Men and Women
Posted on September 14th, 2006 by Deb
- Do you tend to read more books written by one gender over the other? If so, which one? Men?
Or women? I find this kind of interesting, actually. Glancing over my extensive (grin) library, most of my fiction does seem to be written by women. Not to say that the men aren’t represented, but there are more female-written novels than male-written. On the other side of the shelf, though, more of my non-fiction is written by men. I’m not sure why–there’s quite a variety over there, and yet the ladies are under-represented. - Is this a deliberate choice? Or just something that kind of happened? It just kind of happened . . . odd, huh? At least about the non-fiction, I think.
- And (without wanting to get too personal), is this your gender? Well, yes, I am female . . . so the fact that I would connect more to fiction written by women does make a certain amount of sense. But the fact that I have more books about history or biography or dog-training written by men is curious. It’s not like women can’t write incisive history just as well as men, after all! Although almost every craft-book I have is written by a woman, as are the fashion-decorating-etiquette kinds of books.
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Oddly, most of the books on my shelf are by women (but only barely most) but I find that my histories are selected consciously because they are written by women (the others are just by chance). After reading a library worth of history, I realized I tended to enjoy female writers in the field more than males – so I tend to buy those books (where the books by men might only get borrowed, not bought).
I’m of the “who cares who wrote it as long as it’s good” school of reading. I hate seeing books marginalized by something like gender. I was once invited to join a book club, but they would not read books written by men, and that bugged me. That said, I do read a lot of books by women, but it’s not a conscious choice–the books just shout out to me.
When I first read the questions, I thought my library was 50-50% and that gender really didn’t matter; I certainly don’t look for books that way, as the previous commenter was saying about the book club. But, the interesting thing to me is that when I actually looked at my shelves, that except for a few gardening and spiritual titles, almost everything I read and collect is by women. I guess that I tend to read things that most often interest females like fashion or interior design. It’s certainly not intentional.