Eva and Aarti are hosting the Women Unbound Challenge and I’m helping! I am so happy I was on Twitter when the whole idea erupted. Within an hour and a half (I had dinner sometime in there), we had host volunteers, a hashtag #unbound, rule suggestions, time frame, and a ton (well, quite a few!) of enthusiastic and interested readers!
I have no idea what books I will read.
I will commit to the most books read level.
I think know this will be fun! and educational.
Then come back here and give me your suggestion for a must read book!
I am totally impressed with how quickly it came together. I am looking forward to participating!!
I’m looking forward to participating as well!
Some of my suggestions for fiction include A Thousand Splendid Suns, So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba, and Unless by Carol Shields.
Yay I’m looking forward to it – the first part of my top bookshelf houses all my must keep forever fem fic so let me recommend you some:
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – Margaret Atwood
‘Alias Grace’ – Margaret Atwood
‘The Red Tent’ – Anita Diamante (that’s probably not the right spelling)
‘The Bitch Goddess Notebook’ – Martha O’Connor
‘The Carhullan Army’ – Sarah Hall
‘The Virgin Suicides’ – Jeffrey Eugenides
‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ – Michael Connelley (I think)
‘The Girls of Slender Means’ – Muriel Spark
My recs are all on my blog, lol! Thanks for co-hosting w/ me!
Ah and I can’t believe I forgot Flygirl by Sherri L Smith – if you haven’t read that one you just must!
What a marvellous idea, I am seriously tempted!
Let me suggest
Salwa Bakr; The Wiles of Men and other stories; Cairo 1992
Copy/pasted from Amazon.com: Set among the poor of contemporary Cairo, these thirteen stories and one short novella tell of women struggling to provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. They explore the limits of self-awareness, the pressures to conform, and some of the strange paths to escape that women resort to in a conservative society shot through with social and sexual prejudice and preconceptions.
Salwa Bakr; The Golden Chariot; Cairo 2008
Copy/pasted from Amazon.com: From her cell in a women’s prison, Aziza decides to create a golden chariot to take her to heaven, where her wishes and dreams can be fulfilled. As she muses on who to take with her, she tells the life stories of her fellow prisoners and decides in her heart which ones deserve a free ride to paradise. Aziza’s cruelly frank comments about her friends and their various crimes, including murder, theft, and drug-dealing-weave these tales together into a contemporary Arabian Nights.
What a fabulous idea! Naturally all the hundreds of feminist books I know whisk out of my head. Umm…
The Womens’ Room – Marilyn French
Fanny Fern – Ruth Hall
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Margaret Atwood – Surfacing
Non-fiction
Taking Back the Night – Katie Roiphe
The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
Misconceptions – Naomi Wolf
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
Anything by Nancy Friday
There are so many I have forgotten. Looking forward to seeing other people’s suggestions!
You are NOT “helping out,” Care! You’re hosting, too
I don’t have anything up on my blog about this challenge yet, so am off to remedy that now…
I’m not joining anymore challenges, right now, but I’d say anything by Simone de Beauvoir is worth a shot. I’ve read one of her books, The Second Sex, and I was really kind of surprised that she was considered a bold feminist in her day. In many ways, she bent to the times. Still, she was a fascinating lady.
I am looking forward to this challenge! I just haven’t decided what I am going to read yet…
I’m so excited about this one! I want to revisit a lot of the books I read and wrote on in college, and see how they look thru my older/wiser? eyes with 20 years more under my belt (and motherhood, SAHM, etc.)
I don’t have my booklist up yet … I’ll tweet when it’s up!
I’m very excited about this challenge!
I’m signing up for this one which will be my first challenge!
Excellent suggestions by earlier posters. I added some to my post at my site also but I would say that Muriel Spark–The Girls of Slender Means and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are good ones. Plus May Sarton is excellent too. Her journals are fantastic. A Journal of a Solitude is one of my favorite reads. Alice Walker, Willa Cather . . .