I’ve deliberately made an effort lately to read more fiction by women. I already read something like 40% fiction by women naturally – now it’s more like 75%. Call it making up for lost time.

I didn’t expect the quality of my reading material to go down, and it did not. However, there is a lot more breadth in material written by women than in general than that written by men and that has improved my reading experience considerably.

As if there were any doubt, women and men are equally good writers, but female writers in general don’t seem as prone to be locked into certain binary ideas about gender or even society at large. That is to say, you are far less likely to read some unexamined translation of 1950s gender roles into a society of 2896 if it’s written by a woman.

The latest one I’ve read is Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which was quite good.