I’m wondering if other people have any input on this.
I’ve been tracking a few basic facts about every book I read since 2018 - gender of the author, author’s nationality, original language the book was published in, and year of publication. Initially this was just a random thing I did, but I soon noticed that I was reading significantly less female authors than male authors. In 2018 and 2019, it was like 25-30 percent female authors. That bugged me a little bit, so I made an effort to look for more female authors, and then I figured I maybe should aim to read less European and North American authors (comparatively) and give a bit more space to South American, African, Asian authors. It became a bit of a hobby project, tracking these stats. Now I’m at a point where for the first time in 2024, I don’t want to set a reading goal in terms of number of books read, but I want to set myself conditions like 50% female writers, 50% non-European non-North American writers, and works from every decade between 1850 and now. Something of the sort, I haven’t worked it out exactly. The thing is I know it’d be super easy to game this system, which defeats the point. I want to read more voices that are different from my own, not just rack up points in some game against myself. I’m not sure I’m going about this in the best way.
Does anybody else track these sort of things? Do you think it’s worthwhile? Where do you draw the line between gamification of a valid goal (reading more voices that aren’t like you) and gaming your own system? What sort of statistics do you track, if any? Have you made any conscious changes to your reading habits?
Sort of…
I have read countless classics by white men, so a little bit of effort to include some other demographics is important for me.
So, in my book club for next year i have made sure we have a 50/50 distribution between women and men. And there are gay authors included too.
And in my private projects too, i have started making sure that i am including many different types of authors.
I want to be a “good reader”. For me, that means reading good quality books by different types of people. I think, unknowingly my reading has been very white heterosexual male dominated.
Obviously, i am going to continue with such authors. Some of my favourite authors are white men (Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Balzac etc.). But, it is great to include great reads by authors like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Premchand, Arundhati Roy, Chinua Achebe, Adania Shibli, E M Foster, etc.
I want to be experience all sorts of lives, perspectives and histories. Sure, it’s great reading about victorian London, or New York in the Jazz era and so on. But i also want to experience what it was like in Nigeria during their turbulent times through Adichie’s stories and the social challenges in India under British Raj through Premchand’s stories and the love Virginia Woolf felt for Vita Sackville-West and so on.
As time is passing, i have felt the need to widen the scope of my reading, and not limit it to certain demographics, but since there has been such a dominance of men in literary field since time immemorial, it is a challenge to move away without making a concentrated effort.
When i was not tracking my reading, it was hard to detect the pattern (mostly white straight men). I thought i didn’t care about that, since they were great books, so what was the difference. But, i don’t feel the same anymore. So many great authors (esp. women and people of colour)disappeared because nobody read their books.
The media we consume impacts our thinking massively. And that holds doubly true for books since reading is such an important exercise in generating empathy, understanding, tolerance all of which we need more of in this world.
Yes, i too read for pleasure, but my pleasure is in expanding my mind, my understanding of the world and my own self. Edification, for me, goes hand in hand with pleasure.
You seem to be doing a great job, by the way. And i don’t think you should be afraid of gaming your own system. Do it, if it will make your stats look better to you. It doesn’t matter because your goal is so good, and even “honourable”. (I wanted to read a lot of books in October, so i added a few novellas. Worked out amazingly for me, since i loved most of them!) It’s absolutely wonderful that you noticed your trend and tried to diversify your reading experience. I am trying to do that too!