John Podhoretz is unhappy:
The sheer PCness of this list is suffocating. https://t.co/qkDH5Kf6D0
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) August 11, 2017
Even though this Esquire list is more than a year old, I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the link, expecting to find a wild list of obscure femino-socialist tracts that no one in the real world has ever read. Instead I got something…surprisingly ordinary. I’ll break the Esquire list into two lists. Here’s list #1. Every one of them is very well known, and most are part of the standard literary canon:
- The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
- The Color Purple, Alice Walker
- The Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
- Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
- Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh
- Heartburn, Nora Ephron
- In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
- Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
- The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
- Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
- Middlemarch, George Eliot
- Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
- Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
- Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
- Selected Stories Of Alice Munro
- Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
- The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
- Sula, Toni Morrison
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart, Chiunia Achebe
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
- The White Album, Joan Didion
- Underworld, Don DeLillo
- A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L’Engle
Here’s list #2. Some of these are obscure, while some are just lesser-known works by famous authors. Some of them I haven’t heard of, so I can’t judge them:
- Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
- Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
- The Ballad Of The Sad Café, Carson McCullers
- Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- Bastard Out Of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
- The Best Of Everything, Rona Jaffe
- Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
- The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
- The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
- Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
- The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch
- Citizen, Claudia Rankine
- The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
- Forgotten County, Catherine Chung
- The Group, Mary McCarthy
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Alice Munro
- Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
- Just Kids, Patti Smith
- The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa
- The Lover, Marguerite Duras
- Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
- NW, Zadie Smith
- Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker
- Redefining Realness, Janet Mock
- The Round House, Louise Erdrich
- Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older
- Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
- So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
- A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
- An Untamed State, Roxane Gay
- Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech
- The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This list was explicitly put together by eight women as a response to Esquire’s ill-received 2015 “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” which contained exactly one book written by a woman.
It’s hard for me to find anything either suffocating or PC about this list. There are lots of standard-issue great books, along with the usual smattering of idiosyncratic choices that might or might not be especially widely read. That’s no surprise: every author or critic worth her salt carries around a mental list of personal favorites that they wish more people had read. The list is heavily populated by women, but not nearly so heavily as the original list was populated by men. The themes of these books are considerably different than the themes of the “Every Man” list, which is hardly surprising. And there are fewer pieces of nonfiction than there are on the men’s list.
Anyway, it’s a list that might not appeal to a lot of men. Them’s the breaks. On the other hand, maybe it provides some good ideas for novels to expand their horizons. You never know til you try.
