Reading List

How does one prioritise the reading order of books? Do you start at the beginning of publishing and work your way to the present? Do you put on hold the books you think you have a gist of already and go for something more alien? How about relevance, and if you get bored or tired do you go on to something light or funny? Over the past few months I have made it my mission to read all feminist books ever published.

“All of them?” I hear you say. “But there must be thousands.”

Well, as many as I can hold in my small flat at one time and purchase on my tiny income, yes. And no, there aren’t thousands. There are a lot, but not thousands.

With such a wide range of topics and such a great deal of herstory to cover, I never really know where to go next. It’s more of a pick and choose what I’m in the mood for. I know I need to read the real groundbreakers, but while I am reading those from 1935 I don’t want to miss something that is happening right now, in the moment. Woe is me!

So far: Living Dolls, The Awakening, Reading Women, Herland, Yellow Wallpaper, The Beauty Myth, Human Rights are Women’s Rights, Reconciliations, How to be a Woman, Women on the Edge of Time,

Books to read within the year: Female Chauvinist Pigs, Half the Sky, Feminine Mystique, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Vagina (by Naomi Wolf), The Female Eunuch, The Equality Illusion, Gyn/Ecology, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Vagina Monologues, The City of Ladies, A Room of One’s Own, Second Sex, He’s a Stud, She’s  a Slut, Gender Trouble, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, The Second Sexism, Full Frontal Feminism etc etc…

Some of these authors have plenty of books. I can’t only read the ones that got best reviews! I need to absorb everything! Germaine Greer, Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Naomi Wolf  and most of the books I listed have other books to go with them! I keep starting books then getting too excited to wait to start reading the next one and before I know it I have six books on the go but only two book marks and no idea where I am up to on the others. On top of books there are also the blogs, podcasts, radio shows, TV shows, films and videos I need to watch and see all of, along with Newspaper and magazine articles and then the real life discussions and activism with other feminists. It’s almost as if there couldn’t be more to take in and couldn’t be less time to do it in! Then again, I am only racing against myself here. 

I have promised not to buy or borrow any more books until I have finished I already have, but there are so many out there I feel I need in my life immediately.

I have asked and searched in many places for books on the Suffragettes but keep finding a lack of published material where I thought there would be plenty. If anyone out there knows of any, please let me know. That will be the LAST book I buy… I promise.