I have been thinking a lot about what feminism means for me. In this interview, I said, "I wish more authors would write about strong women, beyond the strength and importance of motherhood, but not just emulating traditional male behavior." I feel that this is the kind of strong woman I am, as a woman forging a non-traditional path in mathematics. I have been on something of a mission to find books like this, and particularly ones written by women. I find such books frustratingly rare, so I wanted to recommend a few that I have found. There is more to being a woman than falling in love and having children.
A brilliant mathematician examines the complexity of gender and society and forges a path out of inequality. Why are men in charge? After years in the male-dominated field of mathematics and in the female-dominated field of art, Eugenia Cheng has heard the question many times. In X + Y, Cheng argues that her mathematical specialty -- category theory -- reveals why.
Category theory deals more with context, relationships, and nuanced versions of equality than with intrinsic characteristics. Category theory also emphasizes dimensionality: much as a cube can cast a square or diamond shadow, depending on your perspective, so too do gender politics appear to change with how we examine them. Because society often rewards traits that it associates with males, such as competitiveness, we treat the problems those traits can create as male. But putting competitive women in charge will leave many unjust relationships in place. If we want real change, we need to transform the contexts in which we all exist, and not simply who we think we are.
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This is a gorgeous, poetic, magical book, with a strong female character with a mission that is not about falling in love and having children. Although there are love stories in the book, they are unusual ones (as shown by the title) and that is not the main narrative arc of the central protagonist. I long for books where women do something other than fall in love, have children, or emulate men.
This book has one of the most spectacular first sentences I've ever encountered in a book and continued to be spectacular throughout. I felt it was crafted almost like a mathematical proof, where you start from the end and work backward towards first principles, seeking to understand every detail of the intricate combination of factors leading to the result. I have been seeking more books by Asian people as I've read so few books that in any way reflect my own experience of growing up Asian surrounded by white people. I love the fact that this book sets an Asian's experience of racism next to a white woman's experience of sexism, and has a strong woman who does not conform to social expectations. And moreover, that this isn't just incidental, but fundamentally drives the plot.
Motherhood is not a universal woman's experience: some women don't want to be mothers and some women are unable to be mothers. But being disrespected, overlooked, and exploited is a universal woman's experience. I found this to be a gripping book about women trying to break free from those experiences, in tightly intertwined tales.
I love the concept of the main character, Marion Palm. She's a sort of anti-hero, exactly the sort of woman society expects us not to celebrate: she commits crimes, and then abandons her family when she's been found out. She goes on the run, like the characters in The Last Flight but for different reasons. And yet I found myself rooting for her. Her crime is almost victimless (or rather, the victims are mostly stuck-up rich people we are not exactly encouraged to sympathize with), and her motives are not selfish. In the end, I took this as a book about a woman unapologetically seeing her own worth and looking for people who will appreciate her for it, albeit in bracingly unconventional ways.
This is my only non-fiction pick, but it reads a little like a gripping work of fiction except that I had to keep pinching myself to remember it really happened. The author is writing about her experience as a professional violinist in a "fake" orchestra. It is a wonderfully nuanced look at the gray area between "fake" and "real", which is devastatingly pertinent to our times. It challenges us to consider if we can actually always tell the difference and if the difference is really clear-cut at all. The reason I'm including it in the list is that the main protagonist, the author, is a strong woman who is determined to make her own way. And there is one section I found particularly satisfying, in which (and I don't think this will give too much away) she refuses to include any romance in the book. She declines to write of being rescued from her predicament by finding "Mr. Right", mainly because it's untrue. But she is urged to make something up, because it is "expected" in books about women, and she refuses, instead deciding to include the conversation about it in the book instead. I love that small but important (to me) resistance. Women don't need to be rescued by men, and more to the point, in reality, as opposed to fiction, women do build their own lives and their own successes, in their own way.
5,309 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about family secrets, humour books, and death.
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From Steena's list on the best books that keep you up past your bedtime.
If you happen to like the type of books that end with a gut punch, then you are going to love Sister Dear. This had an ending that I didn’t see coming, which is probably why I love it so much. I have a few authors on my ‘must read’ list and this one holds the title for #1 because of her endings. Warning: you start reading the book thinking you know where it’s headed, but trust me when I say you don’t!
From Beth's list on the best books on confronting trauma or loss.
This novel achieves something that, as a writer, I think is one of the hardest things to pull off: tackling troubling, emotionally fraught material yet finding moments to make readers laugh out loud. The novel’s protagonist, Alex, has plenty of challenges to deal with: the loss of her mother to an apparent drug overdose, a difficult relationship with her can’t-seem-to-grow-up brother, and an uncertain reconnection with an old flame. Through Alex, Michalski manages to both confront these challenges and find humor in them. As I read the book and thought of the difficulties in my own life, I considered how I needed to take a page from this character’s playbook. Another element that leavens the novel’s heavier material is a plot thread that will delight rom-com enthusiasts.
From Sam's list on the best books on the people of the Levant region.
In a 2019 interview with NPR, Etaf Rum—the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York—said one of her struggles in writing the book was the fear that she was in a way confirming stereotypes about Arabs and Middle Easterners, including “oppression, domestic abuse, and terrorism.” Thankfully Rum overcame these struggles to deliver a courageous, beautiful, and incredibly authentic debut novel that follows the lives of three generations of Palestinian-American women trying to find their voices and identities within the confines of patriarchal and conservative milieus. In a way, the struggles of Rum and her characters mirror the battles that young people throughout the Middle East have been waging against tyranny and oppression since the start of the Arab Spring in 2010.
