Fans pick 100 books like The Women's Room

I have been studying Celtic myth and history since I was in college and took a class on Arthurian literature. Drawing heavily from Irish and Welsh lore to build my “land beyond the veil” known as the Five Quarters, I have always been intrigued by the Celtic view of the land of the dead as a distinct world to which we go and then return, like two sides of the mirrored surface of a well. I hope you enjoy these mythic fantasy books as much as I did!

Born and raised in Greece, I have always been fascinated by the history and mythology of my homeland. My love for reading historical fiction and Greek myths has been drawing me into stories of ancient civilizations and their timeless tales. Visiting archaeological sites and museums, where history comes to life through the remnants of the past has been a lifelong passion and Is a source of inspiration. These experiences have shaped my love for storytelling and my desire to breathe new life into Greek myths and history. In my writing, I aim to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern.

Born in Baghdad and raised in America, I come from an ancient lineage of people called the Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians who still speak Aramaic). The first book I read was Gone with the Wind, at age nine, in Arabic. We lived in Jordan at the time, awaiting a visa to the United States and Scarlett O’Hara’s land and people were my impressions of what America would look like. But Michigan in the 1980s was not Georgia in the 1860s. Still, that book proved that great storytelling transcends ethnicity, age, and gender. So in my writing and film career, I have focused on the art of storytelling as I share the stories my people, culture, and heritage. 

In 1995 I performed with the Women’s Circus (Australia) at the 4th International Conference and Forum on the Status of Women in Beijing. Our show was called Leaping the Wire and presented thirteen women’s stories from Amnesty International through physical narrative. My story was about a Brazilian woman who had been shot and killed for identifying the police who had rounded up her son and a group of his friends. The Brazilian women expressed their gratitude that I had told their story when they could not. I believe women’s stories are important to be told, to be shared, and I made a commitment to make our stories accessible, first through theatre, and now through my novels.

I am an astrophysicist. I am a mother. I am an author. I am a cleaner of dishes, a cooker of meals. I am a daughter, a friend on the end of the phone, a reader of bedtime stories, and the one who hugs away the tears and kisses it better. But I am also just me. Emma. And the books I read are always to escape or understand the internal fight I have between identities and the feeling that pursuing one is failing all the others. Lift yourself above it all, breathe, and read yourself into a different world.

I love writing about families and what makes them tick: the minor dramas being played out behind every front door, make for intriguing reading. As a journalist, I have interviewed so many people with fascinating stories to tell, and with my fiction I throw my characters into a tricky situation and see what unfolds. Inevitably, if you pull one playing card from the bottom, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. When faced with unexpected challenges, my characters often behave badly, make poor decisions and get themselves into the kind of mess that makes you want to read one more chapter before turning out the light at night. 

I wholeheartedly believe that embracing your geeky side is an important part of life and self-discovery. When romance novels incorporate nerdiness, it gives characters (and therefore readers) the ability to understand themselves and what they want on another level, and to gain the courage to pursue what they want. I know that my own forays into TTRPGs, LARPing, Ren Faires, and other such interests have helped shape me as a person. I’m more confident and embodied because I embrace my inner geek, and I want that for my characters and my readers, too. That’s why I want to read and write as many of these stories as possible!

As many of my novels are set in Japan, I try to read as many Japanese authors as I can. Firstly, they offer great insight into the Japanese psyche and Japanese culture, and secondly, they are extremely enjoyable reads. My main series is the Reiko Watanabe/Inspector Aizawa novels, crime thrillers set in 1930s Japan, and while only one of these books takes place during that era, I feel they all provide a great springboard into Japanese crime fiction, a genre that hopefully gains more notoriety in the West.

I’ve been a very sexual woman since my twenties, and provided sex education for women as a young feminist. When I embarked on a fun dating project in my late fifties to date 50 men in order to find the right partner for me, I knew that many of my dates would include sexual encounters. My upbeat memoir about that project, Fifty First Dates After Fifty, includes the sex scenes, because I wanted to provide healthy, satisfying images of older women enjoying sex so that our sexuality would be validated and visible to each other and the world. The sex-positive books I recommend celebrate the variety of women’s sexuality.

I love to make people laugh and cry and I love to read novels like this too, as I find they reflect life’s ups and downs so well. I like to read books that take me by the hand into a character’s world and leave me with more compassion and understanding towards the human race. As well as my novel called Are My Roots Showing?, I have done lots of stand up comedy and have some funny films on my YouTube channel (search Karola Woods) that I hope you can enjoy too. I studied physical theatre, mask and clown at Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Paris.