Are Books By Women Just a Bunch of PC Nonsense?

John Podhoretz is unhappy:

The sheer PCness of this list is suffocating. https://t.co/qkDH5Kf6D0

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) August 11, 2017

Even though this Esquire list is more than a year old, I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the link, expecting to find a wild list of obscure femino-socialist tracts that no one in the real world has ever read. Instead I got something…surprisingly ordinary. I’ll break the Esquire list into two lists. Here’s list #1. Every one of them is very well known, and most are part of the standard literary canon:

1. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
3. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
4. Beloved, Toni Morrison
5. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
6. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
7. The Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
8. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
9. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
10. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
11. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
14. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh
15. Heartburn, Nora Ephron
16. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
17. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
18. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
19. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
20. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
21. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
22. Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
23. Middlemarch, George Eliot
24. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
25. The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante
26. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
27. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
28. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
29. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
30. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
31. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
32. Selected Stories Of Alice Munro
33. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
34. The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov
35. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
36. Sula, Toni Morrison
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
38. Things Fall Apart, Chiunia Achebe
39. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
40. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
41. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
42. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
43. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
44. The White Album, Joan Didion
45. Underworld, Don DeLillo
46. A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L’Engle

Here’s list #2. Some of these are obscure, while some are just lesser-known works by famous authors. Some of them I haven’t heard of, so I can’t judge them:

1. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
2. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
3. The Ballad Of The Sad Café, Carson McCullers
4. Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez
5. Bastard Out Of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
6. The Best Of Everything, Rona Jaffe
7. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
8. The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
9. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
10. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
11. The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch
12. Citizen, Claudia Rankine
13. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
14. Forgotten County, Catherine Chung
15. The Group, Mary McCarthy
16. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Alice Munro
17. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
18. Just Kids, Patti Smith
19. The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa
20. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
21. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
22. NW, Zadie Smith
23. Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker
24. Redefining Realness, Janet Mock
25. The Round House, Louise Erdrich
26. Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older
27. Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
28. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
29. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
30. Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
31. A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
32. An Untamed State, Roxane Gay
33. Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech
34. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This list was explicitly put together by eight women as a response to Esquire’s ill-received 2015 “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” which contained exactly one book written by a woman.

It’s hard for me to find anything either suffocating or PC about this list. There are lots of standard-issue great books, along with the usual smattering of idiosyncratic choices that might or might not be especially widely read. That’s no surprise: every author or critic worth her salt carries around a mental list of personal favorites that they wish more people had read. The list is heavily populated by women, but not nearly so heavily as the original list was populated by men. The themes of these books are considerably different than the themes of the “Every Man” list, which is hardly surprising. And there are fewer pieces of nonfiction than there are on the men’s list.

Anyway, it’s a list that might not appeal to a lot of men. Them’s the breaks. On the other hand, maybe it provides some good ideas for novels to expand their horizons. You never know til you try.