This past year, I decided to read the work of women authors exclusively. After recognizing a glaring oversight on my part – the unconscious tendency to read mostly male authors – I elected to correct it. The year 2020 marks a century since the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. And though hopes for the first woman president were dashed (again), we at least were able to witness the election of Kamala Harris, who will become the first female vice president of the United States on January 20, 2021. Several institutions, including The Baltimore Museum of Art where I work, dedicated the year to women. I decided to follow suit in terms of my reading, research and writing. The following list outlines the many titles by women authors I read over the course of 2020, by far one of the strangest years I’ve ever experienced.
Fiction
1. Drag Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
2. Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck
3. Happening, Annie Ernaux
4. Push: A Novel, Sapphire
5. The Friend: A Novel, Sigrid Nunez
6. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
7. Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
8. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
9. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
10. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
11. “The Birds,” Daphne du Maurier
12. “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
Nonfiction
13. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
14. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli
15. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, Sonia Purnell
16. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
17. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, Rachel Cusk
18. Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay
19. Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore’s Forgotten Movie Theaters, Amy Davis
20. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter
21. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, Rachel Cusk
22. The Liar’s Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr
23. High Theory / Low Culture, Mikita Brottman
24. The Birds (BFI Film Classics), Camille Paglia
25. Ratcatcher (BFI Film Classics), Annette Kuhn
26. The White Album, Joan Didion
27. We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
28. A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
29. The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Mikita Brottman
30. Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez
31. Intimations, Zadie Smith
32. Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000, Jenny Spinner, ed.
Poetry
33. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2003), Sappho (Translated by Anne Carson)
34. “Eating the Cookies” (2007), Jane Kenyon
35. “A Fold of Sun” (2016), Magdalena Zurawski
36. “When Great Trees Fall” (2015), Maya Angelou
37. “Occupations for Air” (2020), Éireann Lorsung
38. “A tendency to survive after disaster” (2020), Éireann Lorsung
39. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017), Mary Oliver
40. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2005), Gwendolyn Brooks
41. Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), Louise Glück
42. Meadowlands (1997), Louise Glück
43. The Wild Iris (1992), Louise Glück
Articles + Essays
44. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976), Rosalind Krauss
45. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), Linda Nochlin
46. “When Our Lips Speak Together” (1980), Luce Irigaray
47. “Ready-made Originals: The Duchamp Model” (1986), Molly Nesbit
48. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (1991), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
49. “Better for Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination” (2012), Sarah Burns
50. “The Post-Industrial Sublime or Forgetting Love Canal” (2014), Karen Wilson Baptist
51. “The Pandemic Is a Portal” (2020), Arundhati Roy
52. “The 1619 Project” (2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones
53. “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument” (2020), Caroline Randall Williams
54. “Where on Earth are you?” (2016), Frances Stonor Saunders
55. “What Makes a Woman?” (2015), Elinor Burkett
56. “I Want a President” (1992), Zoe Leonard
57. “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), Susan Sontag
58. “Sontag, Bloody Sontag” (1994), Camille Paglia
59. “Virginia Woolf’s Suicide Note” (1941), Virginia Woolf
60. “Nostalgia and La Jetée” (2015), Karla Huebner
61. “Susan Sontag’s Love Letter to Borges” (1996), Susan Sontag
62. “From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?” (1991), Catharine A. MacKinnon
63. “Desperately Seeking Susan” (2005), Terry Castle
64. “Hysteria, Witches, and the Wandering Uterus: A Brief History; or, Why I Teach ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (2017), Terri Kapsalis
65. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1913), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
66. “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” (1911), Emma Goldman
67. “Towards a Material Ecology” (2016), Neri Oxman
68. “Lockdown should be easy for me, so why is it like doing time?” (2020), Ottessa Moshfegh
69. “A Lifetime of Lessons in Mrs. Dalloway” (2020), Jenny Offill
DS Mangus
Artist / Designer / Writer
