Monday Musing - How Tess Gerritsen made me 30% less sexist in my reading

Back in 2005 I read the book On Writing by Stephen King. In it he suggest that any serious literary person should read at least 100 books per year. So taking that advice I decided to make an effort and began writing down every book I read.

I soon learned to reach 100 books you really have to be looking for new things to read constantly (now that I am 6 years into this it is a lot easier to do than it seemed then in the beginning). Anyways I began scanning book blogs looking for titles and subjects I liked.

At some point I found Tess Gerritsen's blog and read the following post:

I had a taste of just what I was up against during my book tour down south a few years ago. I was standing in a Sam’s Club, autographing copies of my book, when I noticed a male customer picking up an armful of various paperback thrillers. My media escort, a nice Southern gentleman, approached the customer and said, “Say, you seem to like thrillers. Why don’t you come over here and meet Tess Gerritsen? She writes great thrillers, and she’d be happy to sign one for you.”

The customer gave me a long look and then responded with a dismissive shake of his head. “Naw,” he said. “I don’t read books by women. I don’t like the way they write.” And he turned and walked away.

I had never consciously thought about my book choices when it came to the gender of the author, but I now had a wonderful resource to see how I was doing, my list of all the books I had read so far. Going through the list it turned out that I was reading over 95% male authors; I was one of those dismissive sexist male readers without even knowing it.

I made a commitment to actively seek out female authors and I can now say I read around 35%. Not totally equitable, but a vast improvement over my old self.

Thanks to Gerritsen I have enjoyed a lot of books I may have missed, but particularly her works and the writings of Laura Lippman, MC Beaton, Lindsey Davis, Marian Keyes, JD Robb, Denise Mina, Julie Kramer, Kathy Reichs, Tana French, Sophia Kinsella, and many more.

What Books are you missing out on without even knowing it?

**From this I also started to read a lot more foreign books (not American) as I soon noticed I was severely lacking that department too.