Dec 31, 2022
December Feminist Reading List: 2022 Round-up
This list was extremely hard for me to narrow down, so much so that I was originally aiming for a nice, round 10 choices but ended up with 12. I couldn’t make myself cut two more. I read 91 books in 2022, and if I’m not mistaken, only two of them were by men. I made a conscious choice about five years ago to focus more on books by women, and have since really only ended up reading books by men when they are on a specific subject that I’m researching. I will talk more about that choice in a separate post someday, but suffice it to say that I read a lot of books by women and nonbinary people this year, and most of them were good. So for December’s list, I decided to do a quick little bit about some that missed the other lists for whatever reason, but that I still think are worth recommending. But enough prologue. To the list.
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
1982
Fiction
This was my end-of-year read, when all the TBR lists had been completed (or as completed as they ever are). I took my time with it, and I think you’ll want to, as well. It’s a multigenerational story of a landowning family living in Chilé, and it covers the period from the 1910s all the way up until the 1970s. We start with the little clairvoyant of the family, Clara, dropping an F bomb in the middle of a sermon at the church. We end with Alba, a young revolutionary who is living in the aftermath of the failed political revolution and ensuing military coup. The politics of the country during this period play out alongside family dramas that are driven by differing viewpoints and personalities. All the while, in the background, Clara’s spirits float through the family home, which witnesses several generations of radical change for the family. It is witty, humorous, and incredibly well written, and manages to tackle incredibly difficult subject matter in a way that makes it look effortless.
The Women Could Fly
Megan Giddings
2022
Fiction
Like so many of the books that have come out in recent years by women, this one is based in a dystopian (but magical-realistic) future where women are strictly controlled. All women are required to either marry by the age of 30, or be placed on a registry and face state monitoring for life. Magic, which is seen as a female affliction, is outlawed except in the cases of those women who choose to become registered witches, which essentially leaves them outside of society, save for a few specific vocations, such as art. Josephine is 28 and has to make a decision about what kind of extremely limited future she wants. Her mother disappeared under mysterious circumstances 14 years earlier, and she has just made the decision to have her officially declared dead, but new information about what may have happened to her turns Josephine’s world upside down on the cusp of what may be the biggest decision of her life.
Red Clocks
Leni Zumas
2018
Fiction
Zumas was the thesis advisor of one of my close friends at graduate school, and he was the one who originally put me onto her writing (he sent me her first novel through the mail, all the way from the US, in fact). This is definitely one of my favorite books of the year. Once again, we are in what was a dystopian future at the time of writing, but has since become essentially the doorway we are lingering in as Americans. Abortion has been outlawed in the US, and in a ripple-out effect, fertility treatments have also come under fire, as have adoptions by single women. Ro is a high school teacher and biographer, and also a single woman who desperately wants a child but who is running out of time, as exceedingly restrictive laws go into effect. Gin is a wise woman who lives in the woods and offers homeopathic cures (including abortions) to women in the nearby town. Maggie is a high school student who made a mistake. The three women’s stories become increasingly entwined, as they all grapple with the reality of reproductive rights being stripped away. little by little. Beautifully written. Terrifyingly relevant. If I had to choose one book on this list as my number one for the year, it might be this one.
Milkman
Anna Burns
2018
Fiction
Milkman is ostensibly based in an unnamed city, but you won’t get two sentences into this book without realizing it’s Irish through and through. The protagonist, identified only as middle sister, is a young woman trying to survive in a community that is a tangle of gossip, subterfuge, allegiances, alliances and paranoia (and often for good reason). The bushes are snapping photos. Owning a piece of a foreign car with a flag on it may get you killed. Middle sister struggles to have an ordinary lifein circumstances that are anything but.
The insider perspective this book gives on The Troubles is interesting enough in its own right, but what I found to be the most incredible and insightful parts were the ones that dealt with middle sister’s interactions with the titular character, Milkman, a married man who is purported to be very dangerous, and who has, out of nowhere, seemingly decided to lay claim to middle sister. Burns brilliantly gives voice to so much that women experience on a daily basis, especially the tingling of intuition that isn’t seen as valid, and the frustration of not being able to point to something definitively wrong that a man is doing, all the while knowing, definitely, that there is something wrong. All of this is tackled, and still, the book is laugh-out-loud funny throughout. Like I said, very, very Irish.
The Book of Mother
Violaine Huisman
2018
Fiction
I love a book about a woman who doesn’t follow the rules, and Maman is definitely that. Told from the perspective of one of Maman’s two daughters, this book is a love letter to imperfect mothers, and the passionate, fallible, violent love that exists between mothers and daughters. Maman is free-wheeling, irreverent, and unwilling to embrace the narrative that being a mother is a good enough reason to forsake personhood without looking back. As we follow along with Maman’s increasing mental health issues, we hear the story of her life before motherhood, and we learn alongside her daughter, as all daughters do eventually, how to see Maman not only as a mother, but also as a woman.
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Maddie Mortimer
2022
Fiction
This book is a novel for poets, and so is very hard to summarize in a paragraph, but let me try. Lia is married and the mother of one beautiful daughter, and she is battling cancer. We follow her life through a straight-forward narrative, interlaced with a second, first-person voice, which we eventually come to realize is the voice of her illness, which also at times takes on the tone of the body as a whole, and its version of events. The body tells the story of the emotional forces that move beneath the surface of chronological events. As the story goes on and Lia’s health declines, Lia begins to merge with her illness, as the cancer colonizes more and more of her body. This book is just flat out beautiful, to the point that I had to fight the urge to dissect it and dig around in its moving parts, trying to see how it worked, instead of just enjoying the magic that Mortimer has created.
The School for Good Mothers
Jessamine Chan
2022
Fiction
Frida Liu has one bad day. After finding out her husband is having an affair and divorcing, Frida is struggling to stay afloat as a newly single mother of a young toddler. In a fugue state of exhaustion and stress, she makes one serious mistake, and as a result, sets into motion a horrifying series of events, as a speculative version of child services on steroids gets involved. She winds up being sent into a trial program where she will have to prove she has what it takes to live up to the impossible standards set for mothers or else lose her daughter forever. I’m not a mother, but I suspect this somewhat satirical take on the exhausting expectations faced by mothers in the age of social media and mommy blogs will be comforting in the bitterest way. And even for those of us who are not mothers, it isn’t hard to relate.
Animal
Lisa Taddeo
2021
Fiction
Animal is the kind of book I wish had been around when I was younger, when I was reading the Beats, because it was the closest I could get to something I was hungry for, but was still off the mark, because it was just nothing but men, as far as the eye could see. Animal features the all-too-rare creature known as the somewhat unsympathetic female narrator. I say somewhat, because as Joan’s backstory unfolds, we begin to understand her more, and that, of course, is why unsympathetic characters are the most interesting ones. Something terrible happens to Joan in New York City, so she flees on a road trip to the west coast, where she settles into a rental with a creepy landlord suffering from dementia and a younger, new-agey type guy named River who lives out back in a yurt. While there, she meets up with and forms a friendship with a woman named Alice. It’s kind of hard not to spoil this book, so I’ll just drop this line from Joan and say, if this intrigues you, this is a good choice to add to your TBR list: “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.”
A Lover’s Discourse
Xiaolu Guo
2020
Fiction
I loved this book. A lot of the books I read this year were tough, and the books coming out these days are tough for a reason, but this one was a like a gentle breeze in comparison. I don’t mean that it was trivial in any way — on the contrary, I found it to be incredibly insightful and, as a female immigrant who has struggled with second language and cultural issues in love, all too relatable. You may recognize the title in relation to Roland Barthes’s book of the same name, and that is, of course, on purpose, as this version was partially inspired by that one, and even discusses it somewhat at length. I found it to be a really fitting title, as Guo’s writing has the same gentle, intimate tone that I’ve always loved in Barthes’s work. It is also written as a direct address — from a “me” to a “you”, which I love. The narrator reflects on life as an immigrant and ESL speaker in London, as she meets and falls in love with “you”. This would be a close contender, along with Red Clocks, for my favorite read of the year.
The Yellow Kitchen
Margaux Vialleron
2022
Fiction
This was, again, another lighter read in comparison to a lot of the other books on this list. It’s 2019 in London, and three old friends are navigating life and love against the backdrop of Brexit. Claude, Giulia and Sophie are three very different women, but even after college, while their lives take off in different directions, they continue to grow together by meeting up in Claude’s yellow kitchen to cook and consume intricate meals or to indulge in whatever dessert Claude, the baker, has been working on lately. They take a trip together to Lisbon later in the year, and something shifts as two of the friends come together in an unexpected way. I’m a baker and a food person, so I really enjoyed the foodie scenes in the book, and the way that gathering to cook and eat was what held these friendships together.
Follow Me to Ground
Sue Rainsford
2018
Fiction
2022 was a big magical-realism year for me, and Follow Me to Ground was a stand-out novel for me in that category. Ada and her father are not exactly normal. They have special powers, which they use to earn a living by healing the cures — their word for ordinary humans. When things are really bad, they will plant the cures in a specially maintained patch of ground in the back garden and leave them for the soil to do its healing magic. They mostly get along fine, until Ada, who has come of age, starts to feel stifled in their lonely world of two and begins to look outside for companionship. There’s a somewhat gothic tone to the story that then unfolds, as their small but safe world is broken open to outsiders, and Ada, in her rebellion, tests the limits of their magic.
The Book of Goose
Yiyun Li
2022
Fiction
I hate to be that book review writer, but I’m going to do it anyway: If you liked Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, you will most likely enjoy The Book of Goose. The story starts in the US, where Fabienne has immigrated from her small village in France, when she receives news that her childhood best friend, Agnes, has passed away. Fabienne falls into a revery about their time in the French countryside, and what unfolds is a story of the kind of fierce, frenetic friendship that only really seems to be possible when you are young and female. The two girls get up to a number of unorthodox antics in rebellion against the monotony of the bucolic life, and it becomes clear eventually that only one of them is fated to move on to bigger and better things.
Whew. I didn’t honestly know if I would manage to get that all out before the clock struck midnight and we sailed into another year, but there it is. This year was a big one for me, and I had a lot to accomplish, and I honestly don’t think I would have made it through some weeks without the comfort of these books to curl up with at the end of the day. I hope some of you can find the same comfort in some of these books, and as always, please leave me a note to let me know if you do. And also let me know what books helped see you through 2022. Happy New Year, y’all. Here’s to all the books that got us this far, and all the books that are yet to come.
