Between the Covers

And it’s never been easier: There are now more books in circulation than ever before. Millions, to be imprecise—because precision would be impossible with today’s biblio birth rate. This embarrassment of riches creates a quandary for the passionate reader: How do you wrap your mind around all the options?

We have an idea.

Just as the Dewey Decimal System was invented to impose order on books, we’ve created a system of our own to guide and stimulate your reading. It’s hardly the equivalent of the time-honored catalogue. But it can help you in a way that Dewey cannot, because it follows the rhythms of a woman’s life.

Make that a busy, curious woman, and one who likes to read. If you see yourself in this description, please come aboard. As the Book Babes, two book critics who have built a friendship and partnership around our enthusiasm for reading, our goal is to connect the dots between literature and your life.

For us, reading is as familiar and essential a habit as our morning coffee. It’s an interactive sport that we practice every day, when our experience meets the author’s words and transforms them.

Between the Covers is interactive, too. It revolves around lists—fifty-five in all, each including ten books that relate to the same theme, each approaching the theme in a different way. We start with some favorite women we’ve found through books. No saints here: Instead, they’re individuals—from fiction and reality—who have gained dimension on the page. Their wit, intelligence, perseverance, and elegance remind us of qualities we want to foster in ourselves.

Then we get personal, dealing with how you feel about your looks and weight, your spiritual and artistic growth. Then come family matters, love life, attitudes about home and work. As the circle widens, we expand to your concern for the world at large. Finally, it’s time to put up your feet and relax: Be an armchair traveler, a crime solver, a member of royalty.

In order to cover this range and reflect how women really read, our picks come from every corner. About a third are fiction (with a little poetry for good measure). A third are general nonfiction. The rest? Memoirs. This high proportion is no surprise: So many good memoirs have been published in the past fifteen years. And because this is a book about women and what we care about, personal stories take pride of place.

In our focus on women’s lives today, we give priority to living authors and more recently published books. Not that we’re against the classics, and a couple are tucked in where you might not expect them. But as much as we admire Middlemarch and Anna Karenina, our aim here is to showcase the tremendous variety and superb writing that’s being created now.

Within this contemporary frame, we cast wide, reflecting the eclectic tastes of the truly passionate reader. You’ll find literary fiction and chick lit. Mystery and self-help. Obscure books and best sellers.

If some of your favorites are missing, rest assured, some of ours are, too. This book isn’t intended to circumscribe your reading, but to open it up and spur a wider search. Like a box of assorted chocolates, this selection gives you many ways to indulge.

While writing this book, we discovered what kinship books have. They echo or amplify each other, or take an opposing view. It’s seven degrees of separation, literary-style. After reading Anchee Min’s novel Empress Orchid, about the last empress of China, we picked up Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night, and it was as if the two books were talking to each other, and we were listening in. Describing his library in the French countryside, Manguel compared it to “the strange Chinese villa that in 1888 the capricious Empress Cixi caused to be built in the shape of a ship. . . .” A picture of her strange, land-bound ark cemented the image of the wily queen that Min already had placed in our minds. Discovering her for a second time, she was locked there forever, like John Keats’s lovers on that Grecian urn.

More connections: In her novel The Collection, Gioia Diliberto imagines a young seamstress working in Coco Chanel’s Paris atelier. In My Mother’s Wedding Dress, Justine Picardie gives us an actual tour of the same workspace.

In Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters, Anne Kreamer begins with a photograph from a trip that changed her life and her attitudes toward aging. One of the women in the photo is Akiko Busch, author of Nine Ways to Cross a River—another book that ruminates on the passage of time.

In The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, Desmond Morris describes how women whitened their cheeks and blackened their teeth in ancient Japan, a beauty ritual that’s described in Liza Dalby’s novel, The Tale of Murasaki—itself inspired by the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji.

In making the choices for this book, one goal was to include as many of our unsung heroes as we could. Another was to come at well-known authors in fresh ways. Much as we love Ann Patchett’s novels, she’s represented here by her memoir Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, about her strange but loving relationship with a fellow poet and writer. (A novel by her mom, Jeanne Ray, did make our cut.) Mary Gordon’s memoir Circling My Mother was picked over her better-known Shadow Man, a book about her father. Sara Gruen is featured not for her best-selling Water for Elephants but for Riding Lessons, another novel that similarly shows her devotion to animals.

In order to include as many favorites as we could, we mention only a few authors more than once. But please don’t try this at home: If you like the book we recommend, that’s the perfect reason to read more of what that author has written. Seek out the writers who teach or provoke or comfort you, and ask yourself why they do. Your answer matters, because what you read signals what you want to know and care about.

Between the Covers grows out of a long-distance collaboration that began after we met, appropriately enough, at a book convention during the 1990s. Both of us were book editors for newspapers—Margo in St. Petersburg, Florida, Ellen in Portland, Oregon. We kept in touch by phone and then the Internet, which led us to blogging before most people (including us!) had heard the term. Our back-and-forth discussions evolved into columns and recommendation lists that have appeared on various websites and in newspapers around the country.

What makes our collaboration work is not that our tastes in reading are the same, but that they complement each other. So, too, our lives: Ellen, a native Oregonian, has been married for more than thirty years and has two sons. Margo has been divorced and is remarried. A Wisconsin native, she has lived and worked in various cities in Europe and along the East Coast.

As with books, our political and religious views aren’t the same, but we love to discuss them. Our differences contribute to a stimulating dialogue that’s fueled by—yes, you guessed it—our love for reading. Book lovers are an informed, dissenting lot, so you may take issue with some of our choices. We welcome a different opinion. If there’s ever peace on Earth, we think it will start when guns are replaced with books, when the thirst for knowledge will outpace the quest for power.

The cue for our reading habits and this book can be found in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who observed, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”

No, the Babes can’t guarantee that reading makes you a better person. But it can make you a deeper one: a smarter, more interesting, more imaginative woman who carries that knowledge and understanding into the world.

So, welcome to our divine library. We look forward to introducing you to some old friends and some new ones. Some may merely interest you. Others may change your life.