8 badass female protagonists that I love the most

8 badass female protagonists that I love the most

Book Lists, Bookish, write | 25 comments

Not all of us loves to spend all their time reading Harlequin’s Mills and Boons and dreaming about Mr. Right saving our damsels in distress (though that is my guilty pleasure). There is nothing pleases me more than the kickass female protagonists who would not wait for an alpha male to do everything for them.

When one is done with their fair share of books about princesses, schoolgirls swooning over boys, women gossiping about others, and oh, the vampires and werewolves, take a look at my top eight kickass female protagonists from the literary world. They may be sensible or petty, avenging or forgiving, but they are all strong and independent. They knew what they wanted, and they went after that – be it a guy or their land. So here they are.

8) Elizabeth Bennett, Pride and Prejudice

As much as I fell in love with Mr. Darcy, the short-tempered haughty male protagonist, the first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I could not help but look up at Lizzy as one of my role models. She is well read, sensible and speaks her mind even to the mighty Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She cares about her family than her looks and doesn’t live by the norms of the society. She says no to a wedding proposal that could have made her life a lot easier and chooses someone who is worth her. In short, Austen taught me the importance of self-worth and free thought, mind that the book was published in the 18th century.

7) Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany

Apart from making smoking look cool, made being a free spirit and living an independent life sound chic. Though her life goal was to latch on to someone rich, like most of the females of the era, Holly makes a statement that she doesn’t need a man to have a purpose in life. She is a dreamer, a wannabe perfectionist, someone who believes in others’ dreams and helps them come true. She leaves her ex-husband as it did not help her to move forward. Someone that ambitious, that elegant and that larger than life, is a badass.
badass female protagonists

6) Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre

Set in 1847, Jane Eyre could be one of those early feminists. She chooses to be independent and self-sufficient. She falls for Mr. Rochester, but once she learns it might go against her principles, she walks away from it all. She finds jobs to keep herself afloat and never backs once down from her ideals, despite her turmoils. She does find her happy ending but on her own accord. Jane’s own words cannot be any truer for any feminist of today.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

5) Liesel Meminger, The Book Thief

Very young at age, compared to other protagonists here, Liesel could easily be my most favorite. Born in the Nazi Germany, 9-year-old Liesel helps her foster family hide a Jew in their basement, reads to him and nurses him back to life. She has a strong moral code and just does not follow the rules and status quo of the Hitler led country. She even beats up a classmate when he taunts her and always sticks up for her best friend, Rudy. She steals books and food to keep her going and had cheated death twice, all before she turned ten. Her perseverance in learning to read and love towards books made me feel closer to her. Liesel stands true to the fact that age is no bar to be strong and morally just human.

4) Amy Dunne, Gone Girl

Trust Gillian Flynn to create dark and evil characters and make us fall in love with them. Amy Dunne is the coolest of cool girls. She falls for the ideal man and marries him by becoming the ideal woman for him. She is a perfect daughter, wife and is more than what the eye meets. When she realizes her husband has fallen off their game and had an affair with a student, she becomes the femme fatale. She fakes her own death, rape and covers a murder and does it all with flair. She gets, read as manipulates, her man back into her life. I would not call Amy’s character perfect, but that is what I loved about this cold blooded woman.
badass female protagonists

3) Hermoine Granger, Harry Potter

Ask any Potterhead, they would accept that Harry and Ron would be nowhere if it were not for Hermoine. She is fierce, strong and well-read. Oh, she is opinionated and is not afraid to question the authority. She is loyal and steadfast, even when Ron quits Harry’s quest for a while. Even though she is a muggle-born, she turns to be better than even the pure-bloods like Malfoy. Nobody likes a know-it-all, but she has proved her worth more than once that she is not just a sidekick to the beloved Harry Potter, making her a much beloved female protagonist of all times.

2) Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium series)

She has her own moral code and sticks to them. She is the best at what she does and more. She has an eidetic memory, a skillful hacker and a master at concealing identities making her one of the best PIs around. She is at times self-destructive and has had a traumatic childhood making her what she is today. She has a strong opinion about everything, especially about men who abuse women. Lisbeth is absolutely the strongest of the contemporary female protagonists.

1) Scarlett O’Hara, Gone with the wind

Call it a bias, but I love Scarlett. She might be selfish, vain and manipulative, but by far the badass the female lead that we have ever read about. Though essentially a love story (pardon me Scarlett), her life throws light on what a woman can do, if she wills. She loves, or thinks she does, a man and marries three other men, only to realize that the perfect guy out there has lost his hopes on her. She pulls through her family and her beloved land from the remnants of the civil war and promises that she is never going to let her family starve ever again. She understands the real meaning of winning by hook or crook and that winning is all that matters. She believed in rising from the ashes and proves time and again that she can.
badass female protagonists
Did I write about your favorite female protagonist? No? Tell me whom I missed and why they deserve to be on the list. I added someone who doesn’t deserve to be on it? Let me know, let us talk it out, please do not send any hitman to my residence yet.

8 badass female protagonists that I love the most

10 reasons why I hated your book – Part 1

Authors, Bookish talks, discussion, write | 10 comments

I am, like several others here, a reading addict. I read everything I can lay hands on, though the number of books I read has become drastically fewer these days. I push myself to be selective about the books I choose to read, and I almost have a half read book always at my arm’s distance – be it on my mobile or the old-fashioned hard bound. 
 
 I almost never stop a book half way before completing it. I remember struggling to complete Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, when I was in my 3rd grade, though I understood almost nothing about it. To this day I am a little bit skeptical about reading a play. 
 
But of late, I have realized that not all books deserve that endurance and am still teaching myself to let go if I do not enjoy what I read. It is a tough act, but I finally realized that books are like people. We love some, we put up with a few and then there are truly some that we wanna hurl across the hall. Most of us do not talk about those terrible books in our blogs, not as we are nice people but because we value our sanity more.
 
So, as much as I continue to feel guilty about the books I did not finish, I revisited them and tried to understand what makes us commit such blasphemy. I could summarize almost everything that I discussed with my fellow bibliophiles under a single head ‘bad writing.’ Some of my friends decide to stop reading a book if they are not intrigued by the first few pages, while others like me can persevere through them, even if they are poorly written – well mostly.
Bad writing is usually a combination of bland plot, characters without depth, unnatural dialogues or all above and more. Of course deciding what is bad writing is extremely subjective and we may never reach a consensus on that matter. While somehow the reader’s world agree that Twilight and Fifty Shades series are the worst written books, what turns you off, as a reader or a writer?
 
I am writing this series of posts because I feel compelled to and I do owe it to all the great books I love. Here are a few things that would make me love a book a lot lesser.
 

10) Trying too hard to sound clever

 
I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto. – Fifty shades of Grey, E L James
 
How hard is to say ‘red’? Won’t ‘I turned a shade of crimson’ suffice? Where did the communist manifesto even come from?
 
#Discussion: 10 reasons why I could not finish your book - Part 1
We all know the difference between being smart and sounding smart. If your writing made you feel smarter than your audience then there is something amiss. If your writing sounds like writing, rewrite it. 
 
I almost refrained from quoting this line from the same golden 50 Shades of grey, but I wanted to know. 
 

The elevator whisks me with terminal velocity to the twentieth floor. – Fifty shades of Grey, E L James

 
Ain’t terminal velocity something else?
 
9) Sentences that make me cringe:
 
I am not talking about graphic sex or violence imagery. Oh, them I could take. There is cutesy and there is crass, and there is a great distance between them. 
 

My inner goddess is doing a triple axel dismount off the uneven bars, and abruptly my mouth is dry – Fifty shades of Grey, E L James.

 
I can not think of one person who would describe themselves or any part of them as ‘inner goddess’? If that did not put you off, then this line from E L James’ latest book Grey would do the trick.
#Discussion: 10 reasons why I could not finish your book - Part 1
 

Her sharp intake of breath is music to my dick – Grey, E L James

(Ermm.. how does that even work?)
 
8) Slangs:
 
Okaye! We all like being part of the hip crowd and we may use these words, like in our everyday life (see what I did there?). But can we keep them off our beloved novels, if we can help it? This might be a pet peeve and maybe there are others who are okay with your ‘cool lingo,’ but you will have to excuse me. I can understand the usage sparingly in a YA, but too many of them spoil my interest. So please do not LOL, ha ha or heart it. I would hate it, totes! 
 
7) Purple Prose:
 
How does this excerpt settle on you?
 

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind.  – The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum.

 
The trawler plunged into the sea with high tides, didn’t it? Sorry I could not focus beyond that. I get fed up reading too many technicalities that do not matter to me, as a reader. 
 
Do I care what gun he shot them with?
Yes, if it is a whodunnit and if it would matter in finding the evil mastermind.
Result: I skim them if they seem irrelevant.
In fact, this is what made me stop reading Forsyth and Dan Brown after I devoured one or two of their books initially. Telegraph even made a not-so-satirical article on Brown’s notorious purple prose.
 
Keep a look out for the second part of the series on 10 reasons why I could not finish your book. Why not, go ahead share the reasons that would make you shelf a book without reading it?