Bibliotheca

bibliotheca \,bih-blee-oh'thee-kuh\
1 archaic : BIBLE
2 : a library or collection of books
3 : a list or catalog of books

I read a lot, though I haven't been reading as much for the past month or so due to the immense amount of stuff I've had to do. Generally I read literature, classic novels and so on, with the occasional indulgence like Artemis Fowl or The Rule of Four, interspersed with a lot of plays (as I'm a drama nerd), biographies, science books, history books, and whatever else I feel like. Being homeschooled gives me some choice as to what I can read and don't have to read, since my parents don't micromanage my reading list and generally assume that I'm reading something good. If they walk by and see me holding The Master and Margarita or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, they can walk away with satisfied smiles.

As an example of the sort of stuff I read, here is my reading list (which I keep diligently, one might almost say obsessively) for the past few months. The presence of a reading list somehow encourages me to read more so that I'll have something to put on the list, especially at the end of each month.

October
The Rule of Four- Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Stuff Happens- David Hare
Mother Courage and Her Children- Bertolt Brecht
Nehru- Shashi Tharoor
Uncommon Carriers- John McPhee
Purity of Blood- Arturo Perez-Reverte
The New Life- Orhan Pamuk
Three Tall Women- Edward Albee
Impromptu- Tad Mosel
No Exit- Jean-Paul Sartre

November
The Children's Hour- Lillian Hellman
The Clothes They Stood Up In & The Lady in the Van- Alan Bennett
The Duck Variations- David Mamet
Freakonomics- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Oh, Play That Thing- Roddy Doyle
Invisible Cities- Italo Calvino

December
Blue Door- Tanya Barfield
Bad Science- Gary Taubes
Strange Pilgrims- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jesus' Son- Denis Johnson
The Shia Revival- Vali Nasr

While looking at this reading list at one point, and the entire year's worth of books listed before it, I noticed how woefully lacking it is in female authors. My selection of subject material is wide and various, and authors of many nationalities are represented on this list, but there are really very few women, aside from a disproportionate number of female black playwrights- Suzan Lori-Parks, Lynn Nottage, Tanya Barfield, and Lorraine Hansberry, for example. Am I just subliminally sexist? Are there just not that many books written by women? The latter explanation does not account for this woeful shortage.

So to rectify this abominable situation, encouraged by my mom's plan to read more books by femal authors (specifically, if I recall, American female authors), I've decided to increase the female-penned segment of my reading list. This happens to coincide with the New Year but has nothing to do with it- I don't make New Year's resolutions because I never keep them and therefore it's a waste of time. Some of the female authors I'm planning to read are E. Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Lillian Hellman, Wendy Wasserstein, Marilynne Robinson, and maybe even Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, or (egads!) Willa Cather. Not all at once, of course; I'm still going to intersperse these with scientific books (Darwin, Dawkins, Feynman, Hawking, Sagan), plays (Albee, Ionesco, Pinter, Shepard, O'Neill, Soyinka), biographies (MLK Jr., actors like Alec Guinness or John Gielgud, political leaders/revolutionaries), and plenty of novels by men (some that spring to mind are Schindler's List, Child of All Nations, The Satanic Verses, In the Lake of the Woods, and On the Road).

I'll keep you posted.