Member-only story
Last February, in response to online pushes (for Women’s History Month) to “read more women”, I went looking at my bookshelf (which I had previously thought relatively diverse) and discovered that only a small fraction of the books I owned were by women; I read some that month, and mostly forgot about the issue. This past February, I was reminded of it again — after a year spent mostly reading male authors — and decided to try to make a more serious change. After all, women are half the population, not one twelfth of it — why spend one twelfth of just a handful of years (and probably substantially less in the twenty-five or so other years I have been reading) on female authors? I decided to try to read only women for a year (with some caveats).
This is also, in a sense, a kind of ‘soft-ball’ challenge. One might be tempted to do the same with, say, black authors, or indigenous authors, or asian authors, or trans authors. I might try to do one of these things later. Some of these challenges felt too difficult (literature by indigenous people, from what I understand from media coverage, is extremely thin on the ground), and some seemed too straightforward (I already read a substantial amount of Japanese literature in translation, for instance, so a project to ‘read more asian authors’ seemed beside the point, though a more specific project along those lines might be interesting; some large proportion of my online contacts are trans, though now that I come to think of it, probably less than 40%).
