Who is Your Favorite Literary Heroine?: Iowa Patch Book Club

In Eastern Iowa we are lucky to have great literary towns, great book lovers and great writers. So it made perfect sense to me team up with my fellow editors in Cedar Falls and Marion to start a book club where we can discuss books of various types, share what we're reading, and nominate new books to read based on a theme or genre.

Why?

Because reading makes life better, and more people need to do more of it. Plus there's always more wonderful books to learn about.

I want to keep the rules fairly simple, so we can get on to the discussion. One thing this book club will not be is a group where we all read the same book, at least not at first. I am not Oprah, and do not have the cultural cache to make you read Absalom, Absalom! or Anna Karenina (although both are great books) against your will. What I want to know is what you're reading, so join in by adding your thoughts in the comments section under this story.

What am I reading?

One Book, for Fun: The Black Company, a sort of gritty fantasy classic told from the perspective of a doctor/historian serving with mercenaries. About 1/3 of the way through with that.

The Other Book, for the Challenge: The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos, one of the better Modernist writers you may never have heard of. I'm at the beginning of book three.

This Week's Club Recommendations: 

In honor of the Hunger Games movie out this week, I would like to ask what book or books you can recommend for others to read that have a strong or otherwise prominent female as a main character? Give us your suggestions in the Comments Section and we'll compile a list that we can share with everyone next week.

This Week's Recommendations from Comments

Margaret George's The Memoirs of Cleopatra

Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra,

Joan Didion's, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction

Tamora Pierce's The Song of the Lioness quartet

Diane Duane's Young Wizard series

Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles

Garth Nix, Sabriel

Gail Caron Levine, Ella Enchanted

Steve Sherman's Moxie

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Matilda

The Secret Garden

Garlic and Sapphires

Little Women

Barbara Kingslover

Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon

Rosamunde Pilcher's Shell Seekers

Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Anne of Green Gables

To Kill a Mockingbird