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Well, Dayo, if the Guardian is making a reading list, you can bet it's going to be overwhelmingly male and European. How you've lived your life influences what you like to read. Am I the only one who thinks it's silly to pretend otherwise, that it's ridiculous to pretend that we can be Platonic Guardians deciding absolute merit?
Which brings me into the discussion of Why Are There No Great Women Writers—which I sat out last week, since it always makes me really, really sleepy. Maybe I just got worn out by the English dept. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it reminds me too much of the enraged fights my father and brothers used to have over who was the greatest baseball player of all time—fights that sent me off to my room, where (being a total nerd) I escaped into War and Peace. Is Edith Wharton better or worse than Herman Melville? Is Jane Austen better or worse than Evelyn Waugh? Are Great Pitchers Better or Worse than Great Catchers or Great Hitters or Great All-Around Players? Why even debate it, when we need all of them to enjoy the game?
But when it comes to the Platonic Guardians making their lists of 1,000 necessary books, well, whether because of nature, nurture, or culture, men and women—on average—have different interests and tastes in life. Not all of us, not all the time; I find reading chick lit to be as much fun as a bumpy flight in a tiny prop plane, while I couldn't put down Bleak House. But on average, over time, what women and men find more riveting tends to be different.
So here's a modest proposal. Why not have separate prizes—and lists—for male and female writers? The queer community realized long ago that we would slit one another's throats (figuratively speaking) if we had to decide whether Frank O'Hara was Better or Worse than Adrienne Rich—so our groups give prizes for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, and so on. Why can't all lit prizes—or lists of great literature—do the same?
Now I have to go take my nap.
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The Guardian has published a list of 1,000 novels to read before you die. As it should, the list contains, for me, some beloved texts—and some totally unheard of. In search of a riff on your post on domesticity-vs.-sweeping drama, Meghan, I perused the list for signs of gender difference.
Evelyn Waugh, easily one of my favorite authors (and not, as I discovered in high school, a woman), gets eight nods; I totally agree with such praise, but even the most decorated female (Jane Austen) gets only six. A full accounting was too taxing for today, but males do dominate the “war and travel,” “science fiction and fantasy,” and “crime” categories. Throughout, Carson McCullers, George Eliot, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Elizabeth Gaskell keep things interesting, but the only category that approaches gender parity is in “love” (at least it’s not all chick lit).
Sure, the list-makers have excluded short stories and nonfiction and poetry (all of which, you’d assume have the same gender imbalance), but what gives with the lack of XX authors? Equally understandable but more troublesome, perhaps, is the list’s Eurocentrism—does it have to be so white and so male? Of course, there is no comprehensive list of books about women (Flaubert, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and Jeffrey Eugenides are some male authors who might anchor that list). Maybe in 50 years we’ll have a different roster entirely?
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