Over the past few months, has had several articles about women in literature, focusing on how few female authors are reviewed in professional publications and the impact this has on their readership. One of the most intriguing responses to the issue that I’ve seen is the declaration of 2014 as ‘‘.
On the back of this, some people have decided to only read books by female authors and, I have to say, I don’t think I could do it. It would cut out most comics for one (), and although a lot of my favourite authors are women, a lot of them are men too. Damn their lack of vaginas! To be fair, looking at the 29 writers I’ve listed on my about me page, only 10 out of 29 of them are women. Less than half. Problematic. So what about the books I read last year? Altogether, I read 189 books. I don’t pick based on gender, so surely around half of them were by women, right? Wrong. Only 52 titles had female authors, and several of those were co-authored by men. Damn.