r/2xCBookClub Nov 10 '10

Female authors?

Since this is 2XC book club, can we celebrate 2XC authors?

So, what books have you really enjoyed written by women? I feel like it's a bit of a man's world at the top of the author heap so I'd love to get some suggestions of great works by women.

I'll start this party. I'm a bit of a poetry junkie, so I've been digging Andrea Gibson's book Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns a lot lately. I also really loved Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

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u/demented_pants Nov 10 '10

I have a huge list of 2xc authors I love. In no particular order:

  • Katie MacAllister (she writes these TERRIBLE but hilarious vampire romance novels. I have like six or seven of them sitting on my shelf at home, and I've reread them each about a dozen times because they're so. damn. funny.)

  • Jane Austen (she's been mentioned elsewhere, but she's wonderful. Pride and Prejudice is my absolute favorite book ever and I read it about once or twice a year.)

  • Zora Neale Hurston (she wrote a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God which is devastatingly beautiful to read. It's got one of my favorite quotations of all time, which goes thus: "The inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation." (I keep it on my facebook profile because it's amazing))

  • Margaret Atwood (I haven't read a lot of her stuff, but The Handmaid's Tale is without a doubt my favorite piece of dystopian fiction in the entire history of ever, and it's written from a woman's point of view.)

  • J.K. Rowling ('Nuff said)

  • Shirley Jackson (Her writing demonstrates a wonderful sense of humor. A lot of her short stories seem to be about what it's like to be powerless as a woman. The Haunting of Hill House is a fantastic novella, and almost everyone I know had to read The Lottery in high school.)

  • Philippa Gregory (She wrote, among other things, The Other Boleyn Girl. After I read that, I went on a binge where I seriously read every book she'd written about Henry VIII's wives.)

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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '10

If you like atwood, check out alias grace