The Inspiration

The second book I’m officially reading in my Year of Reading Women (YORW, cool?) is a 1000-page behemoth -- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This means I will post my next review sometime right before the YORW comes to an end, so in the meantime I thought I should offer up some of the links and thinks that inspired this project in the first place.  

The big story that got me thinking about the systemic privilege male authors seem to enjoy was the “#Franzenfreude” dustup that took place when Jonathan Franzen published his most recent novel, Freedom. For the record, Franzen (or J.Franz as I call him) is one of my absolute favorite writers, and I naturally devoured and loved Freedom.

And I admit that when I first started reading the various links -- checking out the twitteruckus and the various blarguments -- I was defensive for my main man, J.Franz, who seemed to have become the target of feminist ire for no other reason than that he was an awesome writer who wrote a great book which was also popular. That the pot was being stirred by two very popular female writers who I think of (rightly or wrongly - debate me!) as belonging to the cultural second tier made the whole thing smack of jealousy to me. But once my initial defensiveness passed, it became clear that the point wasn’t Franzen or Freedom, but rather the larger marketing machine(s) and media establishment(s), systematically promoting books by men over similar (equal?) books by women. 

Linda Holmes, the primary author of the Monkey See NPR pop-culture blog is both smart and really good at making larger, more interesting points from a mess of pop culture stupidity. Her post on the subject was ground zero for me.

In this related NPR piece, Jennifer Weiner makes an extremely compelling point:

"It's just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families," Weiner says. "And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America."

That point really resonates with me; I can see that as being a genuine unrecognized bias in myself. (But once recognized it's no longer unrecognized! Victory!) I like books about families, but books about families written by women probably tend feel like chick lit.  In this regard -- as I wrote in the first post on this blog -- I’m a sucker for marketing, and if a book has a pastel color scheme, I’m moving on. Maureen Johnson inspired a cool art experiment that underscores just how important the cover of a book is, and how easy it is to be manipulated.

And lastly, Meg Wolitzer wrote a great piece in the New York Times that says everything I’m trying to say here, only better.

At any rate, my little project obviously isn’t going to make any difference whatsoever in the larger cultural conversation about gender bias in literature, but I do think it’s important for people that care about this kind of issue (men and women alike) to take a step back and examine their biases. To think about some of the things (like the color and design of a book cover) that are seemingly innocent, but also have deeper, more insidious resonances. As Linda Holmes (generally) says, we may not have answers at this point, but the questions are fair...and important to ask.

Review: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.

-- from "Why We Should Read Literature"

This is a phenomenal description of how I felt reading Olive Kitteridge. It was immersive and slow, while being at the same time a page-turner that I never wanted to finish. I would get to the end of a chapter and simply sit and think and feel, reflect and digest. By the end of the book I DID feel like I was in some kind of relationship with Elizabeth Strout and Olive Kitteridge. It's a delicate balance to manage to be both terribly sad and somehow life-affirming at the same time, but this book walks that tightrope flawlessly.

This is a leisurely-paced novel in stories, set in a single Maine town, connected by the intriguing character of Olive Kitteridge, who knows when to take center stage and, crucially, when to step back and let other characters have their moments to shine. All the characters were finely drawn and fully human, but the direct and indirect exploration of Olive is the real draw. And even though it's generally a laid-back read, it's also full of incident and action, both external and internal.

I couldn't imagine a better way to kick off my Year of Reading Women. This was one of the most textured, nuanced, subtle, and beautiful books I've read in ages. And I don't mean those descriptors to be stereotypically "feminine" at all. This may be a "delicate" book on a "small scale," (geographically) but is also a book that encompasses vast amounts of human emotion and moved me much more than a book like Blood Meridian that may be more "sweeping" or "epic" or "muscular" (or whatever stereotypically masculine adjectives you could throw at it).

I truly enjoyed this book from beginning to end and can't recommend it enough. The Year of Reading Women begins with a (lyrical) bang!


[Have a good book- or author-recommendation for The Year of Reading Women? Leave a comment or tweet @MartinIWilson anytime.]

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Already on the shelves...the "To Read" list begins!

Here's the list of books by women that are already sitting on my shelf, previously collected, just waiting to be read this year:

• Once Upon a River - Bonnie Jo Campbell
• Strange Medicine - Louise Erdrich
• The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Borrower - Rebecca Makkai
• The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
• Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall
• Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
• Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith

A good range of reads, and I have a whole bunch more in mind that I'm on the lookout for; good thing this weekend is the Printers Row Lit Fest!

Any and all recommendations are appreciated... Leave a comment or tweet to @MartinIWilson

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.)