Ah, the transportive joy of reading. It is frequent geek girl companion, and one of my favorite topics in the whole world.
Many geeky people use the new year as a time to set reading goals, make lists, visit bookstores and libraries, and decide how many books they can cram into their brain before the ball drops on another year.
Although I’ve never been the kind to set a physical book goal, I love to journey into new realms of reading, filling my mind and my bookshelf with undiscovered worlds and new pockets of thought, feeling, and idea.
Choosing what to read next is similar to journeying through the wild west: limitless paths with distractions, surprises, and discoveries around every corner. While this “shoot-from-the-hip” style certainly keeps things interesting, it doesn’t make for very intentional explorations of genres, authors, or themes.
It’s a truism among those of my friends who use OkCupid that if a guy fills up his “Favorites” section with Important Male Authors and Classic Dude Rock, it’s a red flag. You’ll probably spend the first date listening to his Deep Thoughts, and if he doesn’t bail when he hears you have every Tori Amos album, it’s probably only so that he can show you the error of your ways.
Similarly, when magazines and websites publish lists of “100 books to read before you die,” they’re overwhelmingly male. (And white, but that’s a topic that deserves its own post. Typically, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison are allowed into the hallowed halls, so the list-makers can say they did their due diligence.)
Let’s have a quick overview, shall we? (I did the counts here by eye, so I may have missed one or two, but they’re generally accurate.)
Modern Library’s 100 Best Books clocks in at 91% male for the board’s list, and 87% male for the readers’ list (seemingly because their readers have an objectivist streak, and filled the top 10 with Ayn Rand).
