I don’t know about you, but I don’t really consider an author’s gender when I’m choosing a book.
If I’m actively seeking out books by a particular author because I’ve enjoyed their previous work, then their gender may already be apparent. I know for example that Kate Atkinson is a woman. I enjoyed her book, ‘Life After Life’ so I bought ‘A God in Ruins’ shortly after. I know that Patrick Ness is a man and I have recently learnt that he is gay, but I read his ‘Chaos Walking’ trilogy because I loved ‘The Rest of Us Just Live Here’. In neither of these cases did I actively seek out a book written by a woman or by a gay man. In fact when I read ‘Before I Go To Sleep’ by S J Watson a few years ago, I was surprised to find that the author was a man. Surprised but not shocked. He wrote a fictional account from a female perspective. Unusual perhaps, but not unheard of.
When I hear about people declaring that this year they will only read books written by women, for example, I find it a little difficult to understand. Why would you want to limit your reading experience to such constraints? So, I was pleased to read in this article http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/10/lionel-shriver-rubbishes-year-of-publishing-women-kamila-shamsie that I’m not the only person who finds ‘special treatment’ of certain groups a little un-nerving.
Lionel Shriver argues that making female authors subject to special help and rules can only backfire. In fact she goes on to say that winning the Orange prize (the female only book prize now called the Bailey’s prize) was not as meaningful to her as it would have been to win the Booker prize as ‘you have eliminated half the human race from applying’.
The colour of a person’s skin, their sexual preference, their gender, their political beliefs, can all influence an author’s writing but that does not mean that the subject matter will always be drawn from the author’s real life experience. So, the real intention of reading books written purely by people from a certain demographic can only be to make a political point?
And then to publicly declare that you're making a political point.
Would a year of publishing/reading only female authors actually make a difference to gender inequality or would it further entrench the idea that women need to be singled out for special treatment?
‘Let them have their year, then we can get back to normal.’
Equality and diversity are important issues and probably better explored in a thesis than a blog post! But I’m not convinced that equality can be gained by boosting the rights of one group at the expense of another. What about the incredibly talented young white male who is told on submission of his book, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the women’s turn this year’, or the European who is told, ‘I’m sorry, we’re giving the Africans a chance?’
It sounds flippant and I’ve clearly not carried out thorough research (as I said: blog post, not thesis) but from a reader’s perspective I can see no logical explanation why a book would be turned down by a publisher based purely on the author’s gender, sexuality, skin colour, political persuasion, or where they stand on the ‘marmite’ debate. In fact, authors have pen-names often to overcome such preconceptions, whether intended or sub-conscious.
I’d say restricting your choice of book to authors from a certain sub-section of the population does nothing to address social injustice. A book should be judged on its merits and the losers in this particular battle are the readers who choose to play along.
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