Women Unbound Reading Challenge

Just in case anyone has been hiding under a rock lately, go on over to Women Unbound and check out the most excellent challenge created by a group of book bloggers. I first heard about this challenge through Eva of A Striped Armchair fame, and I am really looking forward to the reading for this one.

I'm going full force and joining at the Suffragette level, which means I will read 8 books, at least 3 of which will be nonfiction. My list is tentative and will probably change many times:

Nonfiction:

• An Alphabetical Life- Publisher's sales representative Wendy Werris chronicles her thirty-five years in the bookselling business, her experiences as a woman in the industry, her father's struggles as a television writer, her rape, and her mother's death.
  
• Persepolis- This autobiography tells the story of Satrapi's early life as a girl in late 1970s and early 1980s Iran.
• Another Day in the frontal lobe- The author describes life as a neurosurgeon, and discusses her stresses, the simplicities and complexities of her job, brain surgery itself, interaction with patients, and liability, as well as remarkable cases, childhood influences on her career choice, and the future of neuroscience.
• My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The life of Emily Dickinson- A biography of nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson, drawing from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson's own letters to answer questions about her development as a poet and her private life.
• Reading Lolita in Tehran- The author presents a memoir of her life in post-revolutionary Iran, focusing on her organization of a group of young women in 1997 who met secretly once a week to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature.

Fiction:

• The Creation of Eve- The largely unknown story of female Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola.
• Sugar- Pearl Taylor, a church-going wife and mother in 1950s Bigelow, Arkansas, and her new neighbor Sugar, a young prostitute, form an unlikely friendship that changes their lives and the lives of everyone in their small community.
• Jane Eyre- Jane, a plain and penniless orphan in nineteenth-century England, accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall and soon finds herself in love with her melancholy employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a man with a terrible secret.