Best book by a female?
Submitted by kenji on Thu, 02/03/2005 - 05:13
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Some of the above i've read, some not. Do suggest any missing favourites and i'll try to add them to the poll a.s.a.p. I'm hoping to get some good ideas from this!
If you are into the fantasy genre, then the 'dragonlance' series has some good reads. Much of it was written by female authors as well.
Frankenstein would get my vote on this list the way it stands now, but Willa Cather is one of my favorite novelists, and My Antonia is one of the greatest novels ever written, IMO. Her O Pioneers, among others, is also great. Flannery O'Conner is one of the great Southern writers, more known for her short stories, but her novel Wise Blood is supposed to be really good--I hope to read it soon.
Johnny Waco
There are some fabulous books on the list. It was hard to pick just one. Some of my favorite books of all time are on this list: Gone With the Wind, The Color Purple, The Bell Jar, Diary of Anne Frank, Emma, Pride & Prejudice, Frankenstein, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, Interview with a Vampire, Little Women, The Secret Garden, to Kill a Mockingbird, & Wuthering Heights were all in my list of best 100 books of all time.t
I hate to admit that I've not read too many books by females, but I'm planning on putting that right. Two that I have read, and enjoyed immensely (and one of the reasons why I plan to correct this ommision), are the brilliant 'The Outsiders' by S. E. Hinton (also a fantastic film), and 'The Mists of Avalon' by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I've also read The God of Small Things, and 'Outwitting The Gestapo' by Lucie Aubrac, but not many others that spring to mind.
Included on my list to read in 2005 are 'Rebecca' by Daphne Du Maurrier (a favourite film of mine), and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
Other books on my shelf unread which I hope to get to sometime in the future are:
The Bell Jar - Plath
Emma - Austen
Gone with the Wind - Mitchell
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Lovely Bones - Sebold
Middlemarch - Eliot
Pride and Prejudice - Austen
Sense and Sensibility - Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee
Wild Swans - Jung Chang
The Firebrand - Marion Zimmer Bradley
All But My Life - Gerda Weissman Klein
In My Hands - Irene Gut Opdyke
Berlin Diaries - Marie Vassiltchikov
The King Must Die - Mary Renault
Cold Shoulder - Lynda La Plante
How do you not have Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand on here??? I've read and enjoyed quite a few books on your list, but Rand is by far my favorite female author.
Please forgive me; i've not read them (hated the film Fountainhead) so they slipped my mind. I'll add them!
Okay I am ticked off! The system said I voted when I hadn't. So for the record if I was allowed to vote....God of Small Things...by far the best. When you know that she didn't edit much more than a few sentences of the first draft. A rich deeply textured story of post-colonial India.
I read a few pages of it a while back, am terrible at leaving books unread, will now have to come back to it. She seems a genuine and enlightened person from what little i've read about her.
Oh, and i voted Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon but then realised i probably should have voted House of the Spirits.
Try now.
i must say I've only read 3, but i tend to hate things written by women, and that includes music and movies as well... but frankenstien by far the best of anything written by a women that i've experienced.
I don't know your taste well enough yet, but you could always try "The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow; the Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley"- she wasn't a woman!