Fans pick 100 books like Motherland

This is a story that many of us have experienced. The reality of it pulled me in. When I was in middle school, a boy I had “dated” made copies of a very personal letter I had written him. He and his buddy then handed the letter out to everyone. Classmates mockingly read the letter out loud to me. How mortifying. I feel you, Cannie Shapiro.

I also love this story because Cannie hits it off with a starlet who turns into a close friend. Who doesn’t want a famous bff? As Cannie pushed to find her way through the heartache and betrayal, I felt for her and wanted her to heal so she could find love and happiness again.

In this novel Florist Sadie Drew thinks her marriage depends on how good an impression she can make on the other corporate wives. Too bad she’s anything but a housewife.

She has her own career, her own personality, and her own friends. She doesn’t need to wear Mary Archer dresses. And yet, her husband Tom seems very disappointed at her inability to blend in with the other wives. Why can’t she be a good wife like all the others? Good question. Especially when we find out that Sadie and Tom had lost a baby. Now she wants to try again, but Tom is not having any of it.

Does he not love her anymore? Is he having an affair?  What she doesn’t know is how much Tom has suffered for their loss, and how afraid he was to see Sadie shutting down after the miscarriage.

Much like my own themes, Pastures Nouveaux is not only about starting over in the country, but having the courage to look at your relationship in the eye.

Rosie is engaged to a horrible columnist, Mark. And she keeps making excuses for him; he’s stressed, he’s unhappy, he’s on a deadline, etc. But he never shows her any great amount of genuine affection. It’s like he’s given up on them. And, perhaps, so has Rosie, who has chosen to ‘live with it’.

And when they move to the country village, Eight Mile Bottom, things take a turn for the worst, as nothing could be further from what they had expected from this move. Or is this the best thing that’s ever happened to Rosie?

His ‘n’ Hers is about a love story gone awry. No one to blame. That’s just how the cookie crumbled. But now something has happened.

Allison and Jim’s cat Disco, the one they shared while they lived together, has just died, bringing back all the memories of when they shared that flat. Trouble is they both have new partners. After grilling themselves about what went wrong, who did what, and are they better off, Alison and Jim give each other a good hard look to understand what happened to them.

And is there still hope for them, despite their current partners? Were they meant to be?

I read this book as a student in my teenage years. To say it was an eye-opener is both to underestimate its impact on me and to reveal just how little I understood, or simply took for granted, about women’s lives (including my mother’s). Oakley’s book, published in 1974, explores the role of the ‘housewife’ and the nature of ‘housework’ and places both in their historical and social context. At heart, it helped puncture such male-oriented myths as the idea that there was something intrinsic to such activity that made it “women’s work” and that it wasn’t the equivalent of real work. In short, using in-depth interviews with young mothers (four of which are used as case studies here) it made housework visible as something to be considered alongside, and in some respects in the same way, as we might think about other forms of labour.  

The Birthday Reunion combines the classic elements of a locked room thriller with a look at the dynamics of female friendships, a topic I always find fascinating.

It’s set on an exotic and remote tropical island, with some glamorous characters. I read it on a couple of typically grey days in London, and could almost feel the sunshine. It proves locked room thrillers don’t always have to be set on dark and stormy nights!

I really learnt a lot from this book! It is an important contribution to the debates about women’s labour, accumulation of capital, and extraction of resources from the global south.

It traces the social origins of the sexual division of labour, which Mies called 'housewifization' (not my favourite word, but it captures something about the way in which the term housewife hides women’s labour!). Layering this with the history of colonialism and the new international division of labour, Mies is able to locate the history of capitalism not only in the roots of colonialism but also in the gendered division of labour–capitalist patriarchy.

This is now a classic in feminist political economy literature.

The book’s subtitle: "Containing the inward and outward virtues which ought to be in a complete woman; as her skill in physic, cookery, banqueting-stuff, distillation, perfumes, wool, hemp, flax, dairies, brewing, baking, and all the other things belonging to a household.” And I must add: do all this while bearing children—sons preferably. The chapters offer up recipes, remedies, instructions on gardening, etc, along with spiritual guidance. Examples: To make a woman apt to conceive, let her drink mugwort steeped in wine. If a woman has a strong and hard labour, take four spoonfuls of another woman’s milk and give it to her to drink. I used the book for research and found it so entertaining and mystifying that I couldn’t put it down while thanking God I was born in the 20th century. 

Hugh Johnson is one of the most famous, and certainly the best-selling, of all the world’s wine writers. This book was first published in 1989 and has held the field ever since. It’s a glorious sweep of the history of wine from the beginning to about thirty years ago, with masses of illustrations, which is one of the glories of the book. A new edition was published in 2020, which brings it up to the present, but it lacks maps and illustrations. On the other hand, he hints at what he thinks about scoring wines by numbers: he’s not keen, preferring sniffing and tasting and then using stars to indicate the quality. What, after all, is the perceived difference between a 91 wine and a 92? And why start at 50?

Gerald Asher is a wine writer who is celebrated for his range, his knowledge, his ability to see below the surface of things, and his compelling writing style. This book of essays about wine is one of my favourites, ranging as it does from wines with food, in which he goes in unexpected directions, to whether or not and how to decant wines, to drinking wine in Greece surrounded by the gods, to wines from Portugal and California and Oregon and Italy and France. He takes me to places I’ve never been and to wines I’ve never drunk, all with no effort on my part. Along the way, I learn and I enjoy. What a pleasurable book!