Books by men you'd recommend to women?

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Books by men you'd recommend to women?

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1Supprimé
Avr 27, 2013, 2:40 pm

Since lots of us are reading books by men these days, how about an open post of rec's for books by men?

Finally got around to The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Sort of speculative/alternative universe/noir. Very nice genre-bending, and interesting in its way: What if the Ashkenazi had ended up in a temporary refugee area in Sitka, Alaska, instead of Palestine?

As in many noir stories, women play a subordinate role as receivers (rather than instigators) of the action, though the protagonist's ex-wife is also a detective and his boss.

2weener
Modifié : Avr 28, 2013, 6:34 pm

Some of my favorite books by men, especially those books that include well-written female characters:

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
Any Love and Rockets comics by the Hernandez Bros
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

3vwinsloe
Modifié : Avr 29, 2013, 9:05 am

>#2, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao really? The reason that I didn't care for that book was the adolescent protagonist's sexual objectification of women. Why would you recommend it? His sister? She was a minor, not fully developed character from what I remember of the book. I guess that I couldn't disagree more.

I would recommend The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels.

Also, the best book that I read last year was written by a man. Far North: A Novel.

4Sakerfalcon
Modifié : Avr 29, 2013, 11:21 am

The best of my recent reads was The master and Margarita and I'd recommend it to anyone, male or female. It's a wild ride and it takes a while for the different strands to link together, but I really enjoyed this satire set in Soviet-era Moscow. While many of the characters are really just pawns in the Devil's schemes, the titular Margarita has more agency than most; once she makes her appearance in the second half of the novel her journey is a delight to follow.

I'm currently reading The good soldier Svejk, which has no major female characters (being set among Czech soldiers in WWI), but it is an excellent read nonetheless. It's another satire, this time on war and bureaucracy.

>1 nohrt4me2:: The Yiddish Policemen's Union is on my Tbr pile. Glad to see you enjoyed it!

5marietherese
Avr 29, 2013, 9:15 pm

I'd recommend Monstress by Lysley Tenorio. It's a superb collection of short stories featuring many fully-rounded female characters as well as gay male and trans* characters. It's also one of the relatively few contemporary books I've read that feature Filipinos as protagonists. I ranked it among my top ten reads last year.

6LyzzyBee
Avr 30, 2013, 1:40 am

The books of Robertson Davies?

7Soupdragon
Modifié : Avr 30, 2013, 7:08 am

Anything by Dermot Bolger or Colm Toibin. I find it's often Irish writers who are good at writing about women, for some reason.

8krazy4katz
Avr 30, 2013, 10:48 am

I think Wilkie Collins has an unusually sensitive understanding of the problems women faced in his time.

9sweetiegherkin
Avr 30, 2013, 10:49 am

> 2,3 Also was disturbed by The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao but then again I also disliked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo despite how many other women liked it and found the main female character empowered.

I'd recommend Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Love his writing and of the three main characters, two are female. In fact, one of them is the narrator of the book.

Alexander McCall Smith always seems to write from the female perspective; at least all of his books that I've read so far feature a woman as the protagonist.

10weener
Modifié : Avr 30, 2013, 7:32 pm

I really liked The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I think the narrator and Oscar both were supposed to come off as sexist jerks but I love reading about that time period and I did like the characters of Lola and La Inca.

If I read it again I'll give it a more critical eye.

11Supprimé
Avr 30, 2013, 10:32 pm

As a woman interested in literary style, I thought "Oscar Wao" was a revelation of culture and language fusion. I also thought the story of Oscar's mother was quite good. She was pretty awful, and she was a victim of larger forces, to some extent, but she was also a product of her own human flaws and bad choices as well.

12weener
Modifié : Avr 30, 2013, 10:39 pm

Exactly. I can't say I liked her or that she was empowered, but her story was well-written and fascinating.

13Booksloth
Mai 12, 2013, 7:14 am

Anything by Chris Cleave (The Other Hand, Incendiary, Gold). Every woman I know who has read any of these assumed Chris was short for Christine because he writes much better about women than any man has a right to do. I'd also nominate anything by Michel Faber

14Supprimé
Mai 12, 2013, 11:31 am

Anybody notice that young male writers are writing what looks an awful lot like a form of chicklit? Am thinking of Nick Hornby and Teddy Wayne as examples. In these novels, men are the smart but somewhat hapless romantic protagonists, often embroiled in career conundrums, dealing with unsympathetic people, description tends to linger over interior decoration, acquisition of digital accoutrements, food, and what people are wearing.

Just finished Wayne's first novel, Kapitoil, and was enchanted by the character, Karim, whose layers are gradually revealed in his audio journals, which he keeps to improve his English. Also refreshing that the protagonist was an observant Muslim, who tries to live honestly and candidly.

15vwinsloe
Modifié : Mai 12, 2013, 11:54 am

>#14. I am reading One Day and had exactly the same thought.

The Marriage Plot had similar themes, but of course, that book was meant to update/play off Jane Austen so I didn't think much about it at the time.

16Supprimé
Mai 12, 2013, 2:38 pm

#15: Great minds think alike :-)

17SaraHope
Mai 13, 2013, 9:33 am

#14 They call it "Lad Lit." Jonathan Tropper is another who writes that kind of book. Though I tend to be less than completely sympathetic to authors like Jennifer Weiner who complain about the lack of review attention they receive, I do think it makes sense when she says she should get at least the same amount of attention as Lad Lit authors (she doesn't).

18vwinsloe
Modifié : Mai 13, 2013, 2:09 pm

Interesting, SaraHope. So I googled it and came up with a bunch of articles from 2004 saying that Lad Lit wasn't selling and sounding the death knell for the genre. The articles all stated that men only comprise 20% of the readers of adult fiction; a statistic that I found to be astounding. They also postulate that "lad lit" grew out of the popularity of Bridget Jones Diary and the desire to tap into that market. Reasons for its demise seem to be given as a lack of interest by men who don't want to identify with the flawed protagonists in lad lit, and distaste on the part of women who would rather fantasize about more perfect leading men.

Okay, but apart from the "lad lit" inner life of a regular bloke stuff, there do seem to be some themes that are now acceptable in books read by boys and men that weren't present before. As nohrt4me2 mentions at #14 above, food and fashion really jump out at me. Take The Hunger Games, for example, notable enough just for being YA written by a woman, under her own undisguised female name and with a female protagonist, which is widely read by YA readers of both genders. I was fascinated by the detailed descriptions of clothing and food scattered throughout the Hunger Games Trilogy. Is this some beginning of breaking down gender stereotypes? Or is it just, as previously stated, that only 20% of all readers are male anyway?

19Supprimé
Mai 13, 2013, 4:59 pm

Whoa! Am I tardy about recognizing a trend or what?! Lad Lit has been on the scene long enough to have it's own genre name and now is on the way out, almost gone before I'd even caught onto it.

GoodReads.com has over 900 books classified as "lad lit."
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/lad-lit

Sigh. And I used to be such a lit hipster. At least I was right about Nick Hornby. yay me.

20overlycriticalelisa
Mai 14, 2013, 2:26 pm

>19 nohrt4me2:

lol. you and me, both. and i run a bookshop. snort.

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