Hooray, we have another book from my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). Matthew picked my list AND its order, so I obediently picked this up second. It dates back to January 2022, when Gill gave it to me for my birthday, choosing kindly from my wish list. Out of the 14 books I received then, I have now read and reviewed 10, with another of them appearing at the very end of my 20 Books (hopefully!). This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.

Helen Taylor – “Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives”

(23 January 2022, from Gill)

I have been moved by the different ways the simple pracice of reading resonates in daily and larger life narratives. Reading lives cross over with and complement our real lives, each giving substance and depth to the other. Women have described to me their lifelong passion for novels and short stories, their gratitue to those who taught them to read, and nostagia for earliest childhood books. They’ve named writers and books that have comforted, challenged, and transformed them. (p. 225)

Taylor is an educator who has spent her working life talking about books and directing events at and whole literature festivals, so she knows what she’s talking about and she’s both done secondary research and sent out a questionnaire which she admits is non-scientific but has given her all sorts of information on why, how and what women read, where they read it and who they read it with, including looking at women writers and their relationship to books and their own readers.

Taylor makes a valient effort to make sure she acknowledges race as well as gender issues, discussing the research done on what she refers to as BAME characters in books, workers in publishing and attendees / speakers at festivals (shows how things have moved on since 2019 in terminology terms).

Nice little personal points were a mention of childhood visits to Selly Oak library, not far from me and my local library when I was a student, and mentions of two of my clients in her secondary research. There’s also a picture of the (old) Persephone Bookshop (this book was published in 2019) and one of the short section on writers and commentators was sadly on Dovegreyreader, the beloved blogger who suddenly stopped blogging.

I kept thinking as I went along that the connection Taylor was making to women talking about their own life stories as connected to their reading was stretching things a bit, but then I realised that a) I have strong memories myself of reading particular books in particular places (James’ The Golden Bowl in Tunisia; Seth’s A Suitable Boy in the South of France; Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil in the reception of a hammam in Turkey) and how I set such store by the way Emma’s and my Reading Together pulls the strands of our lives closer together and has set us visiting locations in our books, not forgetting the effect reading Iris Murdoch early and often has had on my personal, psychological and semi-academic lives. So there’s that.

An interesting and passionate book paying tribute to women as readers.

This is Book 2 in my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

This is Book 36 in my 2024 TBR project – 105 to go!