Well, I love a good book list challenge.

Danyl from Dimpost has written a list of 50-odd must-read novels to recommend to people. The difference with his list is that he omits anything too long or ‘hard’ that might turn out to put people off:

A few weeks ago I was arguing about lists of essential or ‘must-read’ books with Wallace Chapman, and it got me thinking. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I sought out lists of ‘Greatest Novels of All Time’, and tried to work my way through them. I read some great books (although many of them are no longer listed on lists of Great Novels, because literary fashions change and many things that were Great in the 1990s are no longer Great). But I mostly failed to read lots of difficult books, like Satre’s Nausea and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which are still considered great but which I also think, with the benefit of hindsight, were completely ridiculous books to recommend to general readers interested in expanding their literary horizons.

… I’ve read the first volume [of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time] and thought it was sometimes brilliant but mostly intensely boring, and when I disclose this to fellow Proust readers they almost always sigh with relief and agree. It is, I think, the least helpful book you could possibly recommend to someone.

[Read Danyl’s list of accessible must-read books here.]

I’m a sucker for a book list, so I clicked through and read his list. We have slightly divergent taste in books, but I’ve read a fair number of his entries.

But it was immediately clear to me that this was a list full of Pākehā/white male authors. Danyl acknowledged the lack of ethnic diversity in the post, but didn’t mention that the list was 5:1 written by men.

He’s called it a provisional list, though, so when I pointed that out, he said he’d be interested in seeing a list of matching books by women that would fit the criteria.

Again, I love a good book challenge. So here I am at 2am (feverish baby, feverish mama) picturing my bookshelves, an ocean away in Wellington, and picking out a reading list for Danyl and anyone else who wants to broaden their reading.

I arrange my bookshelves differently every time I move house. When we were first married, and got fabulous new bookshelves as a gift from M’s university friends, I filled them up by gender of author, almost exactly 50/50, as it turned out.

I found that very pleasing. Men and women are about 50/50 in the population, right? Much of what I’ve learned about the world has come via fiction, and it would be a shame to miss out on seeing things through the eyes of both women and men.

Pamela Clark has written a fantastic list of 35 practical ways men can support women and feminism, and reading women authors is part of the scene:

3. Consume cultural products produced by women.

In whatever your interests are — French cinema, astrophysics, baseball, birdwatching — ensure that women’s voices and women’s cultural products are represented in what you are consuming. If they are not, make an effort to seek them out.

I can help with the seeking out bit! Here’s my list of accessible, shortish, excellent novels by women, just from what’s on my bookshelf.

(Oh, and you might also like this list of TV shows with strong female leads.)

I’ve got my own preferences and biases, of course, so I’ll also recommend a few other links at the bottom for following up things I haven’t necessarily read myself. In particular, I’ve hardly read a thing offline since I had my daughter, so I’m a little out of date.

While writing the list, it struck me that I could think of very few novels from Africa or the Indian sub-continent that were short, so it may be that the stories women and men from those places tell are by nature told over more pages. Then I realised that the short novels on my bookshelves were far more likely to be written by men. So I have been a bit looser than Danyl on length, lest it skew the list, but I’ve still omitted wonderful books that require a bit of hard work for many readers.

My main criterion is not how fast you can read it but how hard it is to put down. Millions of children and adults have cheerfully devoured 700-page Harry Potter books, so I don’t think size is the main issue. This is a list of brilliant books that are not ‘difficult’. Enjoy. And please add to the list in the comments below.

 

59 (or so) Brilliant + Accessible Books by Women

Carol Shields: Unless

Emma Donoghue: Room

Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible

Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres

Toni Morrison: Beloved

Mildred D Taylor: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Patricia Grace: Tu

Sia Figiel: Where We Once Belonged

Tessa Duder: Alex

Margaret Mahy: The Changeover

Elizabeth Knox: The Vintner’s Luck

Fiona Farrell: Book Book

Kate de Goldi: The 10pm Question

Fiona Kidman: Ricochet Baby

Andrea Levy: The Long Song

Tahmina Anam: The Golden Age

Mary Ann Shaffer: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Marilynne Robinson: Gilead

Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife

Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Edith Wharton: The Buccaneers

Elizabeth Gaskell: Wives and Daughters

Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm

Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

AS Byatt: Possession

Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders

Ann Patchett: Bel Canto

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

Annie Proulx: The Shipping News

Valerie Martin: Property

Nicole Krauss: The History of Love

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Jane Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking

Louise Erdrich: Tracks

Attica Locke: Black Water Rising

Helen Garner: The Spare Room

Melina Marchetta: Looking for Alibrandi

Mardi McConnochie: Coldwater

Anne Brontë: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Margo Lanagan: Tender Morsels

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

Daphne du Maurier: The King’s General

Georgette Heyer: Venetia

Janet Frame: To the Is-Land

Catherine Chidgey: In a Fishbone Church

Dodie Smith: I Capture the Castle

Michelle Cooper: A Brief History of Montmaray

Kate Duignan: Breakwater

Lian Hearn: Across the Nightingale Floor

Elizabeth Strout: Abide with Me

Margaret Craven: I Heard the Owl Call My Name

Elizabeth Berg: The Pull of the Moon

Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years

UPDATES (books I do indeed recommend but accidentally omitted and have been reminded of since publication)

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Rachel Joyce: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 

 

8 More Lists to Diversify Your Reading

50 Books by Women of Colour

A Year of Reading the World

25 Books by Women to Help Diversify Your Bookshelves

5 Indigenous Australian Female Writers Who Should be on School Reading Lists

Crime Fiction by Women of Colour

The Year of Reading Arab Women

14 Aboriginal Canadian Women Writers to Read this Summer

Reading the European Union

So what do your bookshelves or e-reader indexes look like? Is it time to diversify? In what direction?

This is part of an occasional series of book lists. Some others are:

Ten books, four words each

Ten books, four words each: most influential

Ten books, four words each: childhood faves

I tell you, I’m everywhere these days. Follow me on Facebook for daily links, resources and Sacraparentalish tidbits, on Pinterest for link-plantations and on Twitter for ranting.

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