/philosophy.
*Their Eyes Were Watching God* by Zora Neale Hurston
Code Girls by Liza Mundy. It covers the history of women recruited to work as codebreakers for the US military in the Second World War.
Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang perhaps? Or Wild Swans if you’re interested in her own family story
*The Yellow Wallpaper* by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (short story)
*Beloved* by Toni Morrison (it’s an upsetting book, and if for whatever reason you want to avoid sexual and/or domestic violence, don’t read it)
*The Heart is a Lonely Hunter* by Carson McCullers
For history, I mean, Barbara Tuchman is a lion in the field of WWI popular history, Mary Beard (Rome), Eugenia Lean (modern China), Nwando Achebe (western Africa). You might also look up something like *Women’s Work* by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, or *The Fabric of Civilization* by Viriginia Postrel, about clothes, fabric, and how we tend to overlook women’s contributions to society.
>Can anyone suggest any works that you think could open my worldview?
Self Made Man by Norah Vincent. A non-fiction work wherein the author pulls a Mulan and lives as a man to see exactly how much more privileged men are. The book is her collection of experience and her analysis of them.
My favorite author is Shirley Jackson, followed closely by Ursula K. Le Guin. They are both masters of their craft.
I have a little known female author for you:Sergei Itzam Coiot (female) Book: The Bogs of Surrendered Names (Amazon)Here’s the blurb about it if you wanna check it out:
You can get lost in your own dreams, but what if you got lost in someone else’s?
In *The Bogs of Surrendered Names*, Ronnie Vseslav is a 38-year old musician. The early death of his mother left him with a secret desire for family, consisting now only of an estranged brother. He wakes in a desert hotel, where, through a distortion of time and doors that open to lush imaginary worlds, he is caught in a triangle between the mysterious undead hotel owner the Captain and his beautiful equally mysterious maid Linda.
Old grudges and grief manifest their world into a nightmarish painting, challenging the nature of reality and the malleability of memory and the mind. As the line between dreams and reality is broken, the secrets that lie behind this prison of paradise takes the novel to a soaring shattering climax that none in the hotel can escape.
*The Bogs of Surrendered Names* is a surreal character and plot-driven novel that takes place in both the past and in the future, and examines loneliness, love and human perception of belonging.
For classics, I would consider *To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee essential. It’s also one of my all time favorite books. Here are some other good classics:
* *Their Eyes Were Watching God* by Zora Neal Hurston
* *The Handmaids Tale* by Margaret Atwood
* *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley
Try Angela Saini. Her books Inferior and Superior are about how race science and misogyny have affected society. She’s a science journalist.