A Year of Reading Women: Introduction and Thesis

Out of the 280 books I've (perhaps generously) marked as "read" on Goodreads, 48 were written by women. (Seven were written by the same woman! (Ooh, can you guess which seven? I'll buy you a butterbeer if you get it...! hahahahahaZZZZZZZZ)) Thanks to math, I can confidently say that about 17% of the books I've read more-or-less recently have been written by women. Only 17%?? Yikes. 83% of my books were written by men? Last I checked, women were somewhere around 50% of the human population, so something seems off here.

The gender-based double standards, the marketing differences, and the systemic biases especially as they relate to "literary fiction" get discussed in my household with some frequency. And I was a little startled by that 17% number. I'm a sucker for marketing and a fool for buzz, but little did I know both were tricking me into reading only male authors thanks, it seems, to some sort of lunatic, legacy patriarchy that I didn't invent.

So as the father to an 18-month-old daughter and the husband to a crazed, Lean In-brandishing feminist, I've decided to break my chains and attempt a kind of small-scale "affirmative action" (relax, political weirdos) for female authors. For the next year I will read only books written by women to try and make up for what has obviously been many years of disproportionate neglect. This neglect is obviously due to the aforementioned systemic biases -- as I say, marketing exerts a powerful pull over me -- and not the inherent quality of the books or authors themselves. In fact, part of the point of this whole exercise is basically to prove that I will like and dislike in the same measure while reading exclusively women as I do now, reading mostly men.

Along the way, I may (or may not) update this blog with my reviews, and may (or may not) occasionally supplement those reviews with some thoughts/commentary/reactions. Hell, I may (or may not) get suckered into reading something by some hip young white guy before the year is up just because the marketing is too damn strong to resist. I will also undoubtedly stumble and carelessly say things that I will have to apologize to my wife over. We'll see. But, come what may, I'm looking forward to A Year of Reading Women.

(With apologies to my friend Arnie, from whom I've shamelessly stolen this title and concept.)