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 A VOTE FOR: Toni Morrison, Beloved.  A novel based on a life of a real woman – a slave, Margaret Garner. Morrison writes about slavery, sexual abuse, traumatic memories, and the strange existence of slave/woman/mother/daughter/human. Utterly readable (and beautiful), but complicated, and told from a female perspective. And it won a Nobel Prize!  

I haven’t read these, but I’d like to: Isabel Allende, The House of Spirits. (a transgenerational story of Latin American post-colonial political upheavals… My friend says this is her favorite book and that the narrative revolves around the experiences of women). For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange (a play structured as a series of twenty poems performed by women – some themes addressed are love, abandonment, rape, abortion)  

A VOTE AGAINST: Anything by Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. They are the “token women” of the canon – they’ve already got enough people reading them.