“Reading Equal” in 2017
Twas a good reading year. This was the year I gave myself two new reading challenges: first, to “read my age” in books, and second, to “read equal,” meaning to read an equal number of male-authored books and female-authored books (after breaking trans, intersex, and genderqueer authors out separately).
Why “read equal”? Because when I looked at the data, I realized I hadn’t been. From January through April of 2017, I realized I’d read 10 books by men and only 2 by women. In fact, when I looked back at all my previous GoodReads challenges since 2013, I realized that I’d been averaging a reading percentage of 70% male and 30% female every year. And when I looked around at my active peers on GoodReads, I noticed similarly imbalanced percentages, if not worse.
Why “read equal”? To me, it’s simple. Half the world is made up of women, so I should be engaging with at least the same share of those authors’ stories, characters, and careers. That’s just fair. That is how to build a more balanced perspective. If I don’t make a point to do this (I may be my own brand of feminist, but I am one), then I’m not only being lazy and hypocritical, I’m allowing a perniciously sexist (and racist) publishing industry to dictate the conversations that I and my peers are having. It’s a fact — you can’t recommend what you aren’t reading.
Ten years ago, a close male friend declared to me (and a mix of other friends), “There are no great female authors.” I vocally objected, but then sat in my objection as my mind raced to think of names. Even though I’d read some greats already (I was nearly done with college then), no names came to mind. I let that conversation drift away with a “Huh, maybe so,” and tasked myself with having a better answer the next time a claim like that might come around.
Here, I see now, is the frustration that lies at the heart of it: There is no denying that the canon is men, whether it’s coming-of-age in America, Russia, or Britain; whether they’re biographies of success, innovation, or peril; whether we’re reaching back towards ancient Greece, China, or Rome. And if you’re still with me, and you lived through the same 2016 and 2017 I did, there is no want of places to blame for this. How far back do we go? My great temptation (or perhaps where I feel most betrayed) is college — classes like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner or From Gogol to Tolstoy or hell, Shakespeare or The Bible or Existentialism, as owned by Nietzsche and Sartre and Kierkegaard. When I stand back, I see the wholesale inundation of one idea: that men own thought, and religion, and science, and quality.
But blame in my view is counterproductive here, and it will not help us rewrite, or refind, history; we cannot go back in time and resurrect words from the mouths and minds of women who now lay buried. The loss of that is immeasurable. But the women are writing now, and I’d like to witness them. And to do it, I simply have to read.
When I started this “experiment,” a lot of assumptions were made about what would happen to the “quality” of books I’d be reading. “Have they gotten worse? Are they bad?” male friends would ask. It was easy to entertain this bias — the comedy of mock-concern, the audacity of genuine curiosity — and observe it rather than take offense, because I had only just begun, and I had no data to answer the question.
So what happened?
I read 38 books this year. 19 by women, and 19 by men. I chose my reading randomly, which is to say, through word of mouth (aka late-stage Facebook pleas), by filtering for GoodReads ratings of 4.0 or higher, and by remaining aspirationally diverse in genre, publication year, and author or protagonist country / race / sexuality.
Anyhow, I shit you not, in the subjective whirlwind of “quality” as determined by me, my average ratings for female and male authors were essentially the same, at 3.79 and 3.71 respectively.
Here is the most condensed version of the books I read (and my rating of them) this year.
I am a big believer in the idea that “we are what we read” or “we are how we spend our time” or “we are who we spend our time with.” In April, I realized I wasn’t spending time with all the people I needed to. I had a problem to fix, and it was quite honestly one of my year’s greatest pleasures fixing it.
I am not here to make sweeping claims about quality, or describe the wiles of ‘feminine’ writing. I am not here to produce a list of names that topple centuries of going unread, or that justify the exercise of reading equal, as though it need be justified (but I am building one). Some books were good, some books were bad. Some made me feel deeply understood in ways I’d never felt before. While the conveniently tied ratings outcome makes me both skeptical and also very happy (and lends itself to a kitschy conclusion about ‘e-quality’), it might not be like that in the years to come. It might swing one way and then back again. It might not be like that for you.
I am only here to report on what happened — to have an answer to the friend who asks “have they gotten worse.” The answer, this year, for me, is not at all. The real answer is — find out for yourself.
If any of this resonated with you, please join me this year in reading equal. If you need ideas for getting started, check out what I’ve got on deck in the featured picture above, or read through some of the great recs my friends shared to my Facebook post here. And then get on GoodReads. We can compare notes :)
Every year I do a write-up of my most impactful reads. Read it here!
