bolded = i own it and/or it’s on my list of books to read.
crossed out = i’ve read it.
- 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
I just want to be able to give people the one thing they’ve always wanted.
— someone said it, and it was worth remembering