Top 10 Tuesday: Recommendations for Readers Who Have Not Read…

Top 10 Tuesday is hosted by The Broke & The Bookish

This particular Top 10 Tuesday topic (say that ten times, fast) is “Top 10 Books for those Who Have Not Read ___”.

I have chosen two sections, primarily because my reading did not pick up until the end of last year and so my lists don’t always equal ten of anything. I’ve chosen historical fiction because that’s what I find myself drawn to most these days and feminism because, in the words of Maya Angelou, “I am a feminist. I’ve been female for a long time now. I’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”

(click TITLE for more info on Goodreads)

• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
  Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. 
  
• A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable
  When April Vogt’s boss tells her about the discoveries in a cramped, decrepit ninth arrondissement apartment, the Sotheby’s continental furniture specialist does not hear the words “dust” or “rats” or “shuttered for seventy years.” She hears Paris. She hears escape.
  
• The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
  When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.
• The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett
  A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love.
  
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs–yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
  Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of the problem that has no name: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home.
• Paradoxes of Gender by Judith Lorber
  In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist – who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society – challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation.
• Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum (I have a signed copy!)
  An important account of the lives of these young women, Slut! weaves together powerful oral histories of girls and women who finally overcame their sexual labels with a cogent analysis of the underlying problem of sexual stereotyping.
• To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism by Rebecca Walker
  Determined to extend the boundaries of feminism to embrace social, political, and economic equality for all humanity, these twenty-one exciting young activists and thinkers recast the concepts of feminism to reflect their own personal experiences and beliefs.
  
• Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender by Riki Anne Wilchins
  A frontal assault on both the status quo in academic studies and the full spectrum of single-issue identity politics, will change the way you think about bodies, sex, and gender.
  

 

I am certain there are better books that could be recommended but we are working with what I’ve already read here.

Do you have any that you would add to the list?

Don’t forget to link your Top Ten Tuesday!