Women write. I read.

I didn't expect the list to get longer.  After all, it is such an exclusive list of fiction authors who have earned their doctorates. Today I add one more to the list.

Well, technically not an addition to the list because the author, Malinda Lo, did not complete the PhD program.  Wikipedia is where I found out that:

Lo was born in China and moved to the United States at the age of three. She graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master's degree in Regional Studies from Harvard. She enrolled at Stanford with the intention of obtaining a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology, but left with a second master's degree.

I am blown away by these accomplished writers, many of whom are women. 

Through my early years of reading fiction, the authors were overwhelmingly male.  From RK Narayan to Fyodor Dostoevsky to John Steinbeck, it was mostly male authors.  Even the potboilers were from men like Frederick Forsyth.  Among Tamil authors, it was not unusual back then for men to write under female pseudonyms.  Like with Indira Parthasarathy, whose name suggests that it is a woman but it is a man writing under his wife's name.

So much was the male dominance in my literary world that six years ago, I intentionally curated for my summer reading books that were authored by women.  It was a summer of no male authors!  As I noted then, it has always bothered me that while I have not read a great many books, most of what I read was authored by men.  I was badly in need of diversity in the form of female authors.  It is not that I have shied away from them; from Jane Austen to Jhumpa Lahiri, I have read my share of works by female writers.  But, the scale was clearly tilted.

The current reading series is different in many ways.  Unlike in the past when most of my serious fiction reading happened only in the summer, the forced retirement has made every day a summer day, even when there is no sun and warmth outside.  And, it is not that I have been particular about reading books mostly by women; it just so happens that the works that I selected to read had female authors.

A byproduct to this diversity in authors brings in other kinds of diversity too.  For one, many authors are non-white, confirming again and again Orhan Pamuk's prediction that the future in English fiction belongs to storytellers from the brown world, and with stories about brown people's lives.  On top of this, some of the stories, and the authors too, do not conform to the heterosexual normative through which most of us look at the world.  Of course, there is the classic example of Somerset Maugham from the past, many of whose stories I have read and enjoyed.  But his sexuality was not openly talked about, nor did the stories that I read have characters who were not straight.

Now, it is diversity galore.  What a great time to have been laid off; I should thank my former employer for giving me this unpaid sabbatical for life so that I can understand the world better through diverse stories.

I didn't know anything about Malinda Lo whose book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, I am reading until I read the acknowledgements.  I have had this nasty habit for a long time, perhaps all the time.  I read the pages other than the main story and only after that do I start reading the story.  I don't ever recall reading any magazine from the first page to the last either.  This has worked well for me, though it might drive others crazy!

In the acknowledgement, Lo thanked her wife. Even though there are plenty of pages left in the book, I thank Lo for the book.

A bonus if you read until here ;)  The winner of the International Booker Prize is, yep, a woman.  A woman from India.  It is for a work of fiction in Hindi that has been translated into English.