Another chart: books by gender.

I'm only about a third of my way through The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but it's good stuff - poetic prayers invoking both the male and female entities of the Buddhist pantheon: buddhas, bodhisattvas, gatekeepers, you name it.

Which is a good enough lead-in for a pie chart about the genders of the authors I've been reading for this project, as promised in an earlier post.

So far, I've read 93 books:

61 are by men.
29 are by women.
Two have both male and female authors, namely A Trip to the Beach and Voices.
One is allegedly of divine authorship, The Quran.

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This is actually pretty heartening: it suggests that one third of the writers I'm reading are women, which is way higher than I expected given that a whole bunch of these books are by their nations' most celebrated writers and/or kinda old.

It's also worth noting that my South Asia reading list has actually been completely male-dominated so far, which might tip the balance in favour of men. I'll finally get to a female South Asian writer (and there are plenty!) when I cover Bhutan.