I'm guessing they're impatient, flea. It took some investment, but I liked it a lot when I took the time for it. Lisah, good idea. Might as well work with my crime-junkie proclivities, but I'll be keeping track of the other suggestions as well because we're a smallish group.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I'd suggest Margaret Atwood'd Cat's Eye [link] which is a fucking great book. Or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, [link] which is slighter, but a good read.
The Wide Sargasso Sea? Although I don't know if that's feminist so much as postmodern...
The Awakening by Kate Chopin is a classic feminist work, although certainly not cheery. For something different, there's Louisa May Alcott's Work, which is a semi-biographical adult novel that talks about the difficulties women had trying to make a living. Another possibility is Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, which focuses on the choices women have to make.
Another possibility is Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, which focuses on the choices women have to make.
One thing to keep in mind with Gaudy Night is that it is very much a product of its time. I have a hard time reading it because of some of the assumptions that are made.
I think those assumptions are things you can talk about in terms of feminism. The basic questions haven't changed: Do we choose the life of the mind or of the heart? Do marriage and children limit what women can accomplish? Do men have to make the same choices?
I have to second Cat's Eye. It is dead spot-on about girls and how they treat each other, and has some fabulous observation about women and how they are perceived by each other and by society.
It's really all about women and how they treat other women. Oh, and some stuff about art and how men see women. It's a novel I consistently re-read.
I pretty much love all Margaret Atwood's stuff because it makes me all thinky, and Cat's Eye is the one that randomly pops into my head with someting new to think about the most. Should make for excellent discussion.
I haven't read Cat's Eye in years. Maybe it's time to dig it out again.
erikaj - second Margaret Atwood & depending on your group's disposition, add either Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assasin
There is a utopian called Herland, I think - not sure if it's been mentioned?
And Mary Wollstonecraft, George Elliot, and (arguably-not so arguably) Jane Austen, if you're headed in that direction.
Liese - speaking of female cyberpunk characters that don't come from traumatic backgrounds - America Shaftoe (Cryptonomicron, Y.T and Juanita Marquez (both Snowcrash), and Miranda (Diamond Age).