I’m perusing through my collection on my Kindle and I notice a pattern as I’m moving books into different catagories. I’ve got my non-fiction set with Mike Brown and Cesar Millan; my fantasy collection with Tolkein and Brooks; fiction collection with Michel Faber and Cormac McCarthy; my classics collection with Twain and Shakespeare; my sunny day reading collection (easy stuff) with Phillip Pullman, Dan Brown and Bill Bryson; a horror collection with Jeff Long and Stephen King.
But as I’m shuffling through all of these books, no women authors are appearing.
Now I’m wondering if my selections are gender based, so I moved over to the NYTimes Best Seller list. And three of the top five fiction books are female authors:
1.WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen
2.THE JUNGLE, by Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul
3.SING YOU HOME, by Jodi Picoult
4.LOVE YOU MORE, by Lisa Gardner
5.THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson
I did a little research on each of the books from the brief descriptions on Amazon and as for the female authors, I’m finding I’m just not interested in picking them up. The stories don’t appeal to me.
So I’m wondering if I’m just missing the good authors or if there is a gender divide.
If I remember correctly, men and boys tend to read almost exclusively male authors. Women and girls read both male and female authors.
I have no interest in reading any of the top 5 books you listed, so I can offer no help there. I’m off to take a look at my goodreads stats. They actually track your most read authors.
I have kept track of every book I’ve read for the last seven years. Nearly 140 books (I’m not a quick reader) and I could count all the female authors on one hand. I’d have no problems believing that men are “sexist” readers.
On my Kindle for iPhone I’ve got Angie Chau, Mary Roach, Mary Shelly, Virginia Woolf, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, George Eliot, Donella Meadows, Maile Meloy, Temple Grandin, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Jane Austen.
I have four books checked out from the library, two are by women, both are by Ursula LeGuin. I’m a dude.
I’m too much of a Luddite to get a Kindle, so obviously mine is not sexist. But my favorite authors … well, let me free-associate.
Valerie Martin
Mary Gaitskill
Octavia Butler
Andre Dubus
JRR Tolkien
C.S. Lewis
Madeleine L’Engle
Pat Conroy
Robert B. Parker
Sue Grafton
Dorothy Sayers
Arthur Conan Doyle
Stopping arbitrarily at twelve, I note that it’s evenly divided.
It may be true of most men, but it’s not true of me. I’ve read plenty of female authors over the years. In fact, I’ve read several of Jodi Picoult’s books, and she’s one of the authors on the list quoted in the OP.
Off the top of my head, I’ve also read books by:
Agatha Christie
Barbara Kingsolver
P.D. James
Harper Lee (who hasn’t read her?)
Mary Roach
The study is limited to fiction, and non-genre fiction, and to a small population, but it’s pretty interesting results.
A quick google-fu couldn’t find a larger study immediately.
I break the trend of women reading equally between men and women authors.
I read mostly men, because very few women write in my preferred genres (scifi and fantasy), and the ones who do often are writing romance crossovers, which I am in no way interested in reading.
Interesting exception - most of the nonfiction I’ve read lately has been by women.
Last year I read 20 novels. I don’t keep track of the nonfiction I read, I guess because when I was researching books I wrote I read so much nonfiction and not always by choice–now I read mostly nonfiction by authors like Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle and Thich Nhat Hanh. Anyway, eleven of the novels I read in 2010 were written by men. I have some repeat authors on there, though–two Murakami and three Sarah Waters–but I read just as many books by men as I do by women. I really don’t have a preference.
Besides Hobb and LeGuin, my bookshelf does look quite sexist yeah. Guy Gavriel Kay writes sort of like a woman but still, he is a guy as well. Hmm… found a book by Susanna Clarke, but given how many books I have, finding one more book by a woman doesn’t really shift the balance much. Curiouser and curiouser, didn’t even think of this before I read this thread.
I don’t have a Kindle, but out of my five favorite authors, three are women (A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, and Pat Barker). But out of my ten favorite authors, only four are women (add Flannery O’Connor to the other three).
I’m a girl, and I guess it holds true - I read about 50/50. I suppose it’s true that women are gender blind in their reading while men only read male authors. (It’s also true with kids and protagonists - girls will read about girls or boys, but it’s hard to get boys to read a book with a girl hero.)
If you’re mostly reading older books (stpauler cites Tolkien, Twain, and Shakespeare) the majority of authors are male. The reasons have to do with sexism in history, but the fact remains. I’ve been reading a lot of 19th Century writing recently, and hence, lots of males on my kindle. I don’t think it’s because of any inherent sexism in my choice of literature.
I read almost exclusively male authors, but it’s not really by design, it just works out that way. It seems like I just don’t come across many books by female authors which look very interesting to me. Too many women authors write “chick lit” crap, or romances.
Having said that, there are a few women authors I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. I like Dava Sobel’s books, and I think Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is maybe the best fantasy novel since Lord of the Rings.
I’ve also read JK Rowling, of course, and I’m currently reading a novel called Heresy by SJ Parris (a pseudonymn for Stephanie Merritt) which is pretty good. If the subject matter looks interesting to me I’ll read it, but too much of the time women authors appear to be geared too much to women.
I read more male than female authors—partly for the reason C K Dexter Haven mentioned; partly because they tend to be more common in the genres and subjects I’m interested in (and not in the genres I’m not interested in, like chick-lit or sparkly-vampires or female-POV steamy romance). But there are quite a few women whose books I love/like/enjoy.
When it comes to fiction, I mostly read male authors. In my experience, authors of different sexes often have trouble understanding how the opposite sex really thinks, and being male, it’s more noticeable when I am reading a femaile author trying to write realistic inner monoloques of men.