Cheryl LaGuardia

The Art of Manliness May Just Be the Art of Well-Readness
May 14, 2008

Saw this list of 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library at the Art of Manliness site (a site “dedicated to helping men uncover what manliness means in the 21st century), and was struck by several things:

1. 1.  I’ve read an awful lot of these books, and I’m a woman,
2. 2.  I’m okay with that,
3. 3.  although the authors of the list state that it consists of “the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man,” I’d counter that it comprises many books that have shaped the lives of individual persons, while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it mean to be human.

That said, since this list is also a Listmania! list on Amazon.com, I went Amazon to search for a Listmania! counterpart for women, and couldn’t find anything quite like it.

So here are the titles I suggest for as an Essential Woman’s Library list, pretty much off the top of my head. In some cases, the first title in a series holds the place for the writer’s entire output (e.g., Janet Evanovich) but Jane Austen’s books had to be listed individually, of course:

The Age of Innocence, Anne of Green Gables, Annie John, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Awakening, Barren Ground, Beloved, Camp Notes and Other Writings, Century of Struggle, The Change, Cheri, The Children’s Hour, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, The Color Purple, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Delta of Venus, The Diary of a Young Girl, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, The Edible Woman, Emily Post on Etiquette, Emma, Ethan Frome, The Feminine Mystique, Fifth Chinese Daughter, Frankenstein, The Golden Notebook, Gone with the Wind, The Good Earth, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, The Group, The Haunting of Hill House, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The History of Woman Suffrage, The House of Mirth, The House of the Spirits, The House on Mango Street, In Country, Jane Eyre, Jasmine, The Joy Luck Club, Lathe of Heaven, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Little House on the Prairie, Living My Life, Love Medicine, Mansfield Park, Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, The Mill on the Floss, Mona in the Promised Land, Mortal Remains in Maggody, Mrs. Dalloway,Murder at the Vicarage, My Antonia, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Northanger Abbey, On Beauty, One for the Money, The Optimist's Daughter, Oroonoko, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Persuasion, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Possession, Pride and Prejudice,A Raisin in the Sun, A Room of One’s Own,Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, The Scarlet Pimpernel,The Second Sex, The Secret of the Old Clock, Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke,Sense and Sensibility, Seventeen Syllables, The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Silent Spring, So Big, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Selected Writings, Strong Poison, Surfacing, The Tale of Genji, Tell Me a Riddle, Testament of Youth, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tish, To Kill a Mockingbird,A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, The Wide Sargasso Sea, The Wind Done Gone, Windy City Blues, Winter in Mallorca, The Woman Warrior, Women and Economics, The Yellow Wallpaper, and You Have Seen Their Faces.

Woof! Thank you for indulging me. I suspect that you have others you’d include on this list, and I’d like to hear about them, if you’re willing to share – comments are welcome!

More as it happens, among essential men and women,

Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl LaGuardia on May 14, 2008 | Comments (0)