The Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge held by Worlds Without End, which is a great website for readers of genre fiction to check out.

The Challenge was pretty simple – within the 12 months of 2013 read 12 books written by women authors whose work you’d never read before and post a review. I failed pretty spectacularly at this, for several reasons. Chief amongst those was that I didn’t do much writing of any kind for most of last year, especially blogging or writing reviews. Secondary problems included starting the challenge fairly late and having way, way too many things on my ‘to be read’ pile.

Still, I didn’t completely fail. Though I didn’t read as much in general last year as I would have liked (and I’m actually a fairly slow reader) I did manage to to finish a few books for the challenge:

• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
• The Shambling Guide to New York by Mur Lafferty
• Grimspace by Ann Aguirre
• Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck

Of those only Zoo City got a review posted, and I hope to correct that oversight soon, because I liked all of those books. I’m also planning to make an effort to have more parity in the genders of the authors I read going forward. Currently I’m reading Octavia E. Butler’s “Dawn”. I also am about a quarter of the way through Yoko Ogawa’s short story collection “Revenge” and, due to my serious addiction to grabbing way more books than I have time to read, I have probably a half dozen other works by women authors I’ve never read before to get to eventually.

Going forward I also plan to post reviews of what I’ve read here more often. You can expect them to be generally positive and more in the line of recommendations than critical reviews, because I probably won’t finish books I don’t like (I’m not a professional reviewer after all, and under no obligation to do so) and I’m still on the fence about whether or not writers (which I’m told I can call myself even if I don’t really believe it yet) should review other writer’s books.