Some of you will remember that I wasn’t very impressed with my reading stats from last year. I did read more women writers than men, but only a tenth of the things I read were by writers who weren’t white, and I have a worrying suspicion that the number of romance novels and school stories I reread made the gender balance look more impressive than it really was.
So I’d planned to fix that this year, and I like to think I’ve already made a good start. And then a couple of days ago my friend Aishwarya G (with whom I am proud to share a first name) suggested a writing challenge along the lines of the Australian Women Writers Challenge.
So we spent some time trying to work out how many books people read per year on average, arguing over whether we wanted to focus on Indian writers or not, and finally came up with what seem like a comfortingly liberal set of guidelines. An introductory post is here; there’s a twitter account here, there’ll probably be a facebook page soon (Aishwarya has done most of the work so far). Join in, read things.
For my own challenges: I will not be counting books I am asked to review professionally as part of the challenge, but I will count books I choose to review for my column. I don’t want to commit to a number (though I hope it will be more than 10 at least) but I will review at least half of the books by South Asian women that I read.
