Reviewing the List

File this under "cleaning up things from last year." It's not necessarily the last in this category (still have to do that one about resolution that was kicking in my brain from last December or so, but that one's going to have to wait a bit), but it's the one I feel capable of tackling. Unfortunately, while I'm sure I actually started writing this in September or so, I can't find the document. I suspect it's an orphan, one of the things left behind on the hard drive of my old computer that didn't get transferred. Perhaps I'll be able to rescue it someday.

This particular post was inspired initially back in August, when Jo Eberhardt penned this post at Writer Unboxed. The gist of it is that female protagonists are underrepresented in fiction, but because of perception, we (and by we, I apparently mean men and boys) think they are overrepresented, or at least equally represented. At the time (early August), I went through my running list of books I had read for 2016 and started counting--male protagonist, female protagonist, hard-to-tell-who-was-the-protagonist. As I started, I was cringing: at the end of 2015, one of the things I vowed to do was to read more widely, more diversely. Looking at the titles and authors, I was sure I had failed miserably.

When I counted, I was pleasantly surprised, because the "who's the protagonist" question turned out to be much more even than I expected. Not quite even, but close. I was going to write about it then, but either got lazy or decided to see how the list finished out. So, here's how this worked out (note that one book was an anthology, so no main protagonist at all):

TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS READ:  42
FICTION: 37
MALE PROTAGONISTS: 19
FEMALE PROTAGONISTS: 16
TRANSGENDER: 1

Forgive the "hard on the eyes" all caps for the table, and the fact that it's not a table. The number here surprised me, as I said, because when I first started looking at the titles and authors, as I said, I was sure that women protagonists were vastly underrepresented. Part of that was seeing Joe Hill's name on the list twice at the time, and forgetting that both of Hill's books that I read this year (NOS4A2 and The Fireman) had female protagonists. I'll also add there were two books on my list (The Water Knife and All the Ugly and Wonderful Things) that I counted as male. Though page time and point of view were shared fairly equally between male and female characters, I felt that the male character was the primary focus of the story, and one (All the Light We Cannot See) that I counted as female.

Now, I suppose I should look at authors. And for this, I'll expand the list to include the non-fiction. Note that there are more authors than books, because of co-authorships.

TOTAL BOOKS: 42
MALE AUTHORS: 31
FEMALE AUTHORS: 15

Ouch. Only about a third of the books I read were written by women. Yikes. Something else I need to fix? Minorities and other cultures. Only four of the books I read last year were not written by white Americans, as far as I can tell. Clearly, I still need to do some work on the "reading diversely" thing. How about you? Have you taken a good look at your reading list lately? What did you find? 

That's about it for me for now. I'm going to hopefully spend this Presidents' Day productively writing. Thanks for stopping by, and share your thoughts in the comments section.