#readwomen2014

If you haven’t seen our Facebook posts or heard us chatting about the Sotonettes Book Club already, you’re missing out!  In the autumn of 2013, Kate (one of our Sotonettes Committee Members) decided to start up the book club and it’s already become very popular.  If you’d like to find out more about it, have a look at the Book Club page – the next meeting is tomorrow, so please do come along if you’re interested!

The year of reading women

Joanna Walsh’s 2014 bookmarks

At the moment, the Book Club has chosen to focus its reading activities on female authors and books with female leading characters. The Guardian has recently written an article about a newly trending hashtag, #readwomen2014 and the reasons behind it.  Writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh is starting the campaign for people to read more literature written by women and has even created her own 2014 bookmarks (see above). Read more about this hashtag and Joanna’s campaign in the article here and on her website and blog.

Without spoiling The Guardian’s work, we should highlight the work by an organisation called Vida.  A few years ago, they carried out a study which revealed a surprising imbalance of published reviews between works by male and female authors.  Find out more about their 2011 findings in another Guardian article and the subsequent results for 2012 and 2013 on ‘The Count’ site.

This got me thinking – how many books on my bookshelves are by female authors?  After a thorough count, our living room collection contains 68 books by male authors and only 22 by women (it was looking very bad for the girls until I found the 7 Harry Potter books).  It seems I fit perfectly into the norm with male authors dominating my bookcases, but do you?  Let us know your thoughts – you can comment on this post below or drop us an email at sotonettes@gmail.com or find us on Facebook!