Every Friday, the New York Public Library Recommends Twitter handle asks their followers to tell them a book they like, and, in return, they provide a recommendation.
Well, friends, we’ve powered through another week. Who needs a new book? Tell us one you like & we’ll suggest another til 11AM. #FridayReads pic.twitter.com/Y7IiWzsVOT
— NYPL Recommends (@NYPLRecommends) August 25, 2017
On Friday August 25, NYPL took a look at the New York Times‘ editor Sam Sifton’s summer reading list and responded in a series of 16 tweets that included numerous other great reads penned by female authors.
Here’s @SamSifton‘s summer reading list. He’s looking for more books by women authors. Tell him your suggestions: https://t.co/QLQSDaIjNa pic.twitter.com/sOYd1Q3O6i
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 25, 2017
Hi, @SamSifton. Your friendly neighborhood librarians @NYPL have some ideas! #WomenAuthors 1/16 https://t.co/YGCXILKyiP
— NYPL Recommends (@NYPLRecommends) August 29, 2017
With some sorting and digging, we’ve compiled a list of reads penned by female writers for your shopping cart. From memoirs to fantasy fiction, business to politics, this list includes books by authors of different ethnic backgrounds. Summer may be coming to an end, but these stories can still transport you across the globe with the flip of a page.
Captions Courtesy of Amazon Editorial
Image Courtesy of Goodreads
I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere…. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.
New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as ‘wildly undisciplined’, Gay understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.
2. Moon Called: The Mercy Thompson Series by Patricia Briggs
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‘I didn’t realize he was a werewolf at first. My nose isn’t at its best when surrounded by axle grease and burnt oil….’
Mercedes Thompson runs a garage in the Tri-Cities. She’s a mechanic, and a damn good one. She spends her spare time karate training and tinkering with a VW bus that happens to belong to a vampire. Her next-door neighbour is an alpha werewolf, who is, literally, the leader of the pack. Mercy herself is a shapeshifter, sister to coyotes. As such, she’s tolerated by the wolves but is definitely down the pecking order. As long as she keeps her eyes down and remembers her place, the pack will leave her in peace.
3. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Image Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed.
4. Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas
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In 1972, when she was seven, the author and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond Firoozeh’s father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (or cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an array of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
5. Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
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In this astonishing novel, Shanthi Sekaran gives voice to the devotion and anguish of motherhood through two women bound together by their love for one boy. Soli, a young undocumented Mexican woman in Berkeley, CA, finds that motherhood offers her an identity in a world where she’s otherwise invisible. When she is placed in immigrant detention, her son comes under the care of Kavya, an Indian-American wife overwhelmed by her own impossible desire to have a child. As Soli fights for her son, Kavya builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else’s child. Exploring the ways in which dreams and determination can reshape a family, Sekaran transforms real life into a thing of beauty. From rural Oaxaca to Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto to the dreamscapes of Silicon Valley, Lucky Boy offers a moving and revelatory look at the evolving landscape of the American dream and the ever-changing borders of love.
6. One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong
Image Courtesy of Amazon
When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birthrates would help lift China’s poorest and increase the country’s global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers.
7. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah
Image Courtesy of Sonia Shah
Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged in new territory. Experts around the world are bracing for a deadly, disruptive pandemic.
In Pandemic, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah reveals how that could happen, by drawing parallels between cholera—one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens—and the new diseases that stalk us today. As Shah traces each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey from harmless microbe to world-changing pandemic, she reports on the pathogens that have followed cholera’s footsteps—from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers emerging from China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, the slums of Port-au-Prince, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast. A true story that is both gripping and alarming, Pandemic delves deep into the convoluted science, strange politics, and the checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, offering a prelude to the future that’s impossible to ignore.
8. Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by Jo Becker
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A groundbreaking work of reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality. Focusing on the historic legal challenge of California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Becker offers a gripping, behind-the scenes narrative told with the lightning pace of a great legal thriller.
9. We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
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Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few.
10. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Image Courtesy f Amazon
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
On International Women’s Day this year, NYPL even created a list of 365 excellent books written by female authors. With this lengthy list, your whole year of reading will be covered!
For the full list of recommendations, check out their Twitter account here or the hashtag #FridayReads.
Featured Image Courtesy of Herb Scher