100 Books Like The Doll's Alphabet

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.

We all need more than buzz phrases and simplistic solutions. Parents, teachers, and coaches need a clear analysis of the harms we currently do boys. Michael Reichert draws both on his experience as a therapist and a teacher to give us tools to raise more self-aware, caring, and compassionate men.

Jo Carney’s book is a wonderful way of appreciating both Shakespeare and contemporary literature that responds to the themes he developed all those centuries ago. This study explores more recent adaptations published in the last decade whereby women—either authors or their characters—talk back to Shakespeare in a variety of new ways. Carney puts modern works such as Prospero’s Daughter, Desdemona, Hag-Seed, The Gap of Time, The Porpoise, Station Eleven, and Hamnet into dialogue with the plays Othello, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and King Lear. This beautifully written and very accessible book allows us to think about contemporary issues of sexual assault, gender expectations, and differences in new and very exciting ways as well as allowing readers to develop a new appreciation of Shakespeare.  

A grimdark fantasy in the tone of Abercrombie, Moss’s The Worthy is a brilliant debut that explores a fractious sibling relationship between brother and sister Prince Barsten and Princess Ailith, both of whom are battling to become heir to the kingdom of Crell. Ailith herself is hiding her lover, Lady Avalon, at the same time as trying to protect the kingdom when it quite literally begins to tear itself apart due to a mysterious magical entity. The book explores issues of patriarchal oppression, historic abuse and trauma, sexuality and homophobia. Despite the grim world and morally grey characters, I found myself drawn into this story because of the important themes it considered. 

When global diplomats formed the League of Nations in 1919, feminists were forced to lobby for women’s rights from outside the halls of power. As a small measure of progress, after World War II six states would appoint women to the 1945 conference charged with drafting a charter to govern the League’s successor: the United Nations. Half of the female delegates were appointed by Latin American nations, and together, the three feministas would lobby tirelessly to ensure that the UN Charter bound the body to promote human rights “without distinction as to race, language, religion, or sex.” Marino’s fabulous book explains why, in the 1920s and 1930s, Latin American feminists came to play such an outsized role in the global quest for sexual equality and human rights.

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.