100 books like The Paper Garden

When I was in college, I asked my parents for the two-volume, compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas one year. I was in a Friday afternoon etymology discussion group that the philosophy professor in charge of it had named “The Society of Harmless Drudges,” and the OED was our bible.

Many years later, reading this book, I was astonished at the many years and many contributors that went into the making of the original edition. One of the most unusual contributors, as Winchester explores, lived in a mental institution after having been judged criminally insane.

I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for graduate school in 1986, eleven years after this book was published, thirteen years after Nate Shaw’s death.

Reading the life of a man whose parents had been enslaved, a cotton farmer and sharecropper who bravely joined a union and stood up for other Black farmers, opened my eyes to the reality of life in the twentieth century for Black farmers in the state I now called home.

Told in expert storyteller Nate Shaw’s (a pseudonym for Ned Cobb) voice, based on interview transcripts, the book introduced me to a person and a way of life unlike anything I had encountered growing up in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

I fell in love with Ireland on a trip there in 2003 and have been there many times since. As a result, I have read many books by Irish writers, including O’Faolain’s memoirs.

I picked up the story of the woman known as Chicago May with no expectations but was immediately drawn in by the way O’Faolain connected her life with May’s, and individual history with national—both Irish and American—history.

I admire how the author imbued a biographical investigation with the pacing of a novel and a larger-than-life main character. 

I’ve been intrigued all my life by the women on my mother’s side of my family who were artists and writers. How did I fit into that familial line, and what could I learn from them?

Honor Moore’s investigation into her artist grandmother’s life drew me into her own examination of that question, and I was deeply moved by her mission of reviving her beautiful, brilliant grandmother’s reputation as an artist while offering an honest assessment of how societal pressures affected her mental health and problems with alcohol abuse. 

This is the true story of Phyllis Pearsall who (amongst other adventures in a remarkable life that was also filled with personal tragedy) decided to chart and map the geographical districts of London – a project which eventually tuned into the A-Z map. Over a year Pearsall walked 23,000 London streets to achieve this remarkable feat and set up the Geographers’ Map Company. Pearsall is complex and flawed and Hartley wasn’t always able to separate fact from the fiction (Mrs P was a wonderful storyteller but sometimes contradicted herself). Ultimately Hartley concludes ‘If there is a scene, or a word, or a character, you believe to be too fantastical, it is likely they are real.’ Mrs P did have an extraordinary life.

As an undergrad, I was blessed to have two professors who changed the course of my life: Angela Davis and Whitney Chadwick. Both of these professors discussed the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Women, Art, and Society was published in 1990, and in 2020, the sixth edition was released. Although women artists’ representation in art history pedagogy has improved since 1990, the art world in general still favors men over women, making Chadwick’s book a relevant read. It provides a historical and critical look at women artists from the Middle Ages to the present, covering a range of media and artists from various cultural and geographical backgrounds. It challenges the assumption that great women artists are the exception to the rule and charts the evolution of feminist art history. 

As it says on the packet, this is a collection of quick peeks into how 140 brilliant women lived (or are living) their version of a creative life. I loved reading a few pages each morning. It helped to soothe the perfectionist in me, being reminded of the endless ways a life can be lived, in both circumstance and choice. Also to read how the messiness of life is sort of ironed out with hindsight made me feel more welcoming to the current unknown of it all.

Though this is a romantic suspense, it has that haunted house theme in the backdrop, and I was captivated. I’ve always been fascinated by a home’s history. Who lived there? What were they like? Did they die there? Do they still roam the halls? This took those elements, plus romance, and got me thinking about writing a similar book with that kind of twist. The setting is Boston’s north shore in a 19th-century carriage house, and wow. I wanted the place to be real, to go there and explore myself. There are more books in the series. Carla is a wonderfully warm and engaging author, also. She always responds to her readers.

This book should be considered the bible of women’s artistic expression. Built on the idea of physical spaces and how they nurture the creative endeavor a woman does there, Where Women Create introduces you to dozens of extraordinary artists, textile designers, mixed media artists, book producers, entrepreneurs, and product designers. You get lost in their stories and inspired by their ingenious outlook on organization, clutter, and ways to keep the artistic spark alive.

Sometimes art is pretty to look at and sometimes art is powerful.

Ignotofsky shares short bios and gorgeous pictures of fifty female artists throughout history and across the globe, most of whom I wasn’t familiar with prior to reading the book. Not only will this book inspire young artists to create, but Women in Art will inspire them to research these artists further, as each one deserves her own picture book biography (some of which already exist!).