1st anniversary of 'The List'

Posted by Bel. The time is 4:13pm here in Wellington, NZ.

For one whole year now I have read nothing but books from 'The List'.

Okay, there have been a few exceptions, but probably less than five! And two of them were for work. Almost everything I have read has been reviewed on this site (label: 'The List'), but I thought today was a good day to go over it as a whole...

'The List' came from this article on Jezebel entitled 75 Books Every Woman Should Read: The Complete List. It was a collective response, compiled by the blog editors from commentors' suggestions, after Esquire magazine had released a list of '75 Books Every Man Should Read' that they felt was "myopic" due to its old white dude predominance (in fact, one female author, four non-white authors *shudder*).

This list is not without its biases too. Obviously, it tends towards female authors and themes, but more unintentionally many of the authors are from the United States. I think this is one of those unfortunate stereotypes where Americans just don't think far enough outside the square. Part of this is because they have a fantastic education system that focusses on their own history and own literary successes - but it does mean that other cultures get left out in the cold.

There were quite a few seemingly obvious ones that got missed as well. There's no Margaret Atwood on 'The List'. The Vagina Monologues isn't there. Katherine Mansfield doesn't get a mention, despite the fact she's probably more well-regarded overseas than she is here.

But all in all, it's a solid effort. I'd only read 7 of the books when I started. Now, with a recount to sort out various mix-ups, I am up to 42. That means 26 to go! Yes, I did abandon Middlemarch and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, but I am planning to make another attempt - on Middlemarch, at least. So really only 25. Assuming all of the rest are readable. And something has to be pretty awful for me to give it up, I'm dogged like that with books, though who knows why.

I've been able to find every book so far at the Wellington Central Library, bless! However I am now hitting a few dead end. Alison Bechdel's Fun Home has been out each and every time I have looked on the library catelogue. FOR A YEAR. I am quite keen to read this graphic novel, having enjoyed her other work and being a fan of applying 'The Bechdel Rule' to films.

I'm also having to read around Martha Gellhorn. They don't have her collection of war journalism, The Face of War, but do have collections of letters and travel memoirs, as well as some novels in stack, so I figure this will have to do as a way of getting to know her writing.


Below is the complete 'The List' for your perusal - let me know if you would like it as a handy one page Word doc, perfect for keeping handy in your wallet:

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• 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
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
• 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
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• Earthly Paradise, Colette
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Property, Valerie Martin
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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