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25 Books Every Woman Should Read. Women may not yet run the world but we do make for some of the most intriguing characters. Who are some of the most compelling all-time heroines—real-life or fictional—ever to captivate our readerly imaginations?
Click here for best books for single women
O’s Books Editor Leigh Haber, and Assistant Editor Michelle Hart offer their take on some of the best books every woman should read, a mix of classic and contemporary works that satisfy the bibliophile’s desire for total immersion. Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her 1920 novel about an upper class young couple whose impending marriage is threatened by the appearance of the sheltered bride-to-be’s worldly, seductive cousin. In the Martin Scorsese-directed movie, Winona Ryder played the fiancée, Michelle Pfeiffer the potential home-wrecker, and Daniel Day-Lewis the man they both love. It’s impossible to fathom the sheer number of women—young, old, or in-between—whose own feminist awakenings were spurred by Kate Chopin’s indisputable classic. The ballad of Edna Pontellier sings of the caged-bird claustrophobia caused by societal expectations, and laments the limits of acceptable desires. Munro's entire bibliography is essential reading. She's simply unparalleled when it comes to writing about the inner lives of girls and women. In this novel-in-stories, we follow Rose as she awkwardly transitions from girlhood to womanhood—warts and all. Each story/chapter centers on a different time in her life, from her schoolgirl days to getting hitched and having an affair. It's fascinating to go back to 1970s rural Canada and see how similar it looks to our current landscape. This insanely brilliant first novel, published in 1970, marked the debut of one of the greatest writers of our time—of all time. Set in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison herself was from Ohio) it’s the haunting story of Pecola Breedlove, a tortured young Black girl who yearns to have blue eyes, thinking they will make her beautiful. An Oprah’s Book Club pick in 1998, this jaw-droppingly gorgeous novel of a Haitian girl’s reunion with her mother in New York City, and then her return to Haiti, is filled with poetic details about Danticat’s home country—Haiti—that reveal the writer’s love and ambivalence about the place. Her protagonist, Sophie, hails from a family “with dirt under our fingernails,” people so strong they “carry the sky on their heads.” The reigning matriarch of minimalism employs prose so pared back turning the pages might give you paper cuts. Yet despite the economy of her words, her stories burst with laughs and a whole lotta heartbreak. Many writers get you to see certain things differently, but Hempel gives you all new ways to see full-stop. While Elena Ferrante’s brilliant Neapolitan novels comprise an epic ode to the complexity of female friendships, sharp-penned Lorrie Moore distills, in less than two hundred pages, the vacillating pleasures and pains of the sisterly love between girls as well as the way such a formative friendship reverberates through the years—even after that relationship has long since ended. Austen’s third novel, published in 1814, is among the Pride and Prejudice author’s most somber. And yet this tale of Fanny Price, who at age ten is sent to live with wealthy relatives to relieve her poor and overburdened parents, is a slow burn. When, we wonder, will everyone see Fanny as we do, and when they do, will she end up choosing the dashing but frivolous Henry, or the much more serious Edmund, who’s distracted by the flirtations of Mary? This one’s for all of the women out there hiding their light under a bushel. If you don’t quite remember what it’s like to be a 12-year-old girl filled with emotion, still immersed in childhood but feeling the pull of adolescence, visit or revisit this radiant, resonant novel of Frankie. Like To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout, she is wise beyond her years, at times too precocious for her own good, and one of the most enthralling characters ever invented by an American writer—and all the way back in 1946. Among America’s greatest short story writers ever (one of the country’s biggest story prizes is named after her) O’Connor’s often-nightmarish, always-enthralling spins on the Southern Gothic bloom with dark humor and deep compassion that belie the bleakness of her characters’ emotional and physical landscapes. In these ten indelible tales, undying faith commingles with cynicism, beauty with brutality, transformation with tradition, good country people with cold-blooded killers. Turned into a Tony Award-winning musical, Bechdel’s graphic memoir—portraying, among other things, her coming out as gay, her father’s barely-closeted homosexuality, and the innerworkings of the family-run funeral home—is part of the vanguard that elevated comics to a high art. Toni Cade Bambara died way too soon, in 1995, at age 56. An activist, filmmaker and fiction writer whose editor was Toni Morrison, she once observed: “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” Sample any book in her oeuvre for a taste of her singular aesthetic—fiction that reads like jazz improv. To start, this superb collection of fifteen stories gives us unforgettable characters who together form a portrait of Black life in America, as seen through Bambara’s dazzling lens. We are still piecing together how Harriet Tubman did what she did—escaped from slavery and went on to help some seventy others to do the same. As the “Moses” of the Underground Railroad, Tubman was like a real-life superhero. In historian Clinton’s 2004 telling, Tubman comes alive on the page, and reminds us what courage really means, whether fleeing to freedom, working as a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad or as a Union spy, or later in her life fighting for women’s rights. British novelist and historian Brookner died in 2016, denying impassioned fans a chance to slip into new stories of women whose youth is behind them, and are in the process of readjusting their high expectations. If that sounds boring, on the page, it’s the opposite, as it turns out still waters run deep. In this 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel, Edith, who’s long been in a relationship with a married man, vows to break it off with him and settle for an available man she doesn’t love. Will she compromise? We won’t give it away, but whatever her ultimate decision, you’ll love being along with her on the journey.
Books every single woman should read
Best books to read for single woman
Good books for single woman
Best books for single women
Best book for newly single woman
Article:
25 Books Every Woman Should Read. Women may not yet run the world but we do make for some of the most intriguing characters. Who are some of the most compelling all-time heroines—real-life or fictional—ever to captivate our readerly imaginations?
Click here for best books for single women
O’s Books Editor Leigh Haber, and Assistant Editor Michelle Hart offer their take on some of the best books every woman should read, a mix of classic and contemporary works that satisfy the bibliophile’s desire for total immersion. Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her 1920 novel about an upper class young couple whose impending marriage is threatened by the appearance of the sheltered bride-to-be’s worldly, seductive cousin. In the Martin Scorsese-directed movie, Winona Ryder played the fiancée, Michelle Pfeiffer the potential home-wrecker, and Daniel Day-Lewis the man they both love. It’s impossible to fathom the sheer number of women—young, old, or in-between—whose own feminist awakenings were spurred by Kate Chopin’s indisputable classic. The ballad of Edna Pontellier sings of the caged-bird claustrophobia caused by societal expectations, and laments the limits of acceptable desires. Munro's entire bibliography is essential reading. She's simply unparalleled when it comes to writing about the inner lives of girls and women. In this novel-in-stories, we follow Rose as she awkwardly transitions from girlhood to womanhood—warts and all. Each story/chapter centers on a different time in her life, from her schoolgirl days to getting hitched and having an affair. It's fascinating to go back to 1970s rural Canada and see how similar it looks to our current landscape. This insanely brilliant first novel, published in 1970, marked the debut of one of the greatest writers of our time—of all time. Set in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison herself was from Ohio) it’s the haunting story of Pecola Breedlove, a tortured young Black girl who yearns to have blue eyes, thinking they will make her beautiful. An Oprah’s Book Club pick in 1998, this jaw-droppingly gorgeous novel of a Haitian girl’s reunion with her mother in New York City, and then her return to Haiti, is filled with poetic details about Danticat’s home country—Haiti—that reveal the writer’s love and ambivalence about the place. Her protagonist, Sophie, hails from a family “with dirt under our fingernails,” people so strong they “carry the sky on their heads.” The reigning matriarch of minimalism employs prose so pared back turning the pages might give you paper cuts. Yet despite the economy of her words, her stories burst with laughs and a whole lotta heartbreak. Many writers get you to see certain things differently, but Hempel gives you all new ways to see full-stop. While Elena Ferrante’s brilliant Neapolitan novels comprise an epic ode to the complexity of female friendships, sharp-penned Lorrie Moore distills, in less than two hundred pages, the vacillating pleasures and pains of the sisterly love between girls as well as the way such a formative friendship reverberates through the years—even after that relationship has long since ended. Austen’s third novel, published in 1814, is among the Pride and Prejudice author’s most somber. And yet this tale of Fanny Price, who at age ten is sent to live with wealthy relatives to relieve her poor and overburdened parents, is a slow burn. When, we wonder, will everyone see Fanny as we do, and when they do, will she end up choosing the dashing but frivolous Henry, or the much more serious Edmund, who’s distracted by the flirtations of Mary? This one’s for all of the women out there hiding their light under a bushel. If you don’t quite remember what it’s like to be a 12-year-old girl filled with emotion, still immersed in childhood but feeling the pull of adolescence, visit or revisit this radiant, resonant novel of Frankie. Like To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout, she is wise beyond her years, at times too precocious for her own good, and one of the most enthralling characters ever invented by an American writer—and all the way back in 1946. Among America’s greatest short story writers ever (one of the country’s biggest story prizes is named after her) O’Connor’s often-nightmarish, always-enthralling spins on the Southern Gothic bloom with dark humor and deep compassion that belie the bleakness of her characters’ emotional and physical landscapes. In these ten indelible tales, undying faith commingles with cynicism, beauty with brutality, transformation with tradition, good country people with cold-blooded killers. Turned into a Tony Award-winning musical, Bechdel’s graphic memoir—portraying, among other things, her coming out as gay, her father’s barely-closeted homosexuality, and the innerworkings of the family-run funeral home—is part of the vanguard that elevated comics to a high art. Toni Cade Bambara died way too soon, in 1995, at age 56. An activist, filmmaker and fiction writer whose editor was Toni Morrison, she once observed: “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” Sample any book in her oeuvre for a taste of her singular aesthetic—fiction that reads like jazz improv. To start, this superb collection of fifteen stories gives us unforgettable characters who together form a portrait of Black life in America, as seen through Bambara’s dazzling lens. We are still piecing together how Harriet Tubman did what she did—escaped from slavery and went on to help some seventy others to do the same. As the “Moses” of the Underground Railroad, Tubman was like a real-life superhero. In historian Clinton’s 2004 telling, Tubman comes alive on the page, and reminds us what courage really means, whether fleeing to freedom, working as a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad or as a Union spy, or later in her life fighting for women’s rights. British novelist and historian Brookner died in 2016, denying impassioned fans a chance to slip into new stories of women whose youth is behind them, and are in the process of readjusting their high expectations. If that sounds boring, on the page, it’s the opposite, as it turns out still waters run deep. In this 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel, Edith, who’s long been in a relationship with a married man, vows to break it off with him and settle for an available man she doesn’t love. Will she compromise? We won’t give it away, but whatever her ultimate decision, you’ll love being along with her on the journey.
Books every single woman should read
Best books to read for single woman
Good books for single woman
Best books for single women
Best book for newly single woman