Minus the Spine

So far this year I’ve been going through a women writer phase–Willa Cather, Kiran Desai, Alice Munro–which historically for me is nothing new but over the past year I’ve been really trying to diversify by reading more contemporary and classic male writers. Gender-wise, I think as a reader I assume that I will relate better to literature by women but that’s often not the case. (I mean, I definitely don’t relate to the Confessions of a Shopaholic series, etc.) But both looking back over what I read last year, and reading the somewhat narrowly focused stories of Alice Munro in Friend of My Youth (review here), I realized how much great writing really does transcend the lines of personal experience.