This is not intended to be a list of the best books by women, but rather, my personal favorites. As such you will not find Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, nor even Wuthering Heights. Missing are best sellers I did not like at all--Gone Girl, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Educated. Instead there is Little Women, which ignited my love of reading; To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank, which opened my younger eyes to issues I needed to learn about; compelling mysteries to solve by Agatha Christie and Louise Penny, and books that stirred my imagination, inspired me, or left me in despair, titles such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Handmaid's Tale. Missing are books I have not (embarrassingly) read yet such as Sense and Sensibility or anything by Isabelle Allende.
