My brother is a voracious reader – late forties, blue-color worker, deeply fascinated by history, never without a book in his hand. He spends a lot of time with authors like Bernard Cornwell, James Burke, Patrick O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy; series like Flashman. When we were kids he read all the Tarzan, Conan, Dragon Lance, Forgotten Realms, Dune; Isaac Asamov books. He went through the great Russian authors and many of the other classics. He’s incredibly intelligent, and doesn’t have patience for “easy reads”.
What’s notably missing in his smorgasbord of literature? Anything written by a female author! And why, might you ask? My best guess is that he’s afraid of emotionally charged language; he’s terminally incapable of expressing his own emotions, although he is a very gentle and empathetic person. He honors and respects women, is raising a fierce little daughter and embodies, in all other ways, feminist standards of civil engagement. He doesn’t like romantic stories (or so he says) and has been known to praise an author by saying, “he writes great war”.
He’s soon to have a birthday, and I want to buy him a starter pack of female-authored text. He’s missing out on so much good literature. Here are some of my favorite female authors: Louisa Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Mary Renault, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte (of course). I’d love to get some good suggestions from everyone else! Please help me compile the best list possible, so I can show him that women also write “great war”, along with impeccable, incandescent, deeply impactful stories!
by Linnaea-borealis92
21 Comments
I feel like you’re making an awful lot of assumptions about him in this post lol—I mean by this logic, aren’t the stereotypes about women who read exclusively romances written by other women also true? Reading mostly male authors doesn’t necessarily make a guy toxic or out of touch with his emotions, the same way reading harlequins doesn’t make a woman a bitter lonely spinster or a ravenous nymphomaniac or an unserious reader.
What about Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler? Known for their sci-fi/fantasy, but I think a lot of it is more philosophical than one might think about those genres.
Martha Wells’ **Murderbot Diaries** series of sci-fi novellas. They follow an ex-military cyborg who hires out as security to humans at the edge of the galaxy, protecting them from the dumb things they insist on doing while all it wants to do is watch soap-opera videos. Action-packed, fast-moving, with minimal world-building.
The first one is ***All Systems Red***.
The Light Brigade – Kameron Hurley
The Vorkosigan Saga Lois McMaster Bujold,
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
I’m going to go off “deeply fascinated by history” and suggest intergenerational family epics that span tumultuous times in history:
* The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
* Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
* Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Given his love of historical, I suggest Sharon Kay Penman, Colleen Mcculloughs Masters of Rome series, and/or Hilary Mantel
Older books but still well worth a read:
Andre Norton – Her book “Star Man’s Son” started my love for reading. The “Forerunner” omnibus would be a good intro if my memory is working (Storm Over Warlock, Ordeal in Otherwhere and Forerunner Foray)
Anne McCaffrey – **NOT** her PERN series, at least to start with. I’d suggest the “Talent” trilogy
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. No worries about emotionally charged anything with that one.
The Doloriad by Missouri Williams
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. A Balkan travelogue considered one of the great non-fiction works of the 20th century.
Pretty much anything by Ottessa Moshfegh
For History, try The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
For Historic Fiction, try Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel.
For light sci-fi/fantasy, try Jade City by Fonda Lee.
Personally, most of the books that I’ve received as gifts, outside of books from my to-be-read list, have simply collected dust.
Connie Willis for the history/sci fi crossover
The Talented Mr Ripley or Sharp Objects, any Gillian Flynn really
Anything Ursula Le Guin is top tier. But I also just started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and it’s awesome!
*The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific: 1528-1536* by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Fanny Bandelier, trans.
*Longitude* by Dava Sobel.
*Understanding Catholicism* by Monika K. Hellwig.
*A History of God*: *The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam* by Karen Armstrong.
*Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence* (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine) by Ann G. Carmichael.
*Medieval Technology and Social Change* by Lynn White Jr.
*The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars* by Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova.
*The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians* by Angie Debo.
*The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade* by Cecil Woodham-Smith.
*Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery* by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank.
*Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership* by LaWanda Cox.
*Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North* by Jennifer L. Weber.
*The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood and the Autumn Campaigns of 1864* by Anne J. Bailey.
*Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas* by Mari Sandoz.
*The Battle of the Little Bighorn* by Mari Sandoz.
*Ishi in Two Worlds, 50th Anniversary Edition: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America* by Theodora Kroeber.
*A Short History of China* by Hilda Hookam.
*The Manchus* by Pamela K. Crossley.
*Brave, Bold First Lady Lou Hoover: Survivor of China’s Boxer Rebellion* by Sarita Mirador.
*The Last Voyage of the Lusitania* by A. A. Hoehling and Mary Hoehling.
*They Called it Passchendaele: The Story of the Battle of Ypres and of the Men Who Fought in it* by Lyn MacDonald.
*The Guns of August* by Barbara Tuchman.
*The Zimmermann Telegram* by Barbara Tuchman.
*A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century* by Barbara Tuchman.
*First Salute: View of the American Revolution* by Barbara Tuchman.
*Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45* by Barbara Tuchman.
*Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat* by Reina Pennington.
*Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin, 1942-1945* by Ursula von Kardorff.
*Three Came Home* by Agnes Newton Keith.
*Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl* by Anne Frank.
*Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath* by Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman.
*The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II* by Iris Chang.
*Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943* by James Dugan and Carroll Stewart.
*Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage* by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew.
*First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers* by Loung Ung.
If fantasy is on the table, The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon. It’s an omnibus of three novels and tells the story of a sheep farmer’s daughter who runs away from home to join a mercenary company. She goes much farther than simple mercenary. No romance. Moon is an ex-Marine and writes in a very plainspoken style. There’s plenty of action along the way.
Since he likes James Burke, how about Burke’s daughter, Alafair Burke? She has an impressive collection of thrillers. Frankly I like her books better than her father’s. I don’t think there is any concern with him being emotionally overwhelmed. There are 2 series of hers I would look at: the Samantha Kincaid series and the Ellie Hatcher series. Ideally books in each series should be read in order.
Kate Quinn’s book “The Alice Network” is an excellent historical fiction piece about females spies during WWI and WWII.
And of course “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn is on most people’s list of “must-read thrillers”. But only go for “Gone Girl”. Other people like her additional books but I found them a bit of a slog to get through. “Gone Girl” however I devoured overnight.
I’ll try to go back through my lists and find some others.
Regeneration, Pat Barker
The Farseer Trilogy might suit
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Historical fiction with a male MC.