Reading Habits: Mid Year Update.

It is (over) halfway through the year and I thought I'd do an update to this post in which I outlined my intention to read more books by women this year... So, how am I doing?

Well, I think I'm doing well.

Dialling the stats back to how they stood at the end of June, I had read 29 books - well ahead of target, which was 40 for the year.

Last year 64% of the books I read were by male authors. This year, to date, that's been 45%. In terms of individual authors read, just 41% have been male.

In absolute terms, I have read 16 books by 13 female authors - outstripping the 15 books by just 6 women read over the course of the past year by some way. Many of these have been authors I've read for the first time, some as a result of recommendations both here and on Facebook: Jeanette Winterston, Naomi Alderman, Maya Angelou, Mary Shelley, Val McDermid, Jane Harper, Mary Beard, Susan Hill, Natasha Pulley, Jessie Burton.

So, while I still have huge piles of books by men to read, I've been making efforts to buy and read additional books by women. Much of this has been virtual or audible stockpiling: I'm trying to resist adding too much to the physical piles!

Should you be inclined, you can follow my progress on my goodreads page.

Recommendations Sought: Women Authors

I still need to do a proper New Year post but in the meantime, I have a favour to ask: recommendations for women authors.

One of my (as yet to be finalised) aims for this year is not just to keep up my reading, but to increase the number of books by female writes I read.

To put this in perspective, and because I'm sad enough to have kept track, last year I completed 44 books. Of these, 28 were by men, 15 by women and 1 was an anthology; in percentage terms this breaks down as 64%, 34% and 2%. When it comes to different authors, I read books by 19 male authors and just 6 different female authors - a 73% to 23% split. (The difference is down to the fact that I'm reading (listening to) a number of book series, including the Miss Marple and Ripley books.)

So, this year, a supplementary aim to that of reading 40 books is to achieve gender balance overall, and to improve that secondary split as well.

There are a number of good candidates already on my list - but I've always operated on the basis that a book list can never be too long...


P.S. If you want to see more of my book reading habits, you'll find my goodreads page here.