Sex in terms of male or female, my friends (usually now called the inaccurate ‘gender’). This entry is about how the author’s sex/gender influences reading decisions.

I reviewed Of Bees and Mist earlier this week (I was a little disappointed). I picked this book up based on the first few pages, the presence of leading female characters, and a bit of a whim. When I got it home, I realised the author’s name was EricK, not EricA and I have to admit that my heart sank and that I would not have bought it had I noticed that it was written by a man, not a woman.

The reason for that is simple: I generally don’t think male authors do a good job portraying woman as actual people rather than as stereotypes of their ideal or nightmare, and this particular book focuses on three main female characters. In fact, I probably misread the name entirely because it was a book about women, and, naughty me, I assumed the author too would be female.

Kudos to Setiawan — the book wasn’t my cup of tea, but I didn’t have to waste time rolling my eyes at his characterisations (partly because the style of the book lent itself to somewhat less than full-bodied characters anyway — not a criticism, just an observation of this style of book). I did think, as I said in the review, that the male lead in that book did not deserve the ending he got, and that could be because the author was male and thought he did…

But the point is that I have this tremendous bias — I like to read books with female leads, but not if they’re written by men. On the other hand, male leads written by women, I have no problem with. I don’t feel too bad about this, as it’s no worse than the fact that men notoriously tend not to read books by or about women whereas women tend to be perfectly happy to read books by or about men. The example from my little world is Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures… — by a man, about two male leads, and I utterly adored it.

I do feel bad only in that I recognise that I’m wrong in this bias. I’ve read plenty of books by men that do a decent job at creating complex female characters that don’t fall into the angel/whore dichotomy (or the ballbreaker/wants-100-children dichotomy or the nice-girl/bitch dichotomy and so on ad nauseum).

I’ve also read plenty of books by women that are just as narrow in their outlook of what women are or want or need as something written by a man (yes, I know it’s a joke book and so does the webcomic writer. It still has that same old underlying message that women don’t really enjoy sex).

And if you want an example of a man doing a terrible job even though his wife is helping him write the series, you can’t really go past fantasy writer David Eddings, who seemed incapable of creating female characters not based on his apparently wonderfully wise wife or his apparently snotty-as-all-get-out teenage daughter. When I found out his wife had helped him, my first thought was, why aren’t his female characters more diverse then?.

Note: I’m sure there’s plenty of authors of either sex who do a terrible job writing men. I can’t judge this, all I can say is that the characterisation didn’t work for me or rang false somehow. Generally, if an author can’t capture the way a person, male or female, thinks or their motivations in an authentically human way, their portrayal of male AND female characters is going to be off. Authors that limit their female characters will probably limit their male characters too. (ie David Eddings’s male characters weren’t all that diverse either, he was just applying a slightly wider range of archetypes…)

Even knowing I’m wrong, I still hesitate when seeing a male name on a certain type of book; since I read a lot in the fantasy genre, I recoil especially from fantasy books with female leads but male authors. I try not to have this reaction, though often I don’t even notice that I do (as above, where I only realised my bias when I saw I’d misread the author’s name). I try not to judge a book by its cover — and that includes the sex of the name on the cover.

What about you? Do you pay attention to the sex of the author? Are you more or less likely to choose a book when the author is male or when she’s female?