A Fabulous Realization (a post about books!)

I was recently challenged by a friend to list seven books I love, with no review or commentary, just to share.  As I've been a reader my whole life, it was hard to narrow down my choices.  But I finally did, after a lot of consideration (and, surprisingly, sleepless nights).  The seven I came up with were (listed in sort of chronological order of when I read them):

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Jane Eyre
• The Awakening
• Persuasion
• The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter
• Hunger

You might notice something about those seven titles.  The reason I chose them, I thought, was because I re-read them on a regular basis, they shaped my life in some way, and I randomly think of passages as I go about my life, even today.  In using that basic criteria, here are some of the other titles I considered (in no particular order):

• the Little House series
• Little Women
• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• Harriet the Spy
• The Borrowers
• Pride and Prejudice
• Gone with the Wind
• Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret
• Anne of Green Gables
• Helen Keller's The Story of My Life
• The Secret Garden
• The Little Princess
• the Nancy Drew series
• the Trixie Belden series
• Heidi
• Black Beauty
• The Age of Innocence
• Ramona the Pest
• The House of the Spirits
• the Phyllis A. Whitney series of 'juvenile mysteries'
• The Bell Jar
• Ramona
• Misty of Chincoteague
• Pippi Longstocking
• Caddie Woodlawn
• Julie of the Wolves
• Wuthering Heights
• Captains and the Kings
• A Room of One's Own
• The Joy Luck Club
• All the Lives We Never Lived
• Bad Feminist
• and about a million more

I always loved the illustrations in this edition

Notice anything yet?  Yes, most of the books I truly love and that have affected me throughout my life were written by women.  I don't think I even noticed it myself until I started tinkering with the lists.  And, diving even more into my reading history, I can remember women steering me through my reading life.  My mom taught me to read when I was quite young, and books have always been my refuge. In my elementary school, in a small farming community in Ohio, there was somehow a section devoted to biographies about famous women.  As I devoured these stories about Helen Keller, Clara Barton, Elizabeth Blackwell, Amelia Earhart, and others, our librarian (I wish I could remember her name - I can see her face, though!) very kindly kept ordering the newest books in the series.  She would also give me a heads up about when the next Scholastic Book Fair would be coming to our library (remember them?  happiest day of the school year!), so that I could save my money to buy as many books as possible - growing up, my parents never had much money, but they could almost always find an extra $5 for me to buy books.  Sometimes they were classics, sometimes they were silly, but most of the books I bought have stayed with me throughout my life.  I was thinking about a silly teen romance the other day, trying to remember the name, because I remembered a scene where a shy girl flirted with a popular boy.  The way my brain works is generally not a mystery.

We had a library in my hometown, too, and like Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, my goal was to read all the books.  I didn't do it alphabetically, I sort of started in the back of the library, in the children's section, and moved my way forward.  Our library lady was a lovely person and encouraged me to try more and more advanced reads.  I was maybe ten or eleven and I wanted to check out Gone With the Wind and Love Story (not exactly brain surgery, and one is written by a male, but still).  The substitute librarian, who was, you guessed it, not a woman, told me I could not check out those books, they were too advanced for me.  I walked out of the library, dejected, and told my mom (who was waiting in the car) what the man said.  She parked the car, marched into the library, and told that gent that her daughter was allowed to read whatever she wanted.  My mom was, and is, my hero.  

Of course there are books by men that delight me - I remember being so excited at getting the Bicentennial Series by John Jakes, and, hello, Shakespeare.  Roger Ebert's Life Itself is transformative (and on my nightstand to read again imminently).  Dickens, Fitzgerald,  Steinbeck, James, Forster, Krakauer - all get re-reads.  I'm trying to correct neglecting so many writers of color in my youth and am playing catch-up (I should've been reading Thrity Umrigar for years).  But the books I pick up over and over again, the ones where I can see myself, where I can learn something about myself, where I learned to love travel and language and ideas, where I find comfort, are the books by women.  I can't believe it's taken me so long to notice - I'm glad I finally did.  There are a lot of wonderful women writers out there for me to discover...