The most recommended books about misogyny

Atwood has written extensively about the relationship between humans and nature in many of her books, in many different forms. But I’ve chosen to highlight The Testaments because of the way Atwood explores the fallout of ideologies that stemmed from an environmental collapse. What Atwood does so brilliantly in her writing is continually revealing how human reaction to climate change can be as harmful as the mass ecological destruction and extinction itself. She serves up a cautionary tale for how our response—and our beliefs—will play a large role in what kind of changes define the future.

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox is a complex, enthralling pastiche of a novel. Interweaving adaptations of Bluebeard, Fitcher’s Bird, Mr. Fox, and the ballad of Reynardine, Mr. Fox invites readers into a vertiginous wonderland where Oyeyemi’s adaptations interrogate the workings of gender and race, romance and desire, imperialism and geopolitics. Moving slipstream-style across the twentieth century, Mr. Fox offers a transnational circuit of stories and characters that connect gendered and raced cultural conventions with the misogyny and violence of the Bluebeard tradition, ultimately challenging readers to consider (and reconsider) European literary and artistic traditions as well as their underlying ideological structures.

Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, does the rare thing of actually asking gun owners (she interviewed sixty of them) why they have guns, and what guns mean to them. As a sociologist, Carlson immersed herself in the “gun carry culture”—Americans who carry guns with them in everyday life, which is a new wrinkle in American gun culture. I was surprised by many of her findings and insights, and in some cases I was struck by their elegance; for example, Americans carry guns because they feel the US is “in decline” because of social chaos, and “guns are perceived as solving the problem” of that chaos.

What’s new and surprising here, and that I especially appreciated, is that Carlson in her own words “does something different” in this book, rejecting both the “gun politics” narrative that the “gun culture is an affirmation… show more.

Another journalist whom I have met in real life the award-winning British journalist and broadcaster who writes for The Guardian, Sam Bourne is the literary pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland. To Kill A Man is a classic thriller with a climactic twist, a gripping tour de force through American feminism up against violent misogyny, ambition and struggle, politics, and crime. He writes with both simplicity and complexity, insight, and pacy readability.   

This book is a collection of Arabian folk tales, stories that have been told for centuries. It hooked me from the start.

It’s told as a story within a story, and it starts out as the doomed Scheherazade’s ruse to keep a ruthless tyrant from marrying and then killing the women of his kingdom (including her). Every night she builds on the previous night’s story by spinning a different tale of intrigue and excitement, of men and women, children and adults, beggars and royalty, and as the king is drawn into her world, so are we.

Scheherazade is witty and wise, and her stories feature characters, especially women, who are equally cunning and clever, touching on subjects that range from misogyny to love to revenge. This is a must-read.

Bailey originated the term “misogynoir” in 2008 to describe, she writes, “the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture.” The controlling image of the “Mammy” has long been a hyper-visible, toxic presence in this milieu. In this book, Bailey examines the digital resistance and social media-based activisms of Black women—particularly queer and trans women—who seize representational power to dismantle the distorting stereotypes, expose their systemic impacts, and make spaces for telling their own diverse, gendered Black stories and enable others to do so as well. Throughout, Bailey makes clear that cultural representations have material, life-and-death effects, but also the capacity to create new and better worlds.

I suspect that I was led to take The Malady of Death from my shelf by a subconscious directive. I admit that I am afraid of this book, its relentless probing, afraid I will never understand it however much I struggle. Confounded by it twenty-five years ago, I put it aside until my consciousness could mature. (Ha!) The fault must be mine, since her style, language, and structure are as limpid as Ernaux’s or Davis’s, although Duras’s prose carries a poetical charge deliberately absent in the other two writers. I begin to think that the trouble lies in my sex, that as a man, an Other to women, I can’t possibly know what Duras’s narrator is being made to gradually reveal not with the leer of a striptease artist but with the solemnity of a priestess presiding over ancient feminine mysteries.

Would feminists accuse me of being obtuse and,… show more.

Three very different women (Hanna, Klara, and Tilde) live in pre-World War II Germany. Two of them have families trying to achieve advancement by marrying their daughters off to German officers; the third is their half-Jewish dressmaker, who is trying to keep her status a secret from her clients.

What I loved is that we saw the politics of the time and place and the roles women were expected to fulfill. One of the women, Hilde, wants to become a physician; this is unacceptable to her family despite her gift for healing. That’s just one example of how social mores dictated a woman’s “place” in society.

The prose in this book is exceptional; it puts you right in the middle of the action, full of unexpected twists and turns. It is definitely the best book I read this year.

As a reader I simply couldn’t have one book without the other. Detective Cruz is the first female detective in Acapulco and fights for every inch of respect in a police department rife with corruption and misogyny in a country where Mexicans don’t trust the police, feeling that no one cares. But Det. Cruz cares. The recurring theme of so many girls gone missing is her passion which occasionally rises up during other investigations throughout the series. As a writer I enjoyed suspense and danger. Carmen Amato makes you feel the heat and taste the food of Acapulco. Best ever female cop protagonist.

This anthology is as powerful as it is still necessary: beware. Some pieces may be triggering, but they raised my awareness and empathy. These collected poems from writers across the globe declare one common theme: resistance. By exploring sexual assault and violence in their work, each writer resists the patriarchal systems of power that continue to support a misogynist justice system that supports abusers. In doing so, they reclaim their power and their voice. Resistance underscores the validity of all women’s experiences, and the importance of dignifying such experiences in voice, however that may sound. Because once survivors speak out and disrupt their pain, there is no telling what else they can do.

Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot. 

People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.

T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.

Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.

The title says it all. I choose Patai’s withering account of Orwell’s irredeemable misogyny not because I think she is right but because I think she onto something in him and in his life and times. After Koestler, another dark corner.

Jack Holland was an incredible writer. When he told men he was writing a book about misogyny, one group expressed surprise that a man would write such a book. His reply was, “Why? We invented it.” How can you not thoroughly love a man who could answer that? More, he’s done his homework, and done it exceedingly well.

He takes us through the history of this dreadful manifestation of patriarchy sympathetically and carefully. The links he creates historically are breath-taking, and cage-rattling they’re so sensible. Every woman in the world should read this book, and so should every human who knows a woman.

I’m a sucker for a distinctive (preferably gothic) setting, and this book makes incredible use of the northern Scottish coast. The wet chill of the air practically seeps through its pages, mirroring the slow, seeping chill of the plot.

As the story moves through three separate timelines, braiding together the lives of three different women who’ve lived in that remote, rocky spot, misogyny and violence against women rise to the surface again and again, like the dead things that wash ashore.

The piece-by-piece buildup is so subtle, the writing is so beautiful, and the unfolding events are so enraging, I couldn’t put this book down until I reached the end. And it has haunted me ever since.

Margaret Atwood’s seminal The Handmaid’s Tale has been on my “to read” list since it was published in 1985. Almost forty years later, I finally cracked the cover.

Of course, I knew the premise. I’d also seen parts of the Hulu show based on the text, but digging into the source material was far more rewarding. Atwood’s descriptive and plotting skills are a crash course in novel writing; reading The Handmaid’s Tale has—at least temporarily—cured the case of writer’s block I’ve struggled with since 2020. 

The story is also a relevant and thoroughly worthwhile read, especially with the current state of our world.

It’s not easy to find a book about a female gamer. This one explores many of the same themes as the second book in my gaming series, but in a futuristic setting. It’s always interesting to see how an author envisions the future. What new technologies can we expect? What will gaming be like? 

The main character, Reyna, is a Chinese American girl taking part in an elite tournament playing virtual reality games. She hides her identity because, maybe not surprisingly, misogyny and racism are still problems in the gaming world in 2067. A great book to bring these issues to a child’s attention.

In the beginning of the novel, Valentine writes, “What if instead of telling women to be grateful for their suffering we actually helped them with it.” That line hit me like a bolt of lightning.

So many pregnant women and new moms have had awful experiences similar to the main character of Delicate Condition, including myself. This novel truly highlights what it is like for women to go through a complicated pregnancy in a world where medical staff, friends, and family all minimize the physical and mental pain it takes to bring a new life into the world.

For those who have suffered birth trauma and are ready to process it, this book will certainly speak to you. Overall, it is a well-written fast-paced supernatural thriller that will open your eyes to how the struggles of expecting and new mothers are often brushed under the rug. 

This is one of my favorite Laurel K. Hamilton books, Dead Ice is Anita Blake at her best, kicking ass and taking names, as a necromancer Anita can raise the dead but she is also a US Marshal with the highest kill count in the US. She deals with misogyny and bigotry for sleeping with the Vampire king—Jean Claude. The mystery is well written in this book but the fight scenes are great and the monsters are scary as heck, Anita comes off as complex as she deals with being engaged but still wanting to maintain her independence as a woman. This is one of LKH better books as she pens the double standards about how a woman is treated in the workplace by others for being good at her job versus a man- Anita has a high kill count and is looked down upon for being violent if it… show more.

Evie Wyld writes atmospheric and eerie stories that always have an edge, a threat of danger about them, and this wonderful book is almost gothic in its atmosphere of place. The rock itself actually exists, I’m not sure if the house in question does, but the rock and the house and the remote Scottish location bind us into a feeling of constant danger like no single character ever could. The story unfolds in a series of tales told across time periods, back and forth (a tricky format to pull off, but Wyld does it brilliantly). The central character is the great old house, in some disrepair,  and how it has been occupied over time by women who have been, to one degree or another imprisoned by their circumstances. I don’t want to spoil the story, but I guarantee that from the first few pages you will be drawn into the… show more.

This might not be your most obvious pick for an Odyssey list, but Mary Beard’s book is special to me for a couple of reasons. She taught me when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and I’ll never forget our very first lecture as newly-minted freshmen when she stunned us into silence by parading before us a slideshow of images of winged, bell-bedecked Roman phalluses... Her straight-to-the-point, incisive writing always reminds me of the lessons she taught us, always to question and open things up to rigorous analysis, and her opening feminist discussion in this book (which is a great read in its own right) of Telemachus’ silencing of Penelope in the first book of the Odyssey is a brilliant example of this.