100 Must-Read Books for Women

A very optimistically-named blog called The Art of Manliness posted an article:
100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library.

I disagree with some of it (not to mention it's a fairly American-centric list), but it's not a bad list -- plus it's largely a collection of books that are just good in general, and could probably benefit a woman's education as well. Thus, I have started my own list:

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Woman's Library

In no particular order:

Classics

1) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
Yes, I know it doesn't get any more American-centric than this.

It is a fairly realistic romance for those who don't necessarily like happily-ever-after romances -- plus, in Scarlett and Rhett Butler, it has two of the strongest and most intriguing literary characters ever conceived, set against a fairly epic time scale and weighing in at over 1k pages in most editions.

2) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" means, loosely translated, that you can be writing about pedophilia, kidnapping, and just all-around bad parenting, and still create an amazing book if your prose is pretty enough. The book gets rather sickening in the second half, however -- which little girl doesn't remember a guardian not allowing her to stay out late and hang out with boys? Now imagine if you were also having sex with that guardian on a regular basis. And that he was holding you against your will because he married and attempted to murder your mother to have sex with you on a regular basis.

3) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I never said Fitzgerald was any good at characterizing women, which is a fault of a lot of books on this list. I don't much care for Daisy, who seems like the flighty indecisive type of woman whom we all can't stand, but Gatsby is a very interesting and empathetic character, the quintessential man who built an empire chasing a dream that turned out to be empty and illusional, and he alone carries the book, in spite of the boring narrator and the ice queen Jordan.

4) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A book set in France and Spain in the aftermath of WWI has a bunch of American expatriates drinking away their woes on literally every page. Continuing in the trend of famous male authors who can't write a convincing woman, Hemingway has often been criticized for his weak characterization of women, and this book is no different. However, I liked Brett Ashley and found her to be a much more convincing character than his other female leads.

5) Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

It's been compared to Gone with the Wind a lot, in that they are both stories about strong-willed, resourceful women struggling to succeed in a man's world.

6) The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

It is still THE defining teenage angst book of the twentieth century, and let's face it, angst is universal, all you Death Cab for Cutie fans.

7) 1984 by George Orwell

Animal Farm is too full of itself by far and kind of boring. 1984, however, is a much more intelligent book because it offers a lot of very insightful observations about totalitarianism, many of which seem eerily applicable today.

8) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

It's the story of a man from Mars who comes to Earth, learns about our ways, and teaches us a few things, mostly about love. It's been hailed as the "hippie Bible" of the 1960s, and that's easy to believe. Science fiction always suffers from bad women characters. I like to think this is a product of science fiction's popularity during the Cold War era, where the stay at home mom was a staple of life, and not because all science fiction fans are nerds who can't get a date to save their lives. And Heinlein has some of the strongest and boldly expressed views on that subject...but the book is still good, nevertheless. I'm always surprised this one doesn't make it on that many required-reading lists in high school, it's really such an amazing book -- but probably fairly likely to be misinterpreted by a high-school crowd. Probably more of a college book.

9) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is the quintessential British wit and the book makes for a very enjoyable read, as well as being a very well-documented litany of sins. And sinning is always fashionable.

10) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

It's kind of like 1984 and good for the same reasons.

11) A Clockwork Orange by Alan Burgess

I'm really surprised this book didn't make it onto the man's list. What trinity of dystopia books would be complete without this? It has a lot to say about free will and the nature of good and evil, and may be one of the few book to movie adaptations where the movie is actually good.

12) either Bluebeard or Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

People who really like Vonnegut don't even consider Slaughterhouse-5 to be among his best works. It's just the one that's easily taught in school because everyone understands when you criticize war for being inhumane. Bluebeard is superficially about art, I suppose, but Breakfast of Champions is all over the place and doesn't ever seem to have any sort of logical underpinning at all. HOW WILL I MAKE THE CHILDREN UNDERSTAND? C'mon, you're smarter than that.

13) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

You either love or you hate Ayn Rand, there is no in between. And this book proves beyond a doubt that women authors are not necessarily any better at creating believable female leads than men are. What the hell is Dominique supposed to be, really? Despite all this, the book is strongly written in that it kind of has its own streamrolling pace, and the ideas (it's called "objectivism" but it's really just a glorification for the "invisible hand" and the selfishness underpinning modern capitalism) are interesting and worth reading about even if you don't agree with them.

14) The Forever War by Joe Halderman

It's considered one of the best "military science fiction" ever written, and for a good reason -- it focuses on the possible mental and emotional ramifications of warfare, which despite taking place in a science fiction setting and over the course of thousands of years, are applicable even to soldiers who are sent away for a few years to Iraq.

15) The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke was always good at imparting a sense of awe and wonder at the world, which may explain why he is considered one of the grandmasters of science fiction, even though this book takes place not in space but in Sri Lanka and doesn't have spaceships and androids in it. He's also a "hard science fiction" proponent, which will explain why there isn't any mention of hyperspace drives and traveling through black holes in his books.

16) Neuromancer by William Gibson

One of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, books of all time. The Devil is definitely in the details here, and it will probably take more than one reading to simply absorb all the density of the prose here. It's about a hacker and his female bodyguard with the artificial eyes and razors for fingernails as they meet the first "organic" artificial intelligence.

17) Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

I've kind of digressed into science fiction world here, but I included some romances up above, and there's more literary stuff to follow. Neal Stephenson wrote some other trilogies that seem to be more or less capitalistic nonsense, but Snowcrash is basically just a fun, instant classic, that seemed to pretty much envision the future of the Internet or possibly, Second Life, way before it actually happened.

18) Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

This is the last book I read that I was honestly blown away by. I do believe Gibson predicted the "viral internet trend" before it became a household concept.

19) The Once and Future King by T.B. White

This is the story of King Arthur and his knights, the first part of which was the inspiration for the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone. It is a re-interpretation of the old legend as seen through the lens of WWII, especially surrounding the idea of "Might is Right." It is also the only Arthurian romance in which Lancelot is actually a depressed, ugly, and sadistic guy desperately striving for acceptance, which is a lot more interesting than his usual playboy image.

20) The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

This one and the one above go hand in hand, for this one is a retelling of the Arthurian legends from the POV of the women in the story.

21) Hyperion by Dan Simmons

This book is a piece of good storytelling. It's also the first book in a 4-part series, although he introduced a new main character for books 3 and 4, a Messiah-type precocious girl, that annoys me so much that I could never finish the series.

22) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick

He wrote a lot of other good science fiction as well, but this one became the basis for the movie Blade Runner, which is still one of the most amazing movies of all time. It focuses on the nature of humanity and identity, with a healthy dash of his usual paranoia thrown in.

23) Microserfs or Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Microserfs is a nice commentary for the nerd generation, but Generation X, which was written in the 70s, is startlingly reflective even for today's society.

24) Choke, Survivor, or if you're really adventurous, Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik

He also wrote Fight Club, but the three books above trump it both in content and in shock value, which he uses a great deal of. His books are really graphic and not for the faint of heart.

25) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peak

He swears it's not a political commentary but certain parts of it may almost read as such. It could most convincingly be categorized as fantasy, but few fantasy worlds are both so detailed and so self-contained. It's a sprawling epic that's easily overlooked, about a young ambitious man who is trying to usurp power from inside a castle so bowled over by its own traditions that it's become stagnant and ineffectual.

26) Perdido Street Station by China Meiville



Good Reads

Spin State and Spin Control




Educational and Foundational

The Prince

The Art of War

The Metrosexual's Guide to Style

The Iliad and the Odyssey

The Elegant Universe

Guns Germs and Steel

Civilization

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Lucifer Principle

The Selfish Gene

An Autobiography of Cleopatra