52 Books by 52 Women

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. In fact, I’ve been thinking about doing this for at least a year. I thought about starting it at the start of the new year, but I immediately got the flu or something and pretty much everything fell by the wayside. Since then I’ve been aware that although it’s a year-long project, that year can start at any point; there’s no reason that it has to start on January 1. And when I realized all of a sudden that it’s International Women’s Day, I thought, that’s it; it’s a sign.

title unknown, by Henry Clive. Thanks to Megan Lynch for tracking down the credit. 

My project is to read 52 books by women authors this year. That averages one book a week, so that’ll be my benchmark, although if I read two in one week and it takes me a couple of weeks to read another, that’s fine too. My plan at this point is for them all to be fiction, although I’m going to give myself a little flexibility there. What’s not flexible is that they all have to be by different female authors, and they all have to be authors whom I’ve not read before. (Or I haven’t read an entire book of their work, anyway; I’m not going to rack my brain about whether I read one of their stories in the New Yorker or in junior high or something.) A lot of these are going to be “classics” that I’ve never got around to reading, but I definitely want to read contemporary authors too, and for them to be a pretty diverse mix in terms of nationality, ethnicity, time period, subject matter, genre, et cetera.

Mind you, there are plenty of women authors I already know I like, and when I was first conceiving this project I thought I’d allow myself one of their books every now and then as a sort of treat, but I think this project will be far more interesting if they’re all authors who are new to me. So no Jane Austen or Aimee Bender, no Simone de Beauvoir or Ruth Ozeki, no Dorothy Sayers or Ágota Kristóf, no Ursula Le Guin or Flannery O’Connor, et cetera, et cetera. But there are so many authors I’ve never read that there won’t be any trouble thinking of 52 of them; the trouble will be paring it down.

I’m not going to go into this with a finished list of 52 books to read, and I’m going to give myself a lot of flexibility about what book to read next, so as not to mess up my momentum by dragging by heels because I’m really not feeling up for Gone with the Wind that week. With that in mind, I’m not going to worry too much about the overall balance of the finished list; I’m not going for the 52 Greatest Books by Women of All Time (particularly because I’ve no doubt already read a lot of the books I’d put on that list). I just want a good mix of books to keep the project going.

So why am I doing this, anyway? It’s not as if I can’t just read books by women any time I want, and I do. It’s not like my reading list is some big boys’ club to begin with, though historically it certainly hasn’t been 50/50 either. These days I’m lucky if I have any time to read books at all if they’re not for work, so the idea of reading 52 books in a year to begin with feels incredibly ambitious alongside all the other stuff I have to do. But I always relish a chance to catch up on a lot of the books that I felt like I should have been required to read but never was, and also with a lot of the new literature that I read about but don’t get around to reading. And privileging works by women just feels like something I’d like to do for a while.

As a theater journalist, I’m very, very aware that there aren’t enough works by women being produced on the stage, and as a comic fan I know that the non-indie scene still feels very much like a boys’ club. I’m not nearly as plugged in to what goes on in the literary world that’s more germane to what I’ll actually be reading, but all in all it just feels like a good time to immerse myself in works by women.

I want to be careful to say that it’s not that I’m only going to read books by women this year, because there are always things I need to read for work, and comics I like to keep up on, and stuff like that. But if I can make it to 52 books by March 8 of next year, well, that will feel pretty darned good.

So what’s first? The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. It being first doesn’t necessarily signify anything; it’s just that I was talking about this with my wife recently, and she recommended The House of Mirth–which I’d like to read sometime, but I was reminded that when I saw The Age of Innocence I thought man, that wasn’t a good movie, but I have a strange feeling that I’d really like the book. So, perhaps perversely, I decided to read that one first and leave Mirth as a treat for later, sometime after this project. So far I’m only a couple of chapters into Age of Innocence, though, so we’ll see how that goes. I plan to report back with impressions of each book as I go–not a review, certainly,  just a response of some kind.

I  welcome suggestions of books I should read, although of course I may or may not choose those. If they’re by authors I’ve read, for instance, they wouldn’t qualify for this project. As I said, I’m inclined to stick to fiction, at least for now. And if anybody wants to play along at home, well, the more the merrier.