Thoughtful, personal, passionate, insightful, and humane. This is the book I wish I could write.

Helen Morales puts a pin in the lazy “glory that was Greece” trope and gives us the darker side of antiquity and its influence, showing us how stories have been used to enslave bodies and tame minds, to belittle and exclude. But this plasticity is what also makes Greek myth a potentially restorative force.

Helen’s message is that such capacity for continual reinvention gives the ultimate power to the teller of tales, whoever she might be.    

Like some other powerhouse books I’ve read, it would take hours to fully discuss the brilliant storytelling, the compelling characters, the descriptions that have you smelling the damp earth, and to truly explain the awe I felt when reading this book.

When I say, “I’ve never read anything like this,” I usually mean that wowed me this much or that one aspect was unique or clingy. In this case, I mean it in every sense. It was chewy and raw and rare, unique and visceral, sumptuous and dark, devastating and lyrical.

Dealing with illness in magical realism is something I’m familiar with, clearly. To see it being handled in the way Sue Rainsford does is spine-tingling and refreshing, if one can call a book so guttural as this one such.

Written long before J.D. Vance made single women an open political target, Anthea Taylor’s book propounds skepticism in regard to the frequent cliche that they are now a privileged and celebrated class.   

In fact, as she shows, this truism is part of the cultural construction of single women as a problematic population subject to evolving modes of cultural criticism and denigration. This book astutely analyzes their depiction in “chick lit,” reality tv, blogs and self-help modes. It’s smart and scholarly as well as highly readable.

When I first read this book on feminist philosophy in the late 1980s, I was nervous about both feminism (because I wasn’t sure what it meant for me) and philosophy (because I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to understand it).

Marilyn Frye’s book helped me realize that I had been raised in a male-dominated and deeply sexist culture without knowing much about it, making feminism essential to my education. She also demonstrated that philosophy written in plain language was for everyone rather than an esoteric endeavor for specialists.

Frye was a scholar-in-residence at the university where I did graduate studies, and she sat in on our reading group. It was a real treat to sit across the room and hear her think out loud.

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

Thrilling portraits of violent women in Greek tragedy—for example, Clytemnestra, Electra, and Medea—seem like an anomaly in a society that expected women to get married, bear children, be quiet, and stay at home. In this accessible introduction to the subject Rabinowitz examines tragedy in its original theatrical and social contexts. Her analyses of selected plays are grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist theory, and include vivid accounts of some modern performances. Whatever is happening in the world, there is always a Greek tragedy that speaks to it. 

I read Nzegwu’s book after completing my PhD and it left a lingering impression on me.

Her work effectively challenged conceptualizations of gender that assumed an inherently hierarchical relationship between female and male. It also drew attention to the role of colonial laws and judicial edicts in promoting gender inequality in Nigeria’s Igbo society.

Nzegwu's discussion of the Onitsa dual-sex system that had historically embraced sexual difference but still granted women and men respective powers and responsibilities in society told a different story about gender relations in African societies prior to Western colonialism.

Nzegwu’s work echoes Oyěwùmí’s, and together they offer a window into alternative gender realities we can learn from. 

This is the first book of its kind to combine a focus on women’s food knowledge from growing and harvesting to cooking.

The author draws from a wide array of sources to provide a rare cross-cultural and historical perspective on women’s food practices and their significance to “sexual politics.” Written in accessible and lively prose that is both informative and a pleasure to read.

I didn’t read Last Days of Hot Slit in time to include it in my own book about sexual violence. In truth, I could have (barely; it was published just before I finished). But I felt comfortable with my aversion to Dworkin, a crusader against assault who had found common cause with conservative activists. And Dworkin was a self-defeating font of vituperation, wasn’t she? Well, no. She was in fact altogether brilliant. Fateman’s wonderfully lucid, deeply researched introduction and the careful selection she and Scholder made of Dworkin’s surprisingly wide-ranging work, demonstrate the force and courage not just of this radical feminist’s writing, but also of her character. She was dauntless.

One of the most influential thinkers and writers on feminist film theory, Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is one of many that tackle the representation of women in art and culture and how these mediums might impede or aid the women’s movement.

Mulvey was a great resource for my own book in analysing the overt sexualisation of female characters on screen to cater to the so-called Male Gaze and misogynistic pleasures.