80 Books Every

Person Should
Read
We invited eight female literary powerhouses,
from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane
Gay, to help us create an updated list of books
everyone should read. Each participant made 10
picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're
looking forward to reading and we hope you are,
too.
BY ESQUIRE EDITORS
JAN 5, 2016
What can we say? We messed up. Our list of "80 Books
Every Man Should Read," published several years ago, was
rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors
and titles. So we invited eight female literary
powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to
Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list. Each participant
made 10 picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're
looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.
01 OF 88

Michiko Kakutani,
@michikokakutani
Chief book critic for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize
winner, and perhaps the only person on earth with the guts
to call the work of Philip Roth "flimsy" and that of John
Updike "cringe-making."
02 OF 88

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott

Fitzgerald
The author's darkly luminous masterpiece: the original
novel about the American Dreamand the most
beautifully written, ever.
MK
03 OF 88

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

The horrors of slavery are made harrowingly real in a
remarkable novel that possesses the intimacy of real life
and the epic power of myth.
MK
04 OF 88

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The master of magical realism conjured the town of
Macondo, where the miraculous and the monstrous are
equally part of daily life, and in doing so, mythologized the
history of an entire continent.
MK
05 OF 88

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

In recounting the story of one woman's death and her
burial from multiple points of view, this short, fierce book
helped remake the modern novel and influenced
generations of writers to come.
MK
06 OF 88

Underworld, by Don DeLillo

The story of one man and one family that is also the story
of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th
century.
MK
07 OF 88

Selected Stories Of Alice Munro

Piercing, prismatic tales about the lives of girls and women
that possess the amplitude of novels, and the emotional
precision of Chekhov.
MK
08 OF 88

Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

A buddy movie starring the British surveyors who mapped
the boundary between North and South in pre-
Revolutionary America and a dazzling post-modernist
confection that emerges as the author's most affecting
novel yet.
MK
09 OF 88

The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov

A glittering collection of tales animated by the author's
fascination with the magical transactions of art and the
indelible losses of exile.
MK
10 OF 88

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao,

by Junot Diaz
A funny, street-smart portrait of a second-generation
Dominican geek that unfolds into a vibrant meditation on
public and private history.
MK
11 OF 88

A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine

L'Engle
A children's classic thatback in the 1960'sgave the
world a science fiction heroine: a bright, awkward, spirited
girl named Meg Murry who travels through time and space
to find her missing scientist father and save the universe.
MK
12 OF 88

Lauren Groff, @legroff

Author of three novels, including President
Obama's favorite book of 2015, Fates and Furies.
13 OF 88

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Ceremony is one of the great (and under appreciated)
American novels. Silko writes with tremendous power,
rage, and range of violence, Pueblo myth and a veteran's
recovery.
LG
14 OF 88

The Collected Stories of Grace Paley

Under the seductive, crisp and funny voice of Grace Paley,
there burns a great indignation and condemnation of the
way the powerful prey on the weak in society.
LG
15 OF 88

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

This novel has the most capacious vision of humanity that
I know of. In a crowded field of novels about small towns
and marriage and idealism, it remains the best.
LG
16 OF 88

Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin

I could have chosen Baldwin's essay collections The Fire
Next Time or Notes of a Native Son; if his absolutely great
short story "Sonny's Blues" were a stand-alone book, it
would have been a shoo-in. In Giovanni's Room, published
in 1956, Baldwin wrote gorgeously of a homosexual
relationship in Paris, a book so far ahead of its time that
America is still catching up to it.
LG
17 OF 88

Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson

Anne Carson is my pick for greatest living writer. She has
spiny brilliance, profound Classical knowledge, and an
astonishing ability to slide between genres. Autobiography
of Red is both a deeply affecting book-length poem about
Geryon, a demon in love with Herakles. It is also hilarious.
LG
18 OF 88

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote one of the greatest works
of synthesis in prose history: this novel pretends to be
about a few braided love-stories but it contains more
themes, characters, and political ideas than most shelves
of books do.
LG
19 OF 88

The Complete Poems, by Emily

Dickinson
Dickinson's poems are sharp, wild, implosive things. She
will always be relentlessly modern, and is one of the
parents of modern American poetry.
LG
20 OF 88

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

If Dickinson, with her compression, is one parent of
modern American poetry, Whitman is the other parent,
working in the expansive, wild, roaming, explosive vein.
LG
21 OF 88

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by

William Maxwell
This novel has the most stunning architecture, a structure
that, the longer one looks at it, the more powerful and
moving it becomes. The story is about loss and grief, and
is told through the repeated reimagining of a murder the
narrator knew of as a boy.
LG
22 OF 88

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne

This was one of the first modern novels ever written, and
remains one of the funniest and most experimental: there
is almost nothing in the most out-there of modern prose
that Sterne didn't do first.
LG
23 OF 88

Sloane Crosley,
@askanyone
Novelist, essayist, and one of 2015's biggest success
stories.
24 OF 88

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

You can read it to witness the beginnings of New
Journalism, or because it's arguably Capote's finest work,
or because it's illuminating about human depravity. But I
like to read it for the chilling bit when Capote notices the
different types of handwriting in Nancy Clutter's diary and
imagines her trying on selves, wondering: "Is this Nancy?"
SC
25 0f 88 Slouching Towards
Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
Before the Didion craze, there was thisand sure, there
was a lot before thisbut Slouching Towards Bethlehem is
where to start with Joan Didion. She is the ultimate cool
and keen-eyed observer of the human condition, of
America, and of gracefully merciless self-examination.
Though, as ferocious and important as her topics are, she
always leaves a gift for the reader. I, for instance, cannot
eat a peach or turn on the air conditioning without
thinking, just a little, of her essay "Goodbye to All That."
SC
26 OF 88

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

She's French but she doesn't have to be. She is any reality-
challenged newlywed. This first novel (Flaubert really
knocked it out of the park) is an absolute masterpiece
about what happens when humans feel bored and trapped,
when they emotionally chew off their own shapely legs.
SC
27 of 88
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
Alice Munro is a national treasure, and technically that
nation is Canada, but philosophically it's The People's
Republic of Everybody. It's therefore difficult to pick out
her strongest collection or to have the gall to pick, but I'd
go with this one. They are about aging and love and
marriage and life itself. I can't envision a reader who
wouldn't be changed for the better by reading Alice Munro.
SC
28 0f 88
The Collected Stories of Katherine
Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield is not required reading to be a
personbut passion and point of view areand since
Mansfield is one of my personal favorites, I am going to
foist her on you. She's a bit like a New Zealand Edith
Wharton with a sprinkling of Jane Austen and John
Cheever. But clever. "The Doll's House" is one of my
favorite short stories of all time and just to prove it, I
named the heroine of my first novel after a character in
that story.

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29 OF 88
The Group, by Mary McCarthy
Do you have to read a novel with a character named "Priss"
to be a better person? Kind of, yeah. The Group is a
seminal, massively vital book written ahead of its time (it
was banned here and there) and yet very much of its time,
focusing on gender politics, friendship, socioeconomic
status and influencing whole genres of contemporary
fiction all while being a total blast to read. Every woman
should read it to know themselves; every man should read
it to know who they're dealing with.
SC
30 0f 88 Birds of America, by Lorrie
Moore
If you're not in love with Lorrie Moore, I worry for you. You
will hear people speak differently after reading this book,
as if you've been in need of a hearing aid for years and
you didn't know it. "People Like That Are The Only People
Here" is worth the price of admission alone, as it's one of
the most powerful and important short stories (about love
and loneliness and motherhood and death) of this century.
SC
31 0f 88
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati
Roy
Peppered and pierced with tragedy, this book is a blow to
the heart. And then another. And then another. But not in
the Cormac McCarthy way. The God of Small Thingsreveals
the beauty and grace possible in the darkness like no other
novel I have ever read. I both envy and pity the early
editors and reviewers who had the task of describing this
novel for the first time. If forced to boil it down, I'd say
this is a novel about having a family at all, about the
motivations within the structured microcosm of society
that is a family. Just that.
SC
32 of 88
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
I heard Chimamada Adichie speak about Things Fall
Apartseveral years ago. She said that as a young girl in
Nigeria, her books were filled with bouncing blond British
girls and that she "didn't know people who looked like me
could be in books" until she read Things Fall Apart.
Whatever I say about this perfect, archetypical African
novel will pale in comparison to that.
SC
33 OF 88

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

What better way to learn how to be a person than to whip
one up? Frankenstein's monster is the all-time most
enduring image to cross from literature to pop culture and
back. And at his gothic artificial heart, he represents a
blank slate. Which is depressingly telling about what we
chose to latch onto.
SC
34 OF 88

Roxane Gay, @rgay

Essayist, novelist, self-professed bad feminist.
35 OF 88

Citizen, by Claudia Rankine

Rankine defies genre and writes honestly and relentlessly
about being black in modern America. This book is
necessary in every sense of the word.
RG
36 of 88
Balm, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
I am always looking for interesting and, more importantly,
original stories about slavery. In this gorgeously written
novel, Perkins-Valdez writes of life after slavery and the
Civil War as a man tries to find his beloved wife, a woman
seeks a life for herself away from the mother and aunts
who didn't know how to see her, and a widow who can
speak to the dead searches for solace.
RG
37 0f 88
NW, by Zadie Smith
Whenever Smith writes London, I forget time and place.
That is no different in NW, an ambitious and audacious
novel about four people as they grow up beyond the
confines of the council estate where they were raised. It's
thrilling to see how fearless Smith is, taking all kinds of
narrative risks throughout while also telling an
unforgettable story about identity.
RG
38 OF 88

Forgotten Country, by Catherine

Chung
In her debut novel, Catherine Chung writes of a displaced
family, a sister harboring the kind of secret too many girls
know too well, and another sister who tries to mend the
fractures in her family before it's too late.
RG
39 OF 88

Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion

If there is a consummate Los Angeles novel, this would be
it but then, as with all her writing, Didion takes things
further, to a complex and dark place where a woman's
choices are painfully constrained by the whims of men.
RG
40 of 88
Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg
In this moving novel, Feinberg explores the life of Jess
Goldberg, a butch lesbian trying to make a way through
the world in a body few people are interested in
understanding. In addition to tackling sexuality and gender
identity, this novel also reveals hard truths about working
class America at the mid-century. Few books have stayed
with me more.
RG
41 OF 88

Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice

Walker
Alice Walker manages to take on the very political issue of
female genital mutilation while never losing sight of the
power of fierce, deeply engaged storytelling.
RG
42 OF 88

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich

A young man grapples with his mother's rape in a most
unexpected, powerful and haunting coming of age story.
RG
43 OF 88

The Age of Innocence, by Edith

Wharton
Edith Wharton is my favorite writer and I live for her
wicked social commentary wrapped in a torrid but well-
mannered story of forbidden love. You haven't seen
passion until you read how Wharton's WASPs stare
longingly at each other.
RG
44 OF 88

The Lover, by Marguerite Duras

There are few novels more sensuous and troubling and
magnetic than The Lover.Duras is simply exquisite from
the first word to the last. She imbues her prose with the
damp heat of Indochina and the fraught tension of
forbidden love and never forgets how beautiful words can
be when arranged just so.
RG
45 OF 88

Lizzie Widdicombe,
@widdikombe
Staff writer and editor at The New Yorker.
46 of 88
The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena
Ferrante
An observation: People don't seem to merely read Elena
Ferrante's novels. They devour them in all-night binges,
coming to work bleary-eyed and strung out. What's her
secret? Is it that propulsive voice? The way she brings up
thoughts you'd never dared to nameabout friendships,
sex, class? To read them is to remember that the best
books are a little harrowing. Start with the Neapolitan
Novels. They go down like a warm drink of crystal meth.
LW
47 of 88
The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian prince who
died in 1957, leaving behind an unpublished novelthe
only one he ever wrote. It's a masterpiece. Set during the
unification of Italy, it's about one of the prince's forebears,
a wry nobleman who struggles to keep his household afloat
while a new order rises. The book's most famous line is
spoken by the prince's savvy, gold-digging nephew,
Tancredi: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will
have to change." In this age of "disruption," as the
revolutions keep coming, it seems even more apt.
LW
48 of 88
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Like the whale itself, this book's sheer size is scary. And
its reputation: the Leviathan of American literature! But
crack open the first chapter (no CliffsNotes!) and you may
be surprised by how fun it is to listen to the warm, chatty
voice of Melville's narrator, Ishmaeland how fascinating
it is to spend time in the lost world of Pequod, with its
colorful crew: Starbucks, Flask, and, of course, the
tattooed harpooner Queequeg, whom Melville describes as
"George Washington cannibalistically developed." Yes, it's
an epic about man's struggle with God and fate, but it's
also a bawdy, deranged adventure with a group of
nineteenth-century sailors.
LW
49 of 88
Heartburn, by Nora Ephron
Moby Dick it ain't, but don't go through life without
reading Heartburn. To the list of great narrators we have
to add Rachel Samstat, Ephron's wisecracking cookbook
author, who is seven months pregnant when her husband
informs her that he's in love with another woman. Lemons
become lemon souffl. The whole book is funny, but the
scene where Rachel's therapy group gets held up by a
mugger is one of the most pants-peeingly hilarious in
American literature.
LW
50 of 88
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by
Muriel Spark
Miss Jean Brodie, of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, has
some unorthodox teaching methods. Putting aside the
official curriculum, she tutors a hand-picked group of
students on important topics like her love life, the fact that
she is in her "prime" (whatever that means), Renaissance
painting, and the finer points of Fascism. Spark assumes
a God-like voice, occasionally fast-forwarding to the girls'
futures: fiery deaths, disappointing marriages, etc. As you
laugh at Miss Brodie's outrageous dictums, the petty
intrigues of the faculty, and the students' adolescent
excesses, you may be surprised to notice a lump forming
in your throat. How can a book so savagely funny be so
wrenchingly, heartbreakingly sad?
LW
51 OF 88

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Has there ever been a more wonderful heroine than
Elizabeth "Lizzy" Bennett? Witty yet sensible, fiercely
principled yet vulnerable and kind. An independent thinker
determined to marry for love. My parents liked her so
much, they named me after her. Bring on Mr. Darcy!
LW
52 of 88
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
Twenty-five years before Marilynne Robinson won a
Pulitzer Prize for Gilead (and acquired a superfan named
Barack Obama), she wrote this short, strange novel about
two orphaned sisters being raised by a "drifter" aunt in a
forgotten town called Fingerbone. A hypnotic meditation
on the transience of life and love, it rings in your ears.
We're all drifters.
LW
53 of 88
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The publication of Go Set a Watchman, last year
Mockingbird's sequel, or is it a rough draft?sowed
confusion about everyone's favorite 8th grade reading
assignment. But it also drew attention to uneasy mixture
at the heart of this book. Along with the unforgettable
charactersScout, Boo Radleyit depicts a small-town
South where tenderness, humor, and charming
eccentricity flourish alongside vicious racism. Sound
familiar? That's why it's a national treasure.
LW
54 OF 88

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

A book about an accomplished London family on vacation
in the Scottish Hebrides who plan to make a trip to a
nearby lighthouse. But it's by Virginia Woolf, so it's really
about life, consciousness, and the problem of rendering
them in art. And the obliterating forces of war, death, and
timeand what comes after.
LW
55 of 88
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite
Yourcenar
What's the world's greatest love story? Most people,
pressed to answer this question, would probably not point
to a fifty-eight-year-old Roman emperor's passion for a
Greek boy, circa 175 A.D. Certainly not most French
women writing in the 1950s. And yet, with The Memoirs of
Hadrian, Yourcenar made exactly that case. And more:
She collapsed time, showing how a man who lived 2,000
years ago thought and felt just as deeply as we do about
big and little subjects, from diet to governance.
LW
56 OF 88

Anna Holmes,
@annaholmes
New York Times columnist and founder of Jezebel.
57 of 88
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret
Atwood
Margaret Atwood's classic of dystopian fiction may be
some 30 years old but its depiction of a society driven
apart by terrorism and reconstituted as an ultra-
conservative Christian theocracy where women have little
to no rights at all feels as relevant today as it did when it
was published back in 1985, and a sobering reminder that
the war on women is as characteristic of the future as the
past and present.
AH
58 of 88
The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr
This book was a bestseller for a reason. One of the most
brutal, elegant, and yes, funniest memoirs of the late 20th
century, Mary Karr's The Liars Club is an important work
that is at turns personal and political, the story of a Texas
childhood marked by anguish, adventure, and a potent
combination of toxic masculinity, alcoholism and thwarted
artistic ambitions.
AH
59 OF 88

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

My favorite of Toni Morrison's books, and better
than Beloved, this 1977 masterpiece is possibly the most
powerful and moving contemporary American meditation
on family, grace, masculinity, and humiliations of
American history.
AH
60 of 88
Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch
The Civil Rights Movement was much more than just
boycotts of buses and lunch counters and confrontations
with white supremacists. The first in Taylor Branch's 3
volumes on the life and work Martin Luther King, the
1,000+ page Parting the Waters marries the seriousness
of scholarship with the power of great storytelling to tell
the tale of a group of principled and courageous men and
women who make one proud to be an American.
AH
61of 88
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
Past becomes present in E.L. Doctorow's 1975 work of
historical fiction set in and around the corridors of power,
corruption and domestic politics in early 20th century New
York City. Love, sex, class, race, gender, immigration,
war, economic mobility... Doctorow's ambitions with this
work are no less than explaining the very idea of America
to itself.
AH
62 of 88
The White Album, by Joan Didion
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," begins this 1979
collection of Joan Didion essays. Though less-celebrated
than 1968's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White
Album harnesses Didion's skill at capturing the tensions
and obsessions of mid-to-late 20th century California and
amps up the existential ennui another notch as she tries
to make sense of the chaos of everything from politics to
contemporary consumer culture. "The center cannot hold,"
Didion wrote, quoting Yeats, in "Bethlehem." In "Album,"
the essayist and critic chronicles what life felt like after the
center fell apart.
AH
63 of 88
The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 classic is less book than
short story but it remains a devastating must-read, not
least for the way in which it outlines the spiritual, artistic,
economic, emotional, political and physical restraints
imposed on women in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. And also for the manner in which it depicts the
ways in which mental illness so often goes hand in hand
with lack of liberty.
AH
64 of 88
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
Austen's best book, and like so many of her others, an
exploration of gender politics and female independence at
a time in which the freedoms of women were intimately,
and often tragically, constrained by the ways in which they
depended on males for economic assistance and security.
Sounds like sad stuff, but Austen, as always, approaches
these and other issues with an acute sensitivity and ear for
comedy that elevates an explication of the frustrating
social and economic constraints of one half of the
population to a work of art.
AH
65 of 88
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel
Wilkerson
One of the finest works of American history published in
the 21st century, Isabel Wilkerson's 600+ page book
chronicles the massive migration of African-Americans out
of the American south and into the Northeast, Midwest and
and Western states over the course of about six decades
of the 20th century. Told through the stories of three
Southerners who left the Jim Crow South to make new
lives elsewhere, it is a sweeping, meticulously researched
and beautifully-written epic that should be on the shelf of
anyone who loves, and wants to further understand, the
American spirit.
AH
66 OF 88

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh

Children's books are not just for children, and this, the
greatest chapter book about a young girl ever written,
anticipates and reflects second wave feminism with its
loving depiction of a loud, opinionated, curious, tomboy
living on New York's Upper East Side who rejects the
performance of femininity in favor of an authenticand,
admittedly, sometimes off-puttingself.
AH
67 OF 88

Camille Perri
@camilleperri
Cosmopolitan's at-large books editor and writer of the
forthcoming The Assistants.
68 OF 88

Just Kids, by Patti Smith

It's already the stuff of legend: A rock star's uniquely
lyrical first book of prose that went on to win the National
Book Award for its honest and moving depiction of youth
and friendship and its remarkable illustration of New York
in the sixties and seventies. If you haven't already
read Just Kids, why the heck not?
CP
69 OF 88

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher

Stowe
It has obvious flaws and must be considered in context by
the modern reader (James Baldwin's essays make an
excellent critical companion), but I don't think we should
entirely dismiss the novel that helped fuel the Civil War by
making the political personal.
CP
70 OF 88

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

Part Bildungsroman, part Gothic horror story, featuring
then-radical opinions on religion, social class, and
gender, Jane Eyrerevolutionized the novel. Plus, the
struggle to strike a balance between love and freedom
never gets old.
CP
71of 88
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by
Zora Neale Hurston
Put aside the historical, social, and political issues
surrounding this novel (check out Walker's essay, "In
Search of Zora Neale Hurston," published in Ms.
Magazine in 1975) and how the novel has contributed to
countless literary traditions (Harlem Renaissance
literature, American Southern literature, American
feminist literature)the real reason everyone should
read Their Eyes Were Watching God is that it's a damn
good book.
CP
72 OF 88

A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, by

Yiyun Li
The stories in this stellar collection document China's
turbulent history and transformation from a Marxist
dictatorship into one of the world's fastest growing
economies using beautiful, pared-down prose and
characters you won't soon forget. Everyone should be
reading Yiyun Li.
CP
73 OF 88

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

Nobody writes about the abhorrent things men and women
do to each other, about sex, addiction, and masochism
without ever moralizingbetter than Gaitskill. It started
with this debut short-story collection and has continued in
all her work thereafter.
CP
74 of 88
Bastard Out Of Carolina, by Dorothy
Allison
This semi-autobiographical first novel was a bestseller and
finalist for the National Book Award. A story about family
violence and incest, it's understandably intense and
surprisingly funny. Read it because Allison is a rare and
special talent. If you've never had the pleasure of hearing
her speak about writing or literature, do yourself a favor
and watch any interview with her on YouTube. You will be
moved and reminded of why you like books in the first
place.
CP
75 OF 88

The Ballad Of The Sad Caf, by Carson

McCullers
The go-to McCullers is usually The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter, but Ballad depicts the irrational nature of love and
an ill-fated love triangle better than any story I've ever
read. Also: it's quite possibly the best-titled novella of all
time.
CP
76 OF 88

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

In a word: Jo-Effing-March. She's the ideal early blueprint
for strong, willful young women who will likely turn out to
be writers.
CP
77 of 88
The Best Of Everything, by Rona Jaffe
Before The Group, before Valley of the Dolls, and way
before Sex and the City, there was this iconic novel about
ambitious career women in New York City. For kicks, read
it and then watch the Mad Men pilot. You will be amazed.
And later in season one, see if you can catch Don reading
this book in an effort to better understand the desires of
young American women.
CP
78 OF 88

Ashley Ford,
@iSmashFizzle
Contributor to BuzzFeed, ELLE, and others.
79 OF 88

The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard

In this one collection, I found the rhyme and reason for
why I choose to write in this genre. "The Fourth State of
Matter," just one of these essays, is utterly life-changing.
AF
80 OF 88

The Chronology of Water, by Lidia

Yuknavitch
You've never read a memoir quite like this. Yuknavitch's
prose is stunning and vibrant, even as she tackles tough
moments, and the uglier facts of life.
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Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

Even though it's been adapted into a hit Broadway musical,
trust me, you want to read the story of Bechdel's childhood
in book form first.
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Sula, by Toni Morrison

The renowned story of convention in direct opposition to
independence, friendship, and what women are routinely
asked to carry in their bodies and on their backs.
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The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

This is a necessary read. If you've never read The Color
Purple, you're missing out on some of the greatest
literature of our time, not to mention a uniquely black look
at poverty, beauty, and what we mean when we say
"sister."
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An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay

This novel is brutal in its telling, and forces empathy and
understanding for those who have experienced trauma,
especially women. This isn't another sad story. It makes
every emotion you already experience a little more real.
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85 OF 88

Redefining Realness, by Janet Mock

Reading Mock's book is like taking her hand and allowing
her to guide you into a world where you have intimate
access to her pain, brilliance, and enduring courage to live
a full life of authenticity as a trans woman of color.
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86 OF 88

Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones

This gorgeous novel provides a gracious look into the not-
so-distant past, and gives us a full view into life, love, and
secrets that ultimately define our lives.
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87 OF 88

Shadowshaper, by Daniel Jos Older

The existence of a young adult novel with an afro-latina
teen girl for a protagonist is already reason to cheer, but
when you add the fantastical elements from authoer
Older's imagination, you have a masterpiece that defies
the status quo in surprising and pioneering ways.
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88 OF 88

Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech

Say what you want about literature meant for children, but
the way this book deals with girlhood, womanhood, and
grief is more nuanced than most books meant for adults.
If you allow it to blow your mind, it will.
AF