I caught this while roaming the web, bored to tears at the Liberry. It's something I've thought about myself many times--why don't I read more women novelists? I'm a sensitive, New Age guy, aren't I? Most of my favorite 'bloggers are women, after all. Just today I was seeking a novel at home and I thought "I should read something by a woman for once." Instead, I settled on re-reading a Henry James. WTF?
Women novelists I've read (starred ones are faves, those with + signs I loathe):
Shirley Jackson*
Anne Rivers Siddons+
Jane Austen
Flannery O'Connor*
Toni Morrison
Mary Doria Russell
Alice Walker
Willa Cather
Margaret Atwood
Madeleine L'Engle
Ursula K. LeGuin
Joan Didion
Nadine Gordimer*
Dawn Powell
Paula Fox*
Iris Murdoch*
Julian May*
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Anne McCaffery+
Toni Cade Bambara
Tsitsi Dangarembga*
Assia Djebar
Ayn Rand+
Banana Yoshimoto
Simone de Beauvoir
George Sand
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Yourcenar
Isaak Dineson
Women whose works I own but have yet to read:
Edith Wharton
Dorris Lessing
AS Byatt
Lady Murasaki Shikibu
These lists strike me as too short, given the amount of reading I do. Am I somehow biased? Even my non-fiction list is short:
Elaine Pagels*
Samantha Power
Ellen Dissanayake
Wendy Doniger
Anne Lamott
Natalie Goldberg
Barbara Euland
I'm sure I'm simply not remembering some authors, but again, WTF? I could spend a year trying to list male authors I've read; it would be an impossibility.
This post=evidence how bored I am at work tonight.
