500 Great Books By Women discussion

Hello all. It might be a tad early to start doing this, but I officially finished my last 2020 reading challenges book a few days ago, and I wanted to get my ideas out while they're still fresh. For 2021, I'm hoping to give readers more options when it comes to exploring great books by women. As such, I'll be bringing back the Bingo in a more flexible form, in addition to adapting certain reading challenge structures were first put forth, but are currently in use in a different form, by a different reading group. These include:

Quest for Women
Century: Read ten works by women, each published in a continually successive decade.
Decade: Read ten works by women, each published in a continually success year.

Old and New
Commit to a list of twelve works by women + two alternates that can substitute for any of the original twelve at any moment if necessary.
Three works from the pre-1900s
Three works from the 1900s
Six works from the pre-2000s
Two alternates (work must fall in the same chronological category as the work it is substituting, so think strategically about which works are likely to not work out for you)

Bingo
In terms of Bingo, I'm thinking of keeping the original categories (perhaps mixed up in location) listed here, but adding in alternate categories for those who want flexibility and/or a challenge. So far, I'm thinking categories for various esteemed lists (1001 BBYD, 1000 Guardian, 100 Classics by Women/POC, Modern Library, etc) and indie publishers (Virago, NYRB Classics, New Directions, Dalkey, etc). It'd be amazing to create a full Bingo set of alternate categories, but that's for future considerations.

Personal Challenges
As wisely suggested by Brina, this would be a challenge that encompassed any set number of works by women that may or may not be organized around a particular theme (ex: published by Women of Color, published at least 50 years ago). Harking back to yesteryear's mainstream Read More Women themes, your goal could even be to read more books by women in comparison to your previous years' statistics! This would ideally give everyone interesting in reading women something to structure around, especially in these tumultuous times of ours.

People are welcome to submit their suggestions for other challenges or for any of the challenges that are defined above.

Example layouts for Quest for Women:

Century
1800s - Zofloya - Charlotte Dacre
1810s - Kelroy - Rebecca Rush
1820s - The Last Man - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1830s - Valentine - Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin
1840s - Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
1850s - Sonnets from the Portuguese - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1860s - East Lynne - Ellen Wood
1870s - Who Would Have Thought It? - María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
1880s - I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 - Marie Bashkirtseff
1890s - Marcella - Mary Augusta Ward

Decade
1929 - Daughter of Earth - Agnes Smedley
1930 - The Shutter of Snow - Emily Holmes Coleman
1931 - Living My Life (V. 1-2) - Emma Goldman
1932 - Year Before Last - Kay Boyle
1933 - High Rising - Angela Thirkell
1934 - Company Parade - Storm Jameson
1935 - The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen
1936 - Maria Zef - Paola Drigo
1937 - The Years - Virginia Woolf
1938 - The Squire - Enid Bagnold

Old & New (with works by women substituted accordingly):

1899 and earlier
1. Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam - Omar Khayyám (11th-12th c.)
2. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan - Lady Sarashina (1050)
3. Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong (V. 1-4) (14th-16th c.)
1900-1999
4. Dumb Luck - Vũ Trọng Phụng (1936)
5. Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector* (1943)
6. River Ki - Sawako Ariyoshi* (1959)
My Wild Card Six
7. Selected Poems - Gabriela Mistral (1941)
8. The Book of Lamentations - Rosario Castellanos (1962)
9. In the Depths - Moo-Sook Hahn (1965)
10. When Rain Clouds Gather - Bessie Head (1969)
11. Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak: Dictated by Himself - Black Hawk (1833)
12. Swami and Friends - R.K. Narayan (1935)

Alternates
A-1. Blood on the Forge - William Attaway (1941)
A-2. Three Generations - Yom Sang-seop (1932)

Aubrey, for those of us who get burnt out by challenges, can we have a basic personal challenge in the group? Eg how many books by women of color read in a year? Or books read at least 50 years old that by definition are considered classics? I did not participate in the group much this year because with the kids at home for a good chunk of the year and libraries closed at the same time, doing anything structured was out of the question. But I love finding new women authors and would love to participate on a basic level.

Brina wrote: "Aubrey, for those of us who get burnt out by challenges, can we have a basic personal challenge in the group? Eg how many books by women of color read in a year? Or books read at least 50 years old..."

That sounds perfect, Brina, especially with the high chance of the chaos of 2020 seeping into 2021. I've gone ahead and incorporated that in the main challenge planning message. Feel free to make any further suggestions.

Thank you , Aubrey. That is perfect. My shining moment was 2017. I think I read 50 WoC. I doubt I’ll duplicate that next year but I’ll just create a thread and track all the women authors I read. Hopefully it can benefit someone.

Glad to hear it, Brina, and that's the spirit regarding your thread! I'll invite people to start making 2021 threads once the challenges are consolidated, but feel free to muse here or on your 2020 board.

Hi Aubrey, that sounds quite exciting! I still haven't finished the 2020 challenge, as I'm bogged down by other reading challenges plus workload and various exams, but I'm already excited to see what the group will be reading in 2021 :) And as it is, I'm proud to report that with the challenge and other reads I'm now at 64% works by women out of everything I've read this year, which is a welcome improvement compared to past years - I'll definitely try to improve on that next year.

If you're still adding other challenges, I'd love to do something with a "reading around the world" angle - perhaps 10 books by women born in a different country each, potentially even limiting it to contiguous countries?

Stendhie wrote: "Hi Aubrey, that sounds quite exciting! I still haven't finished the 2020 challenge, as I'm bogged down by other reading challenges plus workload and various exams, but I'm already excited to see wh..."

Hi Sophie. It sounds like 2020 has your hands full, but I'm glad you could spare a moment to check in on these musings of mine and notify us of your accomplishments :)

In terms of your suggested challenge structure, I'm a big fan of promoting international reading, so I'll be putting that up as a fifth one when I get the chance. I'll probably stick to a defined number of countries of ten or so and make suggestions for making the challenge more complex. Ten contiguous countries, ten countries with at least one from each of the continents (Anarctica is an unknown factor here), ten works of ten different countries with ten different languages of original composition? The possibilities are myriad.

This sounds like great fun, Aubrey. I think I fall in Brina's "burnt out by challenges" category after this year, so I'd also love the general personal challenge category. But your bingo alternate categories sound very exciting, and also the different countries.

Looking forward!

Glad to hear it, Kathleen. I'll be putting together a more formal description of the countries challenge by the end of the day, as well as start tabulating the Bingo alternate categories over the weekend.

I like the Old and New option, although I admit that I also am not inspired to change my selection of books authored by women in order to tick a challenge box. It’s fun to be reminded not to miss whole categories, though — like pre-1900 - and this group’s challenges do that for me.

Thanks for all the effort you put into this group, Aubrey.

Cheers, Carol. I get the finicky balance between trying new things and being pushed around by arbitrary regulations when it comes to books, so I'm hoping giving a variety of challenges will give readers control over how much they extend beyond their comfort zone.

Challenge planning is now open! Check out the possibilities here (https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...) and make a discussion board in this folder to lay everything out!

Thank you, Aubrey! Looks like more fun than I will be able to resist. :-)