Books like The Doll's Alphabet — picked by fans

Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.

These connected stories give us a picture of Rose’s life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.

A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. That’s it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because she’s busy living.

The kind of book that’s not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here. 

This is Li’s first collection, a series of stories mostly exploring the lives of Chinese immigrants to the US, though some of the stories are set in China, where Li was born. Li is one of the greatest short story writers alive today, period. Part of her greatness is her profound understatement: the prose is disarmingly simple, hiding how brilliant it is.

Reading this collection is like a conjuring trick in which a familiar room becomes unfamiliar, but you aren’t sure how; you only know that the interior has altered. A standout: The Princess of Nebraska, in which a Chinese woman studying in the US goes for abortion care, supported by an older man. I use the opening paragraph of this story when I teach as a demonstration of how to convey, apparently without effort, every significant detail within the first page, except one crucial detail, which you could never… show more.

She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.

Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is… show more.

This raw, experimental, poetic, and challenging graphic memoir began as an exploration of the work of artist/writer Tove Jannson (the creator of the Moomin novels and comics), but Julie Delporte goes well beyond the confines of criticism or biography to examine deep and difficult questions of gender and the challenge of creating a space to exist as a woman in a world haunted by the legacy of traumas past and present. Delporte’s colored pencil artwork is disarming in its beauty and simplicity, and her spare, intimate insights will stay with you for years to come. An essential read for our times.

Crispin is funny, acerbic, trenchant, and a little bit mean. Her 2017 polemic takes contemporary feminism to task for what she sees as its feckless devolution from fervent, world-changing force to toothless irrelevancy. It’s a challenging read, especially for anyone who is, like me, a longtime feminist. But Crispin’s voice is fresh and compelling, and whether or not you agree with her entirely, her critique is impossible to ignore.

Benjamin’s Half in Shadow is an excellent exploration of the life of Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006), a pioneering scholar of black women’s literature. Fearing it could damage her career in the academy, McKay declined to be caricatured as an older, divorced, black single mother of two children. So, she hid this from all her academic colleagues and friends, including her closest ones. The driving force of Benjamin’s book is trying to make sense of the private life and professional motivations of McKay’s choice to live her life “half in shadow.” Benjamin suggests that black women in the academy face similar pressures to achieve in and conform to predominantly white spaces in ways that do not easily allow them to bring their entire selves into the light.

It’s a cliché, but the writing of Andrea Dworkin changed my life (often through painful internal struggle, but always for the better).

This is not her most well-known book, but this collection of essays and speeches was, for me, the most influential. Her speech “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” delivered to a men’s group in 1983, helped me understand that radical feminism was not a threat to men but a gift.

A few years before she died (far too young, at age 58, in 2005), I had a chance to meet her, and in the few hours of a shared car trip, I felt the loving spirit that motivated her work. 

Unrecognised female labor is also the subject of this captivating non-fiction book by Hochschild, a sociologist drawing upon decades of research with fifty heterosexual couples in the Bay area. Hochschild is well-known for identifying ‘the second shift’ of childcare and domestic chores that working women often perform at home, on top of their professional commitment. This results in a rampant inequality of leisure time, and compounded with unequal pay in the workplace, exacerbates gender injustice in contemporary American society. But Hochschild also provides powerful examples of couples who counter-act this norm, while showing how individual attitudes towards gender and domestic responsibilities are influenced by class, ethnicity, and upbringing. Fascinating and illuminating. 

This collection of essays by pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem introduces the reader to the roots of modern-day feminism and the specific challenges Steinem and others faced to obtain what we consider today to be simple rights.

This book combines history, biography, and sociology, and Steinem captivated me with her clear and concise writing style, wit, and dry sense of humor. In addition to recounting her own experiences (such as her assignment as a reporter to pose as a Playboy bunny), she tells the stories of such varied subjects as First Lady Pat Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, author Alice Walker, and others.

I read this book shortly after it was published in 1983, and I read it again in 2020; both times I was shocked at the every-day indignities women faced routinely, and I was repeatedly encouraged by the bravery of Steneim and others to take on the mostly-male “establishment.”

Steinem reminds… show more.