Women's Lit: The novels that defined 20th-century woman.

From Stylist Magazine

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. 1899. "Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life." A wife and mother begins asking herself difficult questions in this landmark work of proto-feminism.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. 1929. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” An eloquent extended essay railing against the inevitable strictures of a patriarchal society.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. 1963. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. Semi-autobiographical novel about a young writer who tries, and eventually refuses, to fit in.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Anais Nin. 1966. “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Seven volumes of unconventional wisdom and liberal sexuality from one of the 20^th century’s most inspiring thinkers.

The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker. 1982. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Pulitzer-winning novel dealing in racial and sexual oppression.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson. 1985. “Love has been diluted into paperback form and sole thousands and millions of copies.” Ground-breaking coming-of-age novel exploring religious and sexual repression.

The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf. 1991. “Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.” Academic yet palatable argument that the pressure to conform to an invented ideal of “beauty” is a means of controlling women.

The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler. 1996. “Just say c**t! Everything changes.” Episodic play dealing with rape, incest, pleasure and pain.

Vote for February's Book Choice!!!

Vote above for February's book! 

One Day by David Nicholls 

‘I can imagine you at forty,’ she said, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘I can picture it right now.’ He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Go on then.’

15th July 1988. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year which follows?

One Day is a funny/sad love story spanning twenty years, a book about growing up – how we change, how we stay the same. 

‘One Day is a wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad. It’s also, with its subtly political focus on changing habits and mores, the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up. – John O’Connell, The Times.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

It is 1940, and bombs fall nightly on London. In the thick of the chaos is young American radio reporter Frankie Bard. She huddles close to terrified strangers in underground shelters, and later broadcasts stories about survivors in rubble-strewn streets. But for her listeners, the war is far from home. Listening to Frankie are Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor’s wife. Iris hears the winds stirring and knows that soon the letters she delivers will bear messages of hope or tragedy. Emma is desperate for news of London, where her husband is working – she counts the days until his return. But one night in London the fates of all three women entwine when Frankie finds a letter – a letter she vows to deliver . . .

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. 

is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.

Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. 

Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney

and the WINNER is....

SYDNEY HILL!!!

Well done Sydney, who's read the most books off the BBC book list. She's getting a copy of something a touch less high brown than the books she's obviously been reading! Chick Lit!!!

Book Recommendations Anyone?

If you have a book recommendation then please comment below. If your book is chosen as this month's read then you'll receive the book for free! Please feel free to add as many recommendations as you like. We'll try and get through them all. We support all sorts of genres including non-fiction.

The Big Read!

BBC booklist: Apparently the average Brit has only read 6... how many have you read?!Prize to whomever has read the MOST books! Submit your answer to londongbclub@gmail.com

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -  2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -  5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -  8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy- 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald- 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens – 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - 34 Emma - Jane Austen - 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - 52 Dune - Frank Herbert - 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck- 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov- 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson- 75 Ulysses - James Joyce - 76 The Inferno - Dante - 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - 80 Possession - AS Byatt - 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell  83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur  Conan Doyle - 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams –95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo –

How to make money from books

Turn your bookshelf into an investment

In a week where a first edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice sold for a record £139,250, its clear books can be so much more than a great read. Rare book expert Clive Farahar reveals the secrets to investing in your bookshelf.

Buy the books you love
Book values fluctuate. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings went through the roof after the film came out, with a set selling for as much as £25,000. But that market won’t last. So pleasure, enjoyment and enthusiasm for what you buy is the most important thing.
Start with 18th and 19th century classics
Authors from this period are incredibly reasonable; you can pick up a first edition Jane Austen for around £150. Try 19th century travellers like Livingston, Stanley, Parry and Cook or authors like George Elliot or Charles Dickens they're some of the cheapest books to invest in.
Consider childhood
People will always want classicslike Beatrix Potter, because it reminds them of their childhood. There was a 1902 first edition that I valued it at £25,000. And in American the hippy generation has now grown up, got rich and they’re buying beatnik authors like Jack Keurouac because it was part of their youth.
Condition is key
You want the book to be in as original condition as possible, so look carefully at the cover, the printed labels and the bindings. An original condition book may not be the prettiest on the bookshelf but it is the most rare, and therefore worth the most.
Do your research
Make yourself asknowledgeable about the market as possible. Look through eBay, browse online and talk to your friendly local book seller. If they are a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, they’re obliged to give you the best advice that they can.

Our Top Spots for Discovering Book Bargains

• Southbank Book Market, London: London’s best kept book secret, southbankcentre.co.uk
• The Old Cinema, Hay on Wye: The top spot in this book-filled town, haycinemabookshop.co.uk
• Barter Books, Northumberland: Dubbed 'The British Library of secondhand bookshops', barterbooks.co.uk
• The Book shop in Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway: Scotland’s biggest secondhand bookshop, the-bookshop.com
• The Haunted Bookshop, Cambridge: Specialises in children’s and illustrated books, sarahkeybooks.co.uk

From Stylist.co.uk 

Events for Aspiring Writers

There’s an entire weekend of inspiration at Brighton Dome between 19-21 November. In between talks by Bonnie Greer and Lionel Shriver, newly published authors will be available and Catherine O’Flynn will take questions on how she went from having her manuscript rejected by scores of publishers to winning the Costa First Novel Award. From £8
For more info

A great agent can send a writer into the stratosphere. Meet two of the best at the excellent London Writers’ Club events. On 16 November Francesca Main of Simon & Shuster takes the floor for questions, and on January 25th it’s the turn of Caroline Hardman of the Christopher Little Literary Agency. £10

For more info

On 13 November join Malaysian-born, London based writer Francesca Beard for an innovative creative writing workshop. London Tales is inspired by the Canterbury Tales, and uses Londoners' own stories to create a poetic map of the city. £20
For more info

Need an ideas jump-start? On 3 November the London School of Journalist is running a three-day creative writing crash course. Tutor Andrew Taylor will take you through characterisation, plot, genres and all important business relationships within the industry. £325
For more info



From: Stylist.co.uk