Male authors vs. Female authors

I think another part of the problem is the women authors who do get notice tend to write the stereotypical woman's book. Domesticity, family problems, etc. Again, the Oprah phenomenon. Women who write the types of books I'm interested in tend to do so in obscurity. AL Kennedy, Kathryn Davis, Kathy Acker, etc.

And I can argue both sides of the Oprah debate. But when it comes down to it, it is a very good thing that she got so many people to buy books. Period.

Jessa, you need some Patricia Highsmith in your life. Or even some Muriel Spark. No lovey-dovey allowed in their books.

I'm a big fan, so i don't think you can go too far wrong with any of her books. A Far Cry From Kensington is great too. You can usually find her stuff cheap used, so I would just pick something that looked good to you. How's that for a recommendation: Just buy one! :)

The question of how sexist is your writing seems rather facile, as I know it's meant to be, but the whole debate makes certain presuppositions that I don't agree with, among which are:

1) The gender of the person writing is naturally biased.
2) The gender of the writer can somehow influence his or her reader.
3) This influence is somehow not positive, if the gender of the writer is not the reader's gender. Particularly if the latter is a woman. (Poor, defenseless, helpless women.)

I think a lot depends on what you are looking for in a book. I am looking for good story. Stylistics can go by the wayside, reflecting "modern" life ditto that, and so can "my life is just like this person's." I think personally I hew towards stories with lots of plot, decent character development -- and shy away from interior monologues disguised as plot, or stories which have what I consider overused, expected, or cliched "twists and turns."

This means, more often than not, that I pick genre fiction. Genre fiction of the type I prefer is speculative, science-fictiony (minus most spaceship operas), fantasy (minus swords and dragons), horror, and crime (minus straight procedurals or one in a vast series). This means I am usually reading male authors.

Many women who write stories that are published today (the "which are published" being a crucial element -- I bet there's a lot of great unpublished fiction by women who don't fit into the pigeonholes) are telling stories I find repetitive and boring and circled around tired resolutions. Everyone has been molested, abused, run away, is in an unhappy marriage, just got out of an unhappy marriage in which they were abused or cheated on, their parents died, they have some form of female cancer or a friend who does who is soldiering through it all, and that's the extent of the story. And these are the things which not only substitute for character development; they also sub in for a story. If it's not one of those, it's about being a highly-sexed cosmopolitan "gal" who somehow can't find love -- the modern Harlequin novel.

Sometimes, those books are valid and interesting. But when what feels like all of them are telling those same stories over and over, it's no wonder readers shy away from stories written by many women. I'd prefer to read a story with a female character who isn't obsessed with getting married, or her bad marriage, or her horrible childhood for once. I think one reason I like David Mamet's stories (agreed, for the stage and film primarily) is that he seems to write them as if there's only one gender. Mamet's men go and have their adventure and tell their story and women are peripheral, at best, a great deal of the time. I'd like to read a female Mamet (I'd like to figure out how to write like one), so we can get to the story, right up front.

Anyway, all of this nonsense about gender and writing: For years no one knew James Tiptree was a woman. Okay, her work was of the sci-fi genre, but I wouldn't have known if someone hadn't told me. It just would never have occurred to me to look at the author before reading, to determine some kind of so-called bias.

(And I second Patricia Highsmith!)

Bridget's comment above ("I make it a point to read female authors in part BECAUSE I think their voices are suppressed") seems to be a pretty common attitude in academic circles, and is one of the reasons I stopped taking Women in Literature type classes in university. I'm not interested in turning my reading habits into the equivelant of pity sex. If I find your book interesting, I will read it, end of story. I do read more male authors than women, but that's not a conscious decision. Perhaps it's balanced by the fact that when I do read female authors, I tend to read more of a particular authors work. I've only read one book by DeLillo, Nabokov, Faulkner, etc, but I've read something like seven by A.S. Byatt, five by Carol Shields, and so on.

Re: Kathy Acker
I despise her writing like no author before or since. Empire of the Senseless tis the only book I've ever read that I actually regret reading.

My list of female authors isn't really huge, but I don't think it's really slim, either:

A.S. Byatt, Carol Shields, Sheila Heti, Diane Schoemperlen (sp?), Helen Hanff (sp?), Margaret Laurence, Amanda Davis, Helen Fielding, Virginia Woolf, Lydia Davis, Lisa Moore... and I think Pat Barker, but I never actually checked on Pat's gender, so I may be wrong.

I have little patience for Oprah-type books because frankly, I want to bitch-slap most of these women. Same problem for much of chick lit--stop whining, start doing! In terms of "guy novels" I also have a low tolerance for the kind of bloated White Boy stuff Jessa describes; I want good writing, not an overdose of ego. If there's both, the writing had better be exceptional.

Having said that, authors I'd recommend who are women? Besides the aforementioned crime fiction types, there's Angela Carter, Jules Hardy (ALTERED LAND is a women's novel, but the writing is flat-out gorgeous), Elizabeth Smart, Louise Welsh, and other crime novelists like Denise Mina, Val McDermid's work of the last five years or so, and Carol Anne Davis. Oddly, the last 3 names (Welsh too) are Scottish. What's up with that??

I kid, I kid!

So, a year after graduation, I read Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, and in a letter to the prof wrote excitedly, "Hey! I found a woman who writes creative nonfiction who I really like!" (For anyone who's thinking that that represents a particularly sad state of affairs, you can read my defense of Vowell here: Sarah Vowell, anyone?)

I'm not a voracious reader by any means, but the only contemporary novels I can remember reading by women in the last ten years are the two Zadie Smiths, Proulx's The Shipping News, Byatt's Possession, and Minot's Monkeys. And that does sorta bother me (although to be fair, I think The Shipping News and White Teeth are both fantastic). But as I said on the Underworld thread on ILE (Underworld par Delillo), the novels I'm most attracted to incorporate social history and/or cultural criticism, and I just don't find that many women doing stuff like that.

All that stuff aside, I'm sure my collection/tastes would be considered sexist- but I'll put Zadie Smith (White teeth, at least- haven't read Autograph man) and Joyce Carol Oates, and yes, even Jane Austen, up against just about anyone. But those choices feel so obvious as to reveal the shocking core of sexist leaning from which they likely came. Damn.

Joan Didion to thread!

The Outsiders! Heck, i didn't know S.E. Hinton was a woman until i was an adult myself. But really, good books should appeal to anybody no matter who they are written by. There are a zillion examples of books where if you took the name off of them you wouldn't have a clue as to the gender of the author.

do it! slouching towards bethlehem and the white album are near perfect pieces of work - male or female, fiction or nonfiction, this or that.

at the moment, i'm reading through modern library's top 100 novels of the last century, so there's a bias there. as far as my preferences go, i suppose i generally read more men then women for fiction. it's not something i consciously do, just something i've done.

however, as far as poetry goes, i like both. i read a wonderful variety of poets.

this would be news to the many thousands of working women writers around the world.

It's two different papers. The Observer is a Sunday only publication.

this would be news to the many thousands of working women writers around the world."

What, to find out that they aren't like most women? What I meant was, perhaps the pool is smaller. But it's just a hypothesis; more likely, I'm more interested in men because I'm not one.

But I'd like to slightly stick up for Chick Lit here. Good British and Irish Chick Lit, it seems to me, inherits the precious light-comic tradition of Wodehouse. The characters are female Bertie Woosters, are they not? Tossing off one-liners, acting like self-confessed twits. My guess is that female readers of literary fiction feel that these protagonists are letting the side down, which is why they want to give them a "bitch-slap", as someone put it. As a male, I'm quite impressed by the lack of macho in these books, and the readiness to admit to failings.

Actually, I have to admit that I've read only two of these authors: Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes, but I found them engaging enough, in need of more editing though they were. They may not write as carefully as literary writers, but they don't lack literary skill either, particularly for one- and two-liners:

"The other thing which is keeping me sane is an invaluable tip which I would recommend to all brides-to-be. It is to keep a small bottle of vodka in your bag, and take a sip whenever anyone mentions the wedding." (Kinsella)

"What's being married like, anyway?"
"Kind of the same. Except we have more plates."(Kinsella)

"I read about him in "People" magazine. It said he has the sharpest mind in the legal world. It said he can find a loophole in a piece of concrete."(Kinsella)

"Disagreeing with my father was something I did as instinctively as refusing to sleep with moustachioed men." (Keyes)

"I sat down and rooted through my bag, looking for my valium. I tipped three into my hand, then thought better of it and added another two." (Keyes.)

"Women are divided into shoe-women, bath-products women, or nice-underwear women. I'm definitely a shoe woman. Or an Imelda, as we like to call ourselves." (Keyes.)

R the V. (Male.)

As for my own reading habits, I actually keep a list of all the books I read, with accompanying marks for whether the book was by/about a woman. (Anal retentive, yes, but suggested by a Women's Literature teacher, and a good way to keep track of your reading sexism.) Without looking at my list, though, I would say there's a definite bias towards male writers on it, but I do read a lot of literature by and about women.

I will not go out of my way to read a Chick Lit book or go out of my way to avoid them now. Mood often plays a part in selecting between male or female though.

I guess this is where I'm going to define two different senses of the word "writing." There's "writing 1": the act of moving a pen or operating a keyboard, writing down whatever's on your mind, which almost every literate person does and, unfortunately, some get paid for (it has a lot of therapeutic benefit for the writer apparently but doesn't do much for me as a reader unless the person's life is interesting and well-reflected-on. Then there's "writing 1.5," which oodles of people get paid for; it lives obviously between pen-pushing and the Beast, "writing 2": the act of making a geometric leap of effort in trying to make one's ciphers entertaining and, hopefully, intellectually stimulating. Two usually comes at the expense of the majority of the pleasure one takes in the act of writing and tends to cause more anxiety in the pen-mover than it cures. Nobody who's content with real life -- or right in the head -- is going to bother with such a task. Note that whether or how much you get paid for writing does not depend upon the sense of the verb that applies to your production. I happen to vastly prefer writing 2. My question to myself is: so then are more women Writers 1, and why would that be; or, do I have other reasons for generally preferring the books by men that I pull off the shelves?

Maybe I prefer writers who disdain taking sides in the tired old gender war; maybe the androgynous-writing women are harder to find for some reason.

[X-post: my cousin's an aspiring romance novelist and I love her work; it's weird, though, and I worry she'll never get published and will give up.]

I've been avoiding "modern" fiction for years now, and instead have been reaching into the past and enjoying Edna Ferber, Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and many others.

I'd be willing to bet that the great majority of these young men and boys would choose a male author over a female one -- and I would further wager that few of these would be making this choice due to an overdose of Oprah books. Why IS that? And what are the consequences of this phenomenon?

If there are things we do without thinking, I think that is worth thinking about.

Or maybe they were just forced to read Ethan Frome for school and haven't forgiven the female gender yet.

*Ahem*

Anyway, I'd say most boys look for books with some action in them, not books about feelings. They don't grow out of that until they're older, unless they have a halfway decent teacher who can show them why there is something of worth in, say, Jane Smiley.

A.L. Kennedy - "Indelible Acts"
Kelly Link - "Stranger Things Happen"
Maggie O'Farrell - "After You'd Gone"
Charmaine Craig - "The Good Men"
Katharine Weber - "The Little Women"

and for your Glaswegian leanings: Denise Mina's mysteries.

I don't think I'm a particularly sexist reader. No doubt I read more books authored by men than by women, but I don't think that's avoidable when there are so many more books authored by men than by women, especially in certain historical fields that I'm interested in. I don't prefer the 'feminine voice' in writing to the 'masculine': Virginia Woolf can often leave me cold, I've given up on Dorothy Richardson's 'Pilgrimage' more times than I can count, the Boke of Margeary Kempe makes me scream in irritation (although, to be fair, not as much as the 'Pilgrim's Progress'). I like rhetoric, and strictly structured sentences, and Jack Higgins' WWII fantasies. But I don't forgive male writers who can't write convincing female characters, or who are relentlessly didactic and two-tone.

Still, there's certain female authors among my favourite authors who I think of as specifically writing 'female literature'. Not in the sense of chicklit, which I find obnoxiously whimsical and alienating, with no connection whatsoever to my life or anything I care about. It's more that, say, Ursula LeGuin invents and fleshes out worlds in which gender is not a constant, which I can't imagine a male author having the idea to do. Her protagonists tend to be male, and are convincingly written as such, but I still think of her as more a writer of 'female literature' than, say, Hilary Mantel. Or Banana Yoshimoto presenting stories with this light, sweet-bitter, gentle tone, strangely deceiving: they strike me as 'feminine' in a very specific way, and a far more appealing one than you'd get with any heavy(-handed) Maeve Binchy-style phonebook about Understanding and Sympathy and Family and Love.

Read her book, dammit. The suppression of women's writing has a long history, and it's no wonder it keeps repeating itself when nobody seems interested in learning how the mechanisms behind it operate.

You think there are more male writers than female writers out there? That positive discrimination is the equivalent of pity sex? (As opposed to literary onanism, to continue the metaphor?) So what? Just read more books written by women anyways! You'll be surprised how many there actually are, how diverse the literature is, and once you read enough of it, you'll actually start getting the intertextual content that eluded you back when you only sampled it once in a while and found it boring because of your own lack of reference points.

Shloi mopush gustu arboretum, li dup ne, voi Glotolog!

Break the vicious cycle!

What interests me more is whether women have an intrinsically different way of writing than men. This site, for example, tries to find out:

If you paste a sample of your writing in the box it reckons to guess with about eighty percent accuracy whether you are male or female. It's a crude instrument though, and easy to fool.

*

Another aspect of this isssue is that a masculine woman might write in a more "male" way that a "feminine" man, with all shades of difference in between. Patricia Highsmith, for example, writes, to my way of reading, like a male a lot of the time; whereas Hugh Walpole reads like a female writer.

That's all generalisation, and you might regard it as pernicious generalisation. But, though I happily read both male and female authors, I do notice some differences. In particular female writers have a greater tendency, in my opinion, to describe imagined scenarios. Women writers often describe possibilities with the clarity of reality. Virginia Woolf took that to an extreme, but on the whole I find it a good thing, for example in the stories of Kelly Link, A.M. Homes, and A.L.Kennedy. I think women writers comb through their characters' thoughts, reactions, and intentions more acutely than male writers - but there are many exceptions, of course.

To me it smacks of affirmative action, someting that I don't approve of. My argument against such practices, reposted from another board, goes something like this:

I'm not actually in favour of affirmative action, since I think it not only implies that minorites cannot succeed without assitance (ie. are not capable of doing so), but that it actually perpetuates hostility against minorities.

Likewise I do not believe its possible to achieve social equality (as opposed to legal equality) by increased segregation, which is exactly what affirmative action does. Depending on how you look at it, affirmative action either "elevates" a minority group to equal footing with the majority, or it patronizes them by reinforcing the idea that minorities are inherently incapable of independent success.

R t V, beware essentialist speciousness. There is no such thing as intrinsic writing. Words are arbitrary symbols. Cherchez l'arbitre.

The most "masculine" writer, apparently, is Ann, followed closely by yours truly (in an entry from another thread). Other high-male scorers are Tom Lang and anthony kyle monday, followed by Bridget Ahrens in the somewhat-but-not-quite-truly-ambiguous category.

"Most feminine" writing honors go to Sarah Weinman, then Dearbhla Sheridan, then Ide Cyan, August, and Proserpina.

Teetering precariously on the edge, paragraph-by-paragraph, are R t V, cis, Jessa, and scott seward.

What does all this say? Very little, really. One could, draw some inferences, I would guess, in terms of reading habits. the word list used to generate these results is interesting, and not entirely intuitive, suggesting that a word-counter was used for a number of male/female text, with specific "indicators" singled out as being the most reliabel indicators, these then being fed back into the engine as extra samples are offered up to the engine. What this means to me is that people who read "male" fiction more often, and have taken up more of the style/mannerism, are likely to score high on this engine; the same should be true on the other side. Unless we want to assume some intrinsinc gendered "personality" that also comes into play: and hey, why not?

M.

Did you feel it? Did you feel it happening?

M.

I checked my list of reads from last year and, yup, found fewer women than men. Aside from the above, I really enjoyed Andrea Barret's Servants of the Map, and I was amazed by A.S. Byatt's "The Conjugial Angel" (from Angels & Insects).

Poetry: I love Sharon Olds (I hardly read any poetry but hers amazes me). Recently caught a reading by Mary Oliver that opened her work up for me. Nancy Willard is a really fun poet.

Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping is one of my all-time faves.

I couldn't go to a quota system but, I admit it, a factor for me in choosing books is reputation/buzz--if there's a bias in buzz/hype/opinion, that affects me. Reviews, comments on sites like this and Amazon, opinions of friends/co-workers--if there's bias there (and I suspect there is), how can we solve that problem?

Hypothesis: the authors you habitually read magnify the traits -- whether they have anything to do with gender -- that led you to prefer them in the first place.

Boy, does that sound fatalistic or what?

So essentially it separates the creative writing grad students from the journalists.

As for picking up mannerisms- I agree with Ann's hypothesis in part; I think its kind of natural to absorb aspects of mannerism and style of someone you read continually and are drawn to. Not necessarily copying, but just picking up little things. You read 50,000 words written by someone else, something has to rub off, especially if you like the writing.

Perhaps you could explain to me how you came to the conclusion that I approve of the literary canon (which is a misleading term, because the so-called canon varies quite a bit from one English-speaking nation to another, or at least that's been my experience), or that I use this so-called canon as my touchstone, because I don't recall making either statement.

Let's talk about representation, since I'm sure we're all up on the current trend of, as Graham Good would describe it, focusing on aesthetic egalitarianism (and with it issues of representation), since we are unable to achieve social egalitarianism through our post-humanist philosophies.

By saying that I should read a book written by a woman because she a woman is like saying that literary merit (which I would argue is extremely subjective; I think Daphne Marlatt, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Sheila Heti, A.S. Byatt, and Carol Shields are excellent, while I think Margaret Atwood, Cathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, pretty much all the Romantic poets, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Urqhart (sp?) are trash) is not the most important criterion for forming my reading habits, and it also assumes that I would not consider writing by female authors as having literary merit.

It also implies that you don't necessarily consider the work of female authors as having the same literary merit as male authors (which I don't think was what you wanted to imply, but frankly meaning resides in the mind of the reader, not the writer), but that you want them to succeed. I don't think that, and I don't think you think that, but what you think, and what you say and do (and how you say and do it) are not necessarily the same things.

So running with the above thesis, in your statement we find a group of writers (I used the word "minority" above because the quotation was plucked directly from a discussion on affirmative action in the US, not because I believe women are actually a minority; they aren't, and most of the remainder of the quotation can be applied to any group) of dubious literary merit who most likely are incapable of succeeding on their merits as writers. That means you want my reading habits to be about assiting a group of writers that can't make it without some sort of special, non-literary assitance. Or pity. I don't do pity sex, and I don't do pity reading.

It's like trying to create a separate, independent female tradition (which is a project a number of feminist scholars I know personally have been involved in). You can't do it. Why? Because there is, as Robomonkey said, an 800 pound gorilla in the room, and that's the other tradition, which you said was sexist (it is, and it should include more female writers of quality, because there are many female writers who have produced quality work (a lot more), and I won't argue that point; but quality should be the criterion, not a vagina). You cannot create thing X specifically to not be thing Y, without it instantly being defined in terms of (and judged against) think Y.

So you cannot say "read more women because they are women" without also saying "women can't make it without being part of a special agenda", which is a statement I want to reject, because I don't think it's true. But in order to reject the second statement, I must also reject the first.

You may also not have noticed that I put the word "elevate" in quotation marks. That was meant to imply irony, but as I mentioned before, meaning is in the mind of the reader, and irony may not have been in your mind at the time.

why do you think that isn't true? what if i said "blacks can't make it without a special agenda"? would you say that isn't true? what if the "special agenda" was desegregation?

But ideological segregation (one group deliberately separating themselves from all other groups) is not the answer. It's a step backwards. It's like holding a sign on your chest that flashes, alternately, "Love me" and "You're right, I'm not as good as you", which I think is stupid, and as for the second statement, patently untrue. I don't believe there is such a thing as positive discrimination, and don't believe you can achieve true equality after centuries of inequality by creating another, deliberate inequality (a leg up, as it were).

are you talking about the exalted canon of white male literature?? the group of books with "literary merit" that has a suspiciously overwhelming proportion of white males?

on't believe you can achieve true equality after centuries of inequality by creating another, deliberate inequality (a leg up, as it were).

well am i enforcing inequality if i try to read equal numbers of books by men and women? because i'm ignoring the "literary merit" in favor of a quota??

i dunno the answer to that, but you tell me, is "merit" the real reason you read books? i don't, because i don't know if they're any good or not before i read them. i read books TO FIND OUT if they're any good or not, or because someone suggested i read one, or because i like the cover of the book or the blurb on the back. so shouldn't i at least make an effort to read roughly equal numbers of books by men and women? considering i don't know how good the books are before i read them then i can't be discriminating in favor or against "literary merit", right?

so that's why i tend to ignore lists of "literary merit" that don't have roughly equal numbers of men and women, because in the absence of really convincing evidence of "literary merit" (like my ex post facto opinion) then i'm gonna play the safe side.

If "maleness" in fictional structuring is going to be associated with "hardness", or "priapism", the latter is particularly useful, ie its gender-specificity automatically "discredits" author X, or at least indicates how very, very "limited by his gender prerogatives", male author X is (cf. "hysteric", somewhere else on the same continuum).

Would I be wrong to wonder if their looks had anything to do with the favour in which they are held? If so, how strange that looks have become more important to literary than genre writers, given that the former are assumed to produce the less commercial product. My guess is that a bad-looking middle-aged writer would stand less chance of being accepted as a first-time literary writer than as a commercial one.

Write a decent thriller and no one cares what you look like; write literary stuff and expect to have huge fetishistic pictures of you published in glossy magazines, as recently happened to Donna Tartt, Nell Freudenberger, and A.M.Homes.

I think my reading is sexist by default. Like Randee, I read mostly genre fiction (actually many of the genres she reads). My favorite is SciFi, especially hard SciFi, which is predominantly male.

And the group in question separating themselves, if you actually read my post, is the group that suggest that women writers (or any group of writers) should be read for any reason other than that they are good writers.

My post above also, if you actually read it, is very critical of the so-called canon, and in fact questions the entire notion of a received canon.

"well am i enforcing inequality if i try to read equal numbers of books by men and women? "

It depends. Not if you truly feel the books you are reading to be good books. *But*, if you read, say, a Daphne Marlatt novel and find that you hate it (I like her work, but this is an example), and then you pick up a Julian Barnes novel and love it, but deliberately read more Daphne Marlatt simply because she's a woman, than yes, you are enforcing inequality (although "enforcing" is a stupid term, because you don't have that much power). For one thing, it's patronizing.

Now that's actually a pretty extreme example, using two authors whose work I happen to enjoy, but I'm sure, provided you read this post more carefully than you seem to have read my others, that you will at least grasp my opinion.

And if you're really interested in how I select what books I read, I do so in several ways:

1) I wander through book stores and pick up random books, read the first few pages (and the dust jacket), and make a decision. That's how I discovered both Sheila Heti and A.S. Byatt.

2) I read books recommended to me, either by friends, professors, or other authors (this last one usually through reading interviews, books, and criticism).

3) Through reputation, either in the academic world, or in the media/awards circuit. This is how I discovered Carol Shields, Jamaica Kincaid, Daphne Marlatt, Margaret Laurence, and many others.

you mean if i work hard and get smart enough i will understand your nonsense???

wait are those real scholars or are they strawman thought experiment scholars like the 800 lb gorilla?

well, that's not the sense i meant *read more women writers* in. i meant that people who find that they read lots of books by men should make an effort to read more books by women. i wasn't suggesting that they read books by authors that they hate. unless of course, they hate "women's literature" or "oprah books" without actually having read very many books by women or books on the oprah book list. because that's just ignorant.

but you probably didn't read my post carefully enough, hmm?

That said, I'm more curious about the different perspectives that women might bring to non-fiction than to fiction. I thought Catherine Merridale's book on the culture of death in twentieth-century Russia was outstanding--would it have been different were she male? Etc.

well you already agreed that it's not!! your criteria is:

1) what you think of the first few pages
2) what someone else tells you to do
3) the canon

in the case of reasons 2 and 3 i'd say that if you're looking at these lists (all the books your professors suggest, all the books that are on awards lists or are reviewed in magazines, etc) and there's a suspiciously high proportion of men you'd better develop some other criteria ... like arbitrarily reading women instead of men just to balance out the proportion ... if YOU want to compile a list called "best books of the 20th c" and populate it 100% with men that's fine with me! but you'd better have read as many books by women as by men or you're lacking in credibility.

as far as the first reason goes if you already read lots of books by men then you may be influencing your subjective criteria in favor of the male voice. which suggests a reason to read women writers that isn't literary merit. i.e. what mookieproof just said.

For two or three years I was mostly reading philosophy, giving myself a historical overview. (I didn't get very far, actually.) Anyway, almost every author I was reading at the time was male, so when I mixed in some fiction, I tended to be drawn to female authors (preferably from other cultures, races, ethnic groups).

However, in my nonfiction reading about particular subjects, I really can't be concerned with whether or not most of the authors are male or female. I really don't care. I guess it could make more of a difference in certain subjects than others.

But I'm certain that if you called Dr. Linda Warley a straw man she'd probably boot your rooster.

but you have to understand how some of your claims come across ... for example, your implication that kathy acker's fanbase is deliberately segregating itself is patently offensive. kathy acker was an outspoken lesbian in california and i'm not sure that you understand the social reality of that situation. for god's sake, her books were banned in canada! now those are real levels of ideological seperation to worry about ... not the fact that her fans want her added to the canon because, yes, she is a woman and a lesbian (and a damn good writer too! but, yes, you are right - her fans ARE interested in her because she's a woman and a lesbian ... that's what makes her more interesting to me than say john o hara or steinbeck or any number of british "angry young men")

and then implying that i just don't get what you're saying?? that's patronizing! if anything, i'm reading your posts too closely!

I could go on, but I think I've dealt with some of your most obnoxious points.

"Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his streetshoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize."

(And no, Vahid, since I have both an imagination and a sense of self the use of male pronouns did not fucking bother me in the slightest, thanks; had the author clumsily inserted "his/hers" everywhere I'd have slammed the book shut, since I like my eyes.)

I've never gone along with that attitude but that might be because as a 40-something music-loving, football-supporting white male I'd have to limit myself to Nick Hornby if I did.

i'm neither, lee.

I think this is the longest thread so far on ILB. Conclusions: some people prefer male writers to women and vice versa. Most don't care.

It's sad, though. I never thought I'd see journeymen like Brian Deane and Wayne Quinn wearing the claret.

Lee, any chance of having Lampard, Cole & Johnson back?

(Ugly American baseball fan having his fun)

No, but you can have Veron if you like.

Apologies to anyone who has no idea what we're talking about. Basically I support a crap soccer team.

I love your posts. Your quoting of WHGass clinched it for me. I can't believe that more people don't talk about him (ie., esp on ILB).

But, to get back to why I wanted to respond: I'm all in favour of spontaneous generalisations of the sort you added above (and think it got knocked on the head a little prematurely). I think it's fair to say that there's something melancholic attached to all of the writing that I admire; so much so that it feels linked in some special way to these writers' impulse to write (as you suggest).

People around here sometimes ask my best friend whether my goony falling-apartness as a person is somehow linked to writing... he told me he replies in the vein of "well, they're connected, but only 'somehow' is right: if writing went away for her the other thing would still be there..."

stay true... the pands

Just based on a glance at the bookshelf, I have probably a larger number of male authors, but more books per female author. I have one or two books by a Howard Norman (say), but ten or eleven by Iris Murdoch. Put another way, I probably generally read slightly more books by men, but when it comes to authors whose work I love passionately, women close the gap.

(To give you an idea of my tastes, female writers I appear to like a lot include:

• Margaret Drabble
• Iris Murdoch
• Virginia Woolf
• Margaret Atwood
• Joan Didion
• Annie Dillard
• Dorothy Parker
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Sylvia Plath
• Jane Austen
• George Eliot
• Mona van Duyn
• Katherine Ann Porter

Vs. male persons in the same predicament:

• Nabokov
• Shakespeare
• John McPhee
• Walker Percy
• Randall Jarrell
• Don DeLillo
• Michael Ondaatje
• Faulkner
• Joyce
• E.M. Forster
• Nicholson Baker
• David Foster Wallace)

Someone said upthread that he didn't think female writers liked to do the sort of writing he liked to read. While I wouldn't go that far, I must say that I have a weakness for something I'll call (as shorthand) trick-lit. I like narrative playfulness, unreliability, gimmickry, games, and self-reference. Postmodern metafictional concepts thrill me inordinately (even if I don't actually have the patience to read the resulting books)

And contrary to basically every sane person who thinks and writes about literature, I generally like it when authors break in and call attention to themselves. I like consciously fine writing, and will stop to smell the sentences to the exclusion of the virtues that more right-minded readers read to experience (character, theme, idea, plot, story).

The end result of this preference can be a very white and very male bookshelf. I try to work against it, but it can be a challenge.

lol, this thread...a blast from the past!

I am a crazy sexist reader.

so my english fiction shelves apparently have no female authors between harper lee and mary shelley. shall i start a recommendation thread?

year before last I read only books by women, after looking at my list of books read and realizing that it was overwhelmingly male. that was an an awesome experience! so the next year I did "only works in translation" since I noticed that was another clear bias on my list. then I figured this year I should just go back to "read whatever strikes my fancy" so now I have no reading plan but I kind of miss the "choose your next book from within these parameters" Catholic-freedom of the year-of-reading-only-x

did you read anything particularly unmissable by women with surnames beginning with M, N, O, P, Q, or R?

Measuring the sexism of one's reading affinities by which gender predominates among the authors of the books one reads is so laughably reductionist that it inclines me to jollity. It appeals mostly to those whose brains have been eaten by zombies.

JD you have discipline! This is the first year that I've even bothered with a reading list. I've conciously incorporated lots of Western/Central European and Latin American authors this year, but still mixed -- I'm much more bothered by the fact that I don't have many ideas about Chinese or African literature. Way more bothered about certain places than gender or race.

Would add Elizabeth Taylor to the list of female authors. I recommended her, on the basis particularly of Angel and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont to a friend of excellent judgement, who couldn't get on with her, I forget for what reason.

For me, at her best she has a sort of savage humourous bleakness that reminds me of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude and also, particularly in Angel, of Beckett's plays (that's a slightly weird comparison - but there's a particular scene in Angel that provokes a sense of an abysmal void at being unable to articulate one's condition, that I also get from, say, the backwards talking bit of Watt, or the bleak conventionalities of Happy Days).

Anyway, there's a biography out, reviewed in this week's TLS. I'm not sure how necessary a biography is for Taylor, but it's a worthwhile reminder of how good she was. Strong meat.

Just have to add my love for Elizabeth Taylor. She's wonderful.

thirded! she's tops. and needs to be better known in the states.

if some imaginary person asked me for the storytelling of pym and the bite of spark, i would point them to taylor.

Measuring the sexism of one's reading affinities by which gender predominates among the authors of the books one reads is so laughably reductionist that it inclines me to jollity. It appeals mostly to those whose brains have been eaten by zombies.

Who said anything about sexism? That's not what motivated my year of reading women. It just struck me that, looking at a list of what I'd read, I was getting a very limited sampling of the voices the world has to offer. For me, noticing the predominance of male writers on my "books read" list, I thought: "this is well worth correcting." You may not share my view that getting as broad a sampling of the voices of the world's people - men and women, from many different countries, translated from many different languages - is a big part of what will make your lifetime's reading feel worthwhile & rewarding. Luckily for us both, there's no reason for you to be affected in any way by what I want from reading books.

did you read anything particularly unmissable by women with surnames beginning with M, N, O, P, Q, or R?

(if this is a serious question btw I can go check the list - I am generally not a listmaker/keeper of records, it's really unusual for me to go about anything with any sense of method or plan, but I do keep a list of what I read each year)

haha yeah it's a serious question! admittedly it's also kind of a stupid one

toni morrison, yo

Barbara Pym

haha yeah it's a serious question! admittedly it's also kind of a stupid one

No it's not stupid! I just thought maybe you meant "do you also alphabetize/separate by height of spine/etc"

anyway, for R, try Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret - it's short stories, very good

alice munro, lorrie moore

i can't find the quote but didn't nabokov say something about his "homosexual" preferences when it came to authors

Oh, I've read some Morrison. Just not kept them, for some reason. Song of Solomon (which was great, actually) and I think one of the other novels and 'Playing in the Dark' (which wasn't great, kind of showed it was a novelist's work of criticism: which is a shame, because parts of it were generally right-on ...)

I note Ozick (oh, Ozick, I should finish an Ozick book, someday) has called Munro 'our Chekhov'. Heh.

The Rifaat book looks interesting, will order it. Munro, Moore, and Pym I think should be in the library. I hope.

Also I was thinking for a while about how and why my reading habits are sexist today. I think they are less sexist than they were. I would not point to my posts in this thread as a shining example of how they are less sexist than they were.

grauniad review had a cover feature on women writers in the US, after ian mcewan apparently greeted updike's death with some kind of whither-now-the-american-novel-whither-now bullshit, unfortunately kind of boils down to 'these are my nine favorite' but oh well

i have read one of these writers.

also the piece is not great but a lot better than the last guardian thing on books i linked from here i promise.