Bookshop Just for Women

So what do you think of this idea - a bookshop especially for women?

Elizabeth Tai writes that MPH Bookstores has introduced Malaysia’s first “women concept” store which is at The Curve :

To begin with, the outlet’s books will be chosen for their appeal to women. There will be everything from women-centric business and management books and autobiographies on prominent female leaders to chick-lit and cookbooks. EspresSOUP is a little corner where you can relax with a cup of coffee and a good book. ... There will also be other products with female appeal, such as wedding stationery, to name just one. Brides-to-be will be glad to know that stationery specialist MOOF will be bringing in its exclusive designs, which will only be available at The Curve outlet.

I think it is a clever marketing strategy, especially as The Curve already has a big branch of Borders and the branch of MPH does need to differentiate itself.

Bookshops also do need to reinvent themselves as destinations which customers associate with a pleasurable experience, if they are to survive especially as we move towards the age of ebooks.

This sounds like a place where women might go to treat themselves and get away from the pressures of the day and that's good and I like the idea of the books club, talks and workshops:  it's bookstore "squidginess", for sure.

But, I do have some reservations.  First, I personally don't like segregation of the sexes. Men need their spaces to relax and hang out too.  

And secondly I don't like the cliched assumptions that women should like certain things whether in terms of decor (usually frilly, flowery pink things) or in the choice of  books.  The concept of women's bookshops is nothing new, but around the globe most have been independents which promoted feminist and/or lesbian thought.

Furthermore, it seems to me that there is an increasing de-emphasis on selling books and a move towards the store becoming a gift shop that also sells books. 

I will go check it out the next time I go shopping at The Curve ... and I hope the EspresSOUP corner serves decent coffee!

Anyway, what's your reaction to this?

New Classics to Win Back the Blokes

Following the shock-horror-gasp revelation the other day that women are better readers than blokes, and Jean Hannah Edelstein's plea on The Guardian blog, Bookninja is announcing a contest to "remasculate" books in order to repatriate male readers.

You need to change the title and basic plot summary (one sentence, max) of a famous book—and if the book is by a woman, “masculate” her as well. There are bonus points for reinventing the cover (as in the funky remake of Iris Murdoch's The Sea at left.) More inspiration here (though you may never recover from titles like The Ass is Singing by Boris Lessing!)

You can also join the Bookninja group on Facebook and if you want your literary updates intravenously instantaneously, you can subscribe to his feed on Twitter.

Anyway, off you go, and don't paste your great ideas here, go along to George's blog.

Academic Men a Menace on Booker Panel

There must be a lot of authorly fingernail chewing going on at the moment as we await the result of this year's Man Booker Prize. (I'm sitting here in yet another Ubud internet cafe waiting for the result to come in ... 'cos I don't have anyone but you guys to talk to tonight and everything closes so early here.)

Ahead of the results though, Louise Doughty, one of this year's Booker judges has had a swipe at male judges as she tells the Independent that they :

... "always have their eye on their reputations" and are too concerned with picking a "highbrow" author rather than a readable one. She added that they tended to made judgements based on "how well the winning book reflected on them", often choosing the most obscure and self-consciously highbrow novelist, rather than considering the best entry. ... "I don't think it's a good idea to have academics as judges on these prizes," she said. "Academics always have their eye on their reputations and always have a vested interest to pick someone as literary and obscure as possible. I think academics are always looking over their shoulder.

John Sutherland (as a male academic) disagrees with her (of course).

I'm not sure whether she's right or not, but it would be really nice to have a novel win that's capable of catching the public imagination ... as previous winners Enright and Banville really haven't.

75 of the Best ... And Then Another 75

When Esquire magazine put up a list of 75 Books Every Man Must Read (which you can find here in the form of a rather lovely slideshow) Jezebel.com found the list "extremly myopic" relying as it does on the "old white dude cannon" with the token great Russian thrown in and only one female author (Flannery O'Connor). So they invited readers to help them compile a list 75 Books Every Woman Should Read.

And here 'tis. Enjoy!

[Found via Conversational Reading]

Tremain Takes Orange for Immigrant's Tale

In this country, prizes are like bumps in the road, sleeping policemen. You can't pretend they are not there, and anyone who says they don't care about them is being disingenuous.

Rose Tremain, one of Britain's most critically acclaimed authors has never won the Booker, but has scooped this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which she was nominated once before).

The Road Home tells the story of an Eastern European immigrant called Lev, who tries to make his way in Britain, and broadcaster Kirsty Lang, chair of the judges said of it :

We were all very impressed by the novel's main character and the empathy with which she has written him. We liked the cast of characters, and, though it could have been a worthy book, it wasn't.

You find out more about the book and Ms. Tremain on the Orange Broadband site and can read an extract here.

The 2008 Orange award for new writers was won by Joanna Kavenna for Inglorious, which Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian describes as

... a tale of a disaffected journalist's descent into nervous breakdown

I have to admire this lady's perspicacity and determination - she said she had 13 "unpublishable" novels rejected before this!

Meanwhile of course, the ding-dong about whether it's' fair to have a separate prize for women continues with Tim Lott in The Telegraph pointing out that we don't have literary prizes for other disadvantaged groups like the handicapped and people of colour. (Has he never heard of the Decibel Prize?) It's tiresome to see critics inflating like puffer fish as the very mention of the Orange, though sure, it's hard to justify positive discrimination in a year when women have swept all the major literary prizes in the UK.

I did though like this comment left on Lott's post by someone calling themself Chas Pooter :

Novel writing is the one literary
form in which women have always
excelled, indeed led. The novel as
we know it was invented by Mrs
Behn, and she was buried in
Westminster Abbey (though not, it
is true, for being a pioneer
lady-of-letters). In every generation,
from Austen to the Dribbles,) the
leading novelists have been ladies.
And male novelists, from
Richardson's PAMELA onwards,
have been pre-occupied with the lot
of woman. Perhaps the founders of
the Orange Prize have not read any
of them.

Reading Lists for Manly Men and Time-Wasters

We long ago established that guys generally aren't as into fiction as women (those who visit this blog being the exception, I suppose) and tend to avoid books written by women. But what do blokes like to read?

James Abela pointed me in the direction of a very nice list of 100 must-read books for the guys on The Art of Manliness (and also listed also on Amazon.com) a website dedicated to providing you with top tips on manliness :

There are the books you read, and then there are the books that change your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books of anecdotal or literal merit, we have narrowed down the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.

A lot of the books listed are just downright good 'uns, whatever your sex. This post is surely a labour of love and I loved the visuals as much as the reading suggestions (surely this is biblioporn at its best?).

Another reading-list I thought was fun was this one of Great Novels About Wasting Time (found via) compiled by Jessica Winter for Slate magazine's special issue on procrastination (a subject close to our hearts) :

Those of us who are vulnerable to the siren call of procrastination can find plenty of fictional compatriots on our bookshelves, though they may provide cold comfort. We could start with Hamlet, obviously, who wonders "whether it be/ Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple/ Of thinking too precisely on th' event" that causes his dithering. Or pity the aptly named Jimmy Tomorrow and the other ne'er-do-wells who populate The Iceman Cometh, nursing their pipe dreams like toxic cocktails. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City gives us a cocaine-addled protagonist whose procrastination at work costs him his job and whose punishing nightlife regimen is revealed to be, at least in part, an elaborate deferral of grief for his dead mother. Most endearingly, Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys toils haplessly on an unfinishable novel—he procrastinates not about starting the book but finishing it or, rather, abandoning it.

My favourite book on procrastination, Magnus Mill's hysterically funny The Restraint of Beasts isn' t included, sadly.

Improving Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise ...

Delighted I am that one of my favourite singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell, has recorded a new album, her first collection of original songs since 1998.

Anyone who has been through English SPM exam in the past few years will recognise the lyrics to the last track - it's a musical interpretation of Rudyard Kipling's classic poem If. Mitchell says of the poem:

It gives me optimism. It's a good grocery list, very difficult to live up to. The thing about this ... is that you can't really change the world, the only thing you can do is work on yourself.

But she felt that she needed to "improve" on Kipling's words as she felt that Kipling's emphasis on endurance was overly macho, compounded by his concluding "you'll be a man, my son". (And I would agree too, as someone who found herself teaching teachers how to teach the poem!):

To endure is important, but that's not how you inherit the earth. My experience tells me that the earth is innocence, with wonder and delight, which is renewable. I wanted to get the feminine principle into the poetry. ... It needed rewriting.

The Kipling Estate agreed with her and let her make the changes.

You can listen to the song here.

The Virtues of Virago

My favourite writers at this time were all men - Beckett, Flann O'Brien, BS Johnson, Alasdair Gray - but at a time when I was also struggling to find my own voice as a novelist, Dorothy Richardson flung open a door on to a new world of possibility. And, while my student contemporaries were immersing themselves in the new generation of British writers (the Granta generation, you might call it: Swift, Amis, Barnes and McEwan most prominent among them), I found myself drawn back repeatedly - almost perversely - to those bottle-green spines.

Author Jonathan Coe talks in the Guardian about how the Virago Modern Classics series and the women authors who changed his literary landscape forever.

Virago Press:

the first mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women. An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world'

was set up by Carmen Calil, Ursula Owen, and Harriet Spicer (left) in 1973. The Modern Classics series was launched in 1978 with:

... a list dedicated to the celebration of women writers and to the rediscovery and reprinting of their works ... (to demonstrate) the existence of a female literary tradition and to broaden the sometimes narrow definition of a classic.

Among the authors brought to prominence by the series are many now widely acknowledged as among the world's best writers, including Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Grace Paley,
Pat Barker, and Angela Carter.

But was it necessary to have press solely for books written by women? And even if it was necessary in the dim and distant 70's, haven't we come along way since then?

Coe believes that there remains a gender bias in publishing "subtle and unspoken" even now.

If we take the Booker prize (for want of anything else) as being indicative of what the British literary establishment has considered most attention-worthy over the past 40 years, a clear preference emerges. In the first 30 years of its history, 108 of those shortlisted for the prize (63.5 per cent) were male, only 62 (36.5 per cent) were female. The Orange prize was set up in 1996, partly to correct perceived gender bias in the Booker (after it had gone through a particularly chauvinist phase - in the years 1991-95, only five women were shortlisted, compared to 24 men), but in the past nine years of the Booker, the pattern still hasn't changed noticeably: 33 men (61 per cent) have been shortlisted, compared to 21 women (39 per cent). ... Perhaps one shouldn't read too much into these statistics. And yet do they not imply, cumulatively, that while the reading public (spurred on by book groups and the Richard and Judy show) now has no hesitation in embracing and indeed privileging the work of women writers, the female novelist might still feel that the ultimate imprimatur of literary status - not the Booker prize itself, of course, but that indefinable sense of being taken seriously - still dangles tantalisingly out of reach?

If you are inspired to rush out to pick up the Modern Classics back list, the best place to try in the Klang Valley is Skoob.

Wake Up, Fellas!

Henry Sutton, chair of judges for the fiction section of the New Writing Ventures awards and literary editor of the Daily Mirror has issued a wake-up call to male writers in the UK after all six awards went to women.

Michelle Pauli in the Guardian reports that Sutton was:

"surprised and saddened" when he realised that no men had made the grade to even reach the shortlist for the category.

The awards were launched two years ago by Booktrust and the New Writing Partnership, and are intended to nurture new writing talent.

The fiction award was won by Azmar Dar for the first chapter of a novel called The Secret Arts.

Books for the Boys

Since Glenda seemed quite intrigued by the comment I made yesterday about male readers choosing not to read female authors I thought I'd post up the article I wrote on the subject. This piece appeared in (the now sadly defunct) men's magazine Chrome in January 2006. Don't know how many of you read it at the time. Greenbottle and Amir Hafizi will find their own words still reverberating!

One rainy afternoon in Bangsar some years go, I was browsing in the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop when an elderly, dhoti-clad gentleman burst in from the street, brandishing a copy of Middlemarch at Skoob’s proprietor, Thor Kah Hong. Thor had apparently recommended the novel as the kind of improving read this gentleman said he was after. But now his customer was absolutely irate and demanding the book be changed.

“Why does she call herself George? I don’t read books by women writers.” He spat out the last two words as if they left a rancid taste in the mouth.

The answer is quite simple, of course. Mary Anne Evans became George Eliot to protect herself from prejudice in a predominantly patriarchal society, just as many other women authors have changed their names over the years to make sure that their work was judged solely on its merit.

The most famous woman writer in 19th century France, Aurore Dupin, published under the pseudonym George Sand. The Bronte Sisters, Charlotte, Anne and Emily published under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame) chose to write under the male name Isak Dinesen. Lula Mae Smith wrote as Carson McCullers, and Janet Taylor Caldwell dropped her first name so as to be taken more seriously, writing also as Max Reiner.

Even in recent times, women writers have chosen to reduce their given names to initials so as to become sexually ambiguous; Booker winner A. S. Byatt and Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy among them. J.K. Rowling says she decided to write under her initials rather than her full name because she didn’t want the fact that she was a female to deter boys from reading her books.

But in these more enlightened times surely our Middlemarch wielding gentleman is an anachronistic exception, and writers like Rowling overly cautious? Sadly, it seems not.

Earlier this year, academics Annie Watkins and Lisa Jardine of Queen Mary College, London, carried out a piece of research to mark the tenth anniversary of the Orange Prize for fiction. They surveyed 100 academics, critics and writers – the people they felt were most likely to be well-read and have the most influential opinions about literature to find out their attitudes to the gender of authors.

They found that while women read writers of both sexes quite happily, most men did not. Four out of five men had most recently finished a book by a male, and most had trouble remembering the last novel by a female writer they had read.

Wanting to see if this held true in the Malaysian context, I carried out a small scale survey on my blog and found much the same results. Asked to say what they were currently reading, over 80% of the men said that they were engrossed in a book by a male author. However, unlike the sample interviewed in Britain, most said that they did read women writers and were able to recall the last book they’d read by one.

For most men, Watkins and Jardine concluded, great writing is male writing and they find it more difficult to like or admire a novel authored by a woman. This held true for one or two of my blog readers. “I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with penis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”. Another blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

More worrying is that these prejudices also appear to extend to those who make recommendations about the best books to read and influence buying habits. Of 56 books suggested by male celebrities in the Observer’s summer reading list in 2003, only 6 were by women. A tally of Time magazine’s 100 All-time Novels chosen by critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo and published earlier this year listed only 10 novels by women writers. (Closer to home, see how many articles about women writers you can find in the archives of the Silverfish litmag!) You can’t help but wonder whether women writers are playing on an even playing field.

Now, I’m certainly not one to press for political correctness at the expense of literary merit, and I fully recognise that male readers of fiction are in any case an endangered species (author Ian McEwan went as far as to say that when women stop reading, the novel will be dead).

But if your reading diet has hitherto consisted almost entirely of male writers, perhaps it’s time, at last, to give women a chance?

Comparative Literature

Here are a couple of nice things to amuse you this Monday morning.

There are all kinds of wacky facts about books in this PDF downloadable from the New York Times. (Or you can just click on the pic left if you're lazy.)

What are the best selling books internationally at the moment? Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, yes, you'd expect their works on the list. But Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies is in there too, and I'm also fascinated to learn that while Auster's book sold 70,000 copies in the US in 2006, it sold 165,00 copies in France!

There are also a couple of internationally best selling authors I'd never heard of (and I bet you haven't either) - Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who both of course write in Spanish.

And the titles of some of the Harry Potter rip-offs around the world made me smile: my favourite is Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (China)!

Statistic after statistic on the page shows just how much work in translation is one way traffic, with far more American titles being translated into foreign languages than the other way round.

You might also like to take a look at the list of 100 top favourite books compiled by British bookchain, Waterstones and reproduced in the Telegraph. The company asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstones opened its first store.

(And yes, unbelievable as it sounds, the kind of people who work in bookshops in the UK do read, unlike too many of their counterparts here!)

The number of male authors on the list outweighs the number of female authors - this could be because (as my own small scale research bore out too) while women tend to read books by both men and women, men tend to read mostly books by men. (I'd love to know how many of those employees are blokes.)

Still, we do love to compare ourselves against lists and this one provides a very useful starting point for anyone who isn't too sure about what they might like to read.

Anyway, Happy World Book Day! Don't forget to stop off at a bookshop to buy yourself (and your loved one) a gift.

Something for the Weekend, Sir?

Books and the weekend. It is surprising how differently men and women interpret weekend readings to be.

For a woman, it means being snuggly seated on the sofa with legs off the floor (cosying up in a blanket is an option), holding a chick-lit book gently in hand (or the book could be an adaptation of the latest movie OR a novel that has/is being adapted into a major Hollywood movie), soft music in the background, curtains drawn, and the phone placed off the hook. Oh, and there will be that strong, hot cup of coffee (or soothing tea) waiting quietly on the side like a, err, lover, or something like that.

No such theatrics or dramatics for men, thank you. The male version of a “quiet weekend read” can range from the serious to the silly, with no awkward adjustment period in-between the sudden drop. And the books can be flung aside (without bothering with bookmarks!) at a moment’s notice when friends are excitedly honking outside the door for an excursion or outing anywhere.

Deeply insightful comments from Francis Dass is the NST today about gender differences in reading habits.

Dass makes an eclectic choice of five favourite reads for the weekend. The fifth one, Tuesdays with Morrie he admits he doesn't really like ("a tad too feminine") but says he needed to make up numbers.

It's great to see the paper giving us an article on books, but ...

Memoir of a Gender Spy

Have been on a non-fiction journey over the past week or so, since The Emperor's Children exploded in my face. It was interesting though to have my prejudices about the writing confirmed by the editor of an American literary magazine who emailed me to say:

Thank all the gods someone finally sees the Messud novel like I do. I can't read the damn thing, even the first paragraph, without wincing. I ran into your blog post via a search, stunned that the novel was getting so much praise.

But a lot of people do think it's wonderful, and there must be something in it, mustn't there? I will get back to it sometime soon and try to keep my mind open.

I finished Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, which is a really remarkable book, both brave and intelligent. It put me in mind of a book I read as a teenager - Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. Griffin was a white journalist who "became" a black man with the aid of a drug and skin dye. He then wandered for six-weeks through the racially-segregated Deep South, experiencing at first hand what it was to be black. The book shocked.

Journalist Norah Vincent becomes a gender, rather than a racial spy, and transformed with clothes and make-up, assumes the identity of her alter-ego Ned Vincent. to enter traditional male bastions - the bowling alley, strip clubs, a monastery, a male encounter group, and a hard-selling sales team.

You might expect some pretty ferverent male-bashing, but Vincent makes an effort to get behind the stereotypes and makes some pretty interesting observations including that girls can be nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it'll hurt the most and their aim is laser-precise

She even dates women as Ned she says. She thinks that it is going to be the fun part but instead she learns a lesson is how humiliating rejection is and how it is a fact of life for most guys. she also finds out just how bitter and self-pitying mosr American women are with inflated sense of self-worth.

All Angst and Orwell?

Gender differences in reading habits is a topic that keeps coming back to haunt this blog. Small wonder because these differences in reding habit give a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the opposite sex.

Researchers Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of the University of London interviewed 500 men, all with some professional connection to literature, and asked them about the novel that most changed their life. This piece of research was actually a follow-up to a similar survey carried out last year, asking women for their seminal novel. Both studies were conducted in conjunction with the Orange Prize.

They found that:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion ...

And here's the list of favourites that emerged:

• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Professor Jardine commented that:

... men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do. They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals. The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading.

Men did not come up with anywhere like the range of titles that the women did, and did not regard novels as life companions in the same way that women did.

And shock horror: the study also revealed that men between the ages of 20 and 50 generally do not read fiction. (Actually, I think we more or less knew this already.)

Does the survey actually teach us anything useful? There's lively discussion of the issues raised on the Guardian blog.

Anyway, let's chuck the discussion over to the male readers of this blog - what is the most important novel you've ever read? Is it on the list or something different?

Y'know I've really got to scratch my head to think about the answer to this for myself ... there are so many ...

But 1984 would be pretty high up on my list too ...

What She Knows About Men

I don't think one should ever be cautious in love. Never. Just enjoy it.

Beryl Bainbridge contributes a fascinating piece on men and sex to the first issue of the Observer's Woman supplement with plenty of intriguing revelations about her life. She prefers men drunk. She once had it off on a chicken farm. She doesn't believe a husband can rape his wife.

On writing and gender, she says:

Writing has nothing to do with gender, only the imagination. Men have more time to write because the women are at home making the meals and bringing up the cups of coffee. There are an awful lot of very good women writers, but in the past many women didn't write because it wasn't their role. They had to keep quiet about it. Jane Austen used to write when everyone had gone out.

Murdo NacLeod's photo that goers with the article sadly isn't available online - but shows Ms. Bainbridge taking a big drag on a ciggy ... after she said she'd given up for her health. Tut tut. Of course though it could just be the typical bad girl pose (which she does very well).

Previous posts on Bainbridge:

According to Beryl (4/12/04)
Johnson's Dictionary (7/4/05)
Bainbridge at Seventy (5/10/05)
Beryl on Bernice (16/10/05)

The Gender Genie

Still on the subject of gender, Sharanya sent me this link to The Gender Genie. Paste in an extract from a text and it will tell you if it was written by a man or woman. (The techie bit is here if you're interested.)

According to a report in Utne magazine, the programme:

... assesses with 80 percent accuracy whether the authors of fiction and non-fiction books are male or female, reports Phillip Ball in Nature. Patterns detected by the program include the use of pronouns, such as I, you, he, she, them (female) and words that identify and quantify nouns, like a, the, that, one, two (male). The software, developed by Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University in Israel, was designed to "identify the most prevalent fingerprints of gender and of fiction and non-fiction." These fingerprints were applied to 566 English-language works published after 1975. Two titles misidentified by gender were Possession, by A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. "Strikingly, the distinctions between male and female writers are much the same as those that, even more clearly, differentiate non-fiction and fiction," identifying the genres themselves with 98 percent accuracy, Mr. Ball writes.

80% accuracy, my foot! According to the results posted on the website, the programme is right only 58% of the time - not a great deal better than simple guesswork. And it can't be up to much if it thinks Sharanya is a bloke! I ran a couple of paragraphs of an Annie Proulx story by it, figuring if any writer has a gender ambiguous writing style it's her. The programme told me that the first paragraph I enterered was written by a female and the second by a male!

(And according to the programme the paragraph above was typed by a male. I'm off for a sex-change op!)

Sexism among the Bookshelves?

Working on my article about men not reading books by women and a stray thought hit me like a brick.

For years now the nice Mr. Raman has been introducing me to books I've very much enjoyed by authors such as Kundera, Vikram Seth, Bulgakov, Orhan Pamuk, R.K. Narayan and Saramago.

But I can remember only one instance when he recommended a book by a female writer! It was Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories (shortly before the author came to do a reading) and he said it was incredible that Mukherjee is able to get right inside the mind of a man. Which is true of course.

Raman was not interested in publishing a little piece I wrote for him for his "literary magazine" on A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, despite the fact that it was longlisted for the Booker, I think it's excellent and know that others would enjoy it. (And I was of course giving the piece to him for free!) I wonder if he did not want to take my recommendation seriously because the novel's by a woman and must therefore be fluffy and unsubstantial??

Interesting question - how many women writers does he feature in his lit mag? Take a browse through the archives and tally up.

Books for the Guys

Want to help me with some research I'm doing for an article (with a scary deadline!)?

I'm investigating which authors appeal most to men, so I only want answers from the guys. (Not being discriminatory here, it's just that the article will appear in chrome.)

The questions are very simple:

1. what book are you reading now (or, if you aren't currently reading anything (shame on you!), what was the last book you read?
2. what was the last book you read which was written by a woman (with approximate date)?

You can either put the answers in the comments (exhibitionists) or send me an e-mail (shy guys) at sbakar@streamyx.com . Promise to let you know what I discover.

Many thanks.