One of the weblogs I read regularly recent featured an entry on The Great British Literary Census, an article in the Telegraph that starts with the following lead:

Unfashionable though it may sound, men write better books than women…

Obviously, there is no reason for such a thing to be true, but I recognized a bit of my own reading habits in some of the subsequent paragraphs:

Men, [expert Jon Howells] thought, preferred books written by men while women were far more catholic in their tastes and were not influenced by the sex of an author. He said: “Women read more than men - the core customer is a woman aged between 35 and 55 - but what they read is right across the board, chick lit, crime fiction, biographies, heavyweight novels, and they don’t care about the gender of the author.

“Subconsciously, I think men stick to men writers. They think that what women write doesn’t appeal to them.”

Looking at my own bookshelf, and reflecting on my reading over the past year, I must confess that male writers have dominated the vast bulk of my reading, but I doubt this has anything to do with a subconscious preference on my part. Isn’t it more likely to be the case that—for whatever reasons—more men are getting published than women?

Anyway, of the list of the top 100 books mentioned in the article, here’s how I score:

Have read:

* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon

* Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

* The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

* The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown

* A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

* White Teeth
by Zadie Smith

* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
by J.K. Rowling

* Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden

* Bridget Jones’s Diary:A Novel
by Helen Fielding

* The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
by Murakami Haruki

* A Prayer For Owen Meany
by John Irving

* Neuromancer
by William Gibson

On my bookshelf, yet unread:

* Atonement
by Ian McIwan

* Angela’s Ashes:A Memoir of a Childhood
by Frank McCourt

* Wild Swans
by Jung Chang

* A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawkings

That’s 16 books, a quarter of which were written by women. I would estimate that this holds true of my general reading patterns as well.

So, am I guilty as charged, or is there something about the market that underrepresents the contributions of women?

I can’t give you any insight on this, but glancing over my books on the nearby shelf, I see that you have a far more balanced reading list than me. Of about 50 books, I see only one written by a woman (Hazel Rossotti’s “Colour, Why the World isn’t Grey”).  Of my other bookshelves, I suppose the ratio is nearly the same. This lopsided situation might be because most of my books are related to the physical sciences.  My wife’s English language books have a higher ratio of women authors (maybe 1 in 3 being women), largely because of her collection from Agatha Christy and JK Rowling. 

Jon

I think what male novelists write and females do are different.
Men describe the character, emotion, feeling and the situation in the society related to economics, politics, power games,
while women do those in the community such as family, relatives and neighbors.

So if you male species read only books written by men, it is not because these are better than others.
Women are flexible enough to take both, while men don’t (*evil grin*)
The same thing could be said about the genre of movies.
Women enjoy Die Hard and ‘women movie’ like Sleepless in Seatle or Bridget Jones Diary