In honor of Halloween, I thought I'd update the 'Hello Ladies' index, the only thing I'm truly trying to 'dress up' around these parts here on TOA. (For those unfamiliar with this previous item, please see this link.)
Confused by my opening sentence? Allow me to refer to this passage from my last update of this index, published in this post from July:
'...I am not counting multiple books from the same author in the year-to-date total...'Make sense? No? Yeah, same with me (1).
Anyway, here are the basic author head counts for my reading thus far in 2017:
January: 4 male authors / 6 female authors
February: 9 / 1
March: 9 / 0
April: 2 / 2
May: 4 / 2
June: 4 / 3
July: 5 / 3
August: 4 / 5
September: 5 / 2
Year-to-date (count): 46 male / 24 female
Year-to-date (adjusted): 34 male / 21 female
So, what to make of these numbers? Let's break it down a little bit...
*On the surface, thirty-four to twenty-one doesn't seem like a terrible result. But perhaps I'm comparing it against the far more unbalanced forty-six to twenty-four starting point.
*Three-fourths of the way into the year, the pace is about one and a half extra books written by male authors per month.
*I'm reading about eight books a month so the monthly ratio works out to four and three quarters against three and a quarter.
*If the wildly off balance February and March tallies were removed, I would be down to twenty-eight against twenty-three in terms of headcount (and perhaps even better on the adjusted tally).
I'm not going to declare these numbers some kind of emergency but I did expect to do a little better after resolving to pay more attention to how I was selecting books in 2017. Maybe I was expecting the management truism of 'what gets measured gets managed' to magically apply to my book selections. Or maybe I thought the books I would find interesting in 2017 would come from shelves more equally stocked to begin with.
I do feel I made some effort this year, no doubt about it, but the results show a little more is required if I want to achieve parity on next year's reading list.
I'll be back sometime in early 2018 with the final tallies and a brief wrap up.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Well, if I MUST explain myself...
I think I added the twist knowing I planned on reading all of George Saunders's work this year. He's written like, what, ten books?
Just for fun, here is an example showing how the same thinking might be used to analyze this blog's 'Hello Ladies' Index:
True On Average (count): 235 posts by male authors / 0 female authors
True On Average (adjusted): 1 male author / 0 female authors
