Earlier this week Time magazine published 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime. I’ve added the list to the bottom of this post. The list, compiled from responses by Reddit users, attempts to answer the question:
“what is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”
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WHAT IMMEDIATELY STRUCK ME about the list is that out of the 33 authors, only 3 are women: L.M. Montgomery [Anne of Green Gables]; Harper Lee [To Kill A Mockingbird]; and Margaret Atwood [The Handmaid’s Tale].
Considering that the first two books are about children for children, and that the last one is about a society in which women are slaves, this list doesn’t lend credence to the idea that in 2015 we are living in a post-feminist society.
You with me here?
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I THINK THAT WE can all agree, to use the article’s words, that: “Books have the profound capacity to stay with us for the rest of our lives.”
This is good + positive.
But by accepting this premise I think that it becomes even more important to turn a critical eye toward all the possible books that one can put on a list such as this. If one is going to have these books with him or herself forever, one must be discerning.
N’est-ce pas?
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TO MAKE THE LIST more balanced, I’d suggest that we include &/or replace on it, at a minimum, the following books written by women:
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
There must be more. Suggestions?
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Time’s List of 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime
{ bolded ones I’ve read – asterisked ones I’ve never heard of before }
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- The Forever War* by Joe Haldeman
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville
- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Kafka on the Shore* by Haruki Murakami
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* by Philip K. Dick
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- 1984 by George Orwell
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