This is one of those posts which was trigged by a blog I read (thanks LA) which was, in turn, prompted by something she read (yes, do we seem to inspire one another). The question being asked was whether you have a preference for a particular gender in your protagonist (as a reader that is) … which later drifted into whether you have a gender preference for authors too.
Off the top of my head, I’d have said I was pretty evenly balanced, but there’s no point using Goodreads to record your reading if you don’t look at the stats is there?
|
2019 to date |
2018 |
2017 |
|
| Female protagonist |
11 |
29 |
22 |
| Male protagonist |
7 |
23 |
6 |
| Mixture of protagonists |
4 |
5 |
6 |
| Female author |
12 |
34 |
30 |
| Male author |
9 |
23 |
27 |
| Male & female author together |
1 |
0 |
0 |
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve to tell you I counted Robert Galbraith as female, but surely knowing that’s Joanna Rowling’s pen name, it’s impossible to count him as male, isn’t it?
I’ve a surprising (to me anyway) preference for female authors over male, and a decided preference for female protagonists over male protagonists. Surprising as I’ve gone out of my way to avoid challenges designed to get me to read more of either authors or protagonists by gender split.
After a little cogitate, I wondered if this was down to my preferred genres, so you know where this is going next, don’t you ..?
| Biography/Memoir |
16 |
| Non-Fiction |
11 |
| Literary Fiction |
38 |
| Humour |
6 |
| Sciience fiction/fantasy |
14 |
| Crime/thrillers |
10 |
| Women’s Fiction |
33 |
| Historical Fiction |
5 |
And voilà! Turns out I read a lot more Women’s Fiction than I thought – so it’s heroines for me all the way 🙂
If you’ve got this far, thank you for bearing with me on my little ramble through the stats. Would you care to share your preference – if you have one that is?
© Debra Carey, 2019
debsdespatches.com 
First off💗💗💗and secondly…it’s really interesting to drill down and see what we really read! I think I’m going to begin doing year end stats when I go over my reading. Good post!
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H’mm – interesting. Two of my favourite authors are female with male protagonists, although that is skewed a bit because along the way both get married to females who are initially unsure of themselves but become equal partners. The series I am reading at the moment is a male author with a strong female and male cast. When I include Golden Age (disclosure: one of the favourites is Golden Age) female writers predominate, largely because a couple of male authors have a number of pseudonyms – yes Cecil John Charles Street I’m looking at you! 🙂 On balance, though, I don’t think I have a preference either way: the thing that attracts me is the quality of the writing.
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Thanks LA 🙂 I’ve only been tracking my reading for a few years now and have discovered all kinds of interesting trends that way. Look forward to reading your post when you get to doing it.
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Alan, I agree, it’s generally the quality of the writing for me too. I think I’d ignored how much women’s literature I read as a genre, because I tend to use them as palate cleansers between heavier tomes.
I suppose it’s not unexpected that writers from the Golden Age (even those who are female) would choose to have male protagonists due to the societal restrictions of the time, but I smiled at the fact that they’d managed to widen their tales to include female co-protagonists 😀
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