How many books did you read this year? And how many of them were by women?
I’m officially at 120 books so far (and let’s face it, I’ll probably squeeze in at least 2 or 3 more in the next week and a half). Best I can tell, 115 of them were by women; I started the Maze Runner trilogy before I heard about the Read Women campaign, I don’t skip a new Jasper Fforde book for anything, and one book was cowritten by Mercedes Lackey and a dude. I also started one book that was supposed to be about making parenting decisions based on science but was actually a bunch of self-aggrandizing bullshit by a dickhead who I kind of wanted to punch in the face after only few pages, and eventually I couldn’t even keep hate-reading it.
Otherwise, my reading list was mostly YA and romance, which are dominated by lady authors. (Assuming none of them are men writing under female pen names, that is; my high school English teacher told us she had a good male friend who was a pretty famous romance writer because he masqueraded as a woman. And no, she never did tell us who he was!)
How did you do this year?
5 replies on “Lunchtime Poll: Did You Read Women in 2014?”
I hadn’t even thought about it until I read this, but I checked my goodreads, and 22 out of the 25 books were by women. Huzzah!
54 men
29 women
14 both
So, not the best, percentage-wise, but a lot of what I read were Doctor Who comics and audio adventures and those had the same writers through the storylines, which tips the numbers in favor of dudes. But we already know there’s a dearth of women writers in DW-land. (One book, Earthworld, was written by Jacqueline Rayner).
Wait, I just realized that my numbers don’t quite add up to what I read. I have an extra one counted in there somewhere, but I guess when we’re talking 96 books total, that doesn’t alter the percentages much.
So that’s roughly 56% men, 30% women, 14% both.
I, too, read a lot of romance, so my percentages are probably heavily biased in favor of women. I’m currently reading the Octavia Butler Earthseed trilogy, which I got on a Kindle Black Friday sale and OMG why didn’t anyone tell me about these books before. They are SO GOOD.