Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. While a lot of people treat it as a dog training book, her work in behavioral psychology and training has much broader applications. It can really change the way you approach interpersonal relationships.
Heard a famous ADHD researcher recommend both this and Steven Pinker's Blank Slate for helping parents digest the science on why they can't engineer outcomes for their kids.
I suggested Toni Morrison and held without a doubt that she was the greatest living writer until her passing last year. She'll likely always hold that top spot in my mind, no one can compare. Go read "Sula" or "Song of Solomon" or "Beloved" or "The Bluest Eye". Her work will make you a better human.
I don't have an answer, other than the observation that women, as a class, were generally excluded from authorship in most cultures, with rare exceptions, until relatively recently.
However, there are some "popular" examples. Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin (literature), Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion (nonfiction). They aren't as fashionable today as they were in earlier generations, but that's fashion.
For me, Svetlana Alexievich (born 1948, in modern Ukraine) has been a revelation. I haven't read all of her works yet, but they're on my lists. I can give a strong firsthand recommendation for The Unwomanly Face of War (which recently got a P&V translation: https://www.amazon.com/Unwomanly-Face-War-History-Women/dp/0...).
Her work incidentally illuminates how we systematically lack certain accounts of history. The implication is that we miss pretty much everything "important", when we read history through the traditional lenses of the armed conflict and politics. The literary motif of giving voice to the politically voiceless is an everpresent theme in Russian literature (going back through Turgenev's treatment of serfs), and in the late 20th century it was brought to nonfiction, through Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich.
Statistically-speaking, most people do not spend their lives in the politburo, or in the general staff of the army, but those statistically-significant people do not usually write the history we read. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it's a revelation, and it tends to change one's perspective on the relative costs and utilities of war. As a culture, we're obsessed with the "individual", and we're typically obsessed with the "wrong" the individuals (i.e. the ones whose lives are exceedingly uncommon).
I think her work should be required reading for those seeking to become public servants, whose personal lives are often significantly detached from the consequences of the decisions they make in their professional lives. I don't know if I would call it life-changing, but it's up there.
"The Handmaid's Tale" has an interesting epilogue that touches on this. It's in the style of a later academic lamenting how the narrator didn't say anything about the political power structures of Gilead when, of course, the whole narration had been about the personal power structures.
It's similar in that it offers a somewhat unconventional lens to history, this time applied to the Cold War. As Americans, we often think of the East-West German divide in terms of Soviet and American interests, politicians, and international intrigue.
Yet, for "normal" Germans living in otherwise "normal" towns, the arbitrary partitioning of their country along hastily-drawn lines was an event that had to be integrated into their daily lives. We often think of history in top-down ways (i.e. FDR and Stalin decided that X would happen, and so it did). This book really subverts that narrative, and instead presents a brilliantly-researched and significantly chaotic reality. You come away thinking that the iron curtain was not an inevitable thing, but rather the result of frequent misunderstandings and breakdowns in effective communication, and the inability of distanced leaders to assume good intent.
For me, it changed my default perspective on how borders and bureaucratic systems work, and what role law and top-down decision making (good, bad, influential and negligible) has in everyday life, especially in moments of big change.
It's tangentially relevant to the coronavirus, where big bureaucracies are trying to flex into everyday life. It gives you some intuition of where we should expect these efforts to succeed, and where we can expect it to fail.
Oh man, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is AMAZING on so many levels.
A common thread with these books seems to be exploring consciousness and definitions of self.
As a bonus it does stuff I find more from women authors, like quietly question gender roles without making a scene about it, question slavery, ownership, etc.
Similar a bit to the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells but on a whole other level.
Its a wonderful trilogy of three books. Strongly recommend it.
I can also recommend N.K. Jemisin, not really mind bending, but very odd
Generally I dislike it when authors patronise me, banging my head against their genius, and I find women authors tend to do that less (Disclaimer to sensitive people : this is my personal opinion)
I concur with Ancillary Justice. I love the way that you have to work out what is happening through successive detail. Plenty of surprises. A genderless society is very hard to get one's mind around.
Can second both Ann Leckie (her new book "The Raven Tower" is also a great page-turner) and N.K. Jemisin (who did totally blow my mind with her Broken Earth Trilogy).
Ursula K. Le Guin also appears down below; The Left Hand of Darkness was a profound read.
Someone suggested Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which is by Susan Cain. Your point stands, though. HN's userbase is massively male-a survey a few years ago put it at 94% [0]. This is presumably because the high-tech startup crowd has identical demographics. These books are mostly related to tech or business, so while the skew is notable, it's an artifact of the broader issue.
I don't think it's a tautology to say HN's users are mostly male because the group it draws from is mostly male. There's room for competing theories like some quality unique to the website. To put my thought in bad ASCII flowchart form:
Male tech startup people -> Male HN users -> Male-dominated interest areas -> Male author recommendations
It's a matter of priority. Do you want your mind blown, period, or do you want it blown with [some set of constraints on how and by whom]? I'd say the first condition is hard enough. FWIW "A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Wolf) has stuck with me forever, as has "The Lathe of Heaven" (Ursula K. LeGuin)
I guess I’ll add to the female authors being suggested under this comment.
Wilding - Isabella Tree. Changed how I think about what nature needs, away from the simplistic “more forests! Less agriculture!” viewpoint.
The Female Man - Joanna Russ. Forget all the ‘makeup is empowering!’ Twitter feminism. Russ has a different idea. “For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman... I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man”
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg (if we count Feinberg as, at least, a female-at-birth author). A complex exploration of what gender and transgenderism and sexuality mean to people depending on their class, subculture, etc. What should we call Jess? Trans, a man, a lesbian, non-binary, something else?
I also want to say Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, but I can’t easily explain why.
Perhaps not "mind bending" but I Should Have Honor: A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan by Khalida Brohi definitely opened my eyes to a world I didn't realize existed.
Its hard. After decades of reading indiscriminately, I found I was reading almost purely male authors. Of course; there are so many in comparison. So I have a female-author reading list now.
Same thing here. Only 16% of the books I've read 2015-now were written by women. Needless to say, as soon as I've realized that, I've picked up a book written by a woman and prioritized a few of them in my to-read list. So far this year I'm 3/7, aiming for >50% this year.
While it may not completely change your life, a book that definitely opens your eyes (probably more so if you're white and male) when it comes to mondern-day racism and just how biased our thinking really is is "Biased" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. You ask how many of the authors listed here a women but one could just as easily ask how many of the authors listed here are black and I think the answer would be just as shocking.
Looks like Ayn Rand was listed almost an hour ago (relative to your post). There may be others, that was the first that I searched for, figuring it would show up, and yep...
And as a more useful follow-up, I'll jump in and suggest Annie Duke's "Thinking In Bets" (subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and the rest of the Maddaddam Trilogy. I read it a few years ago, but still think about it all the time. The writing is vivid and visceral, and the characters have an emotional and spiritual depth that you almost never find in dystopian scifi. There are also some spooky parallels to what's happening now.
I really enjoyed the Masters of Roman series by Colleen McCullough, she brings color and life to the famous characters of Sulla, Gaius Marius and Caesar.
We are looking for ideas to bend our mind. I'm happy to keep the authors gender, race, religion, or nationality out of that. The same applies for HN comments.
Going through all 278 comments to find a female name is more notable to me.
In the throes of your rant at someone making a perfectly accurate observation you seemed to have made a false dichotomy.
The options aren't just that everyone on HN is sexist nor that women aren't interested in writing books on mind bending concepts, but another reason, as has been mentioned above, is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. From there it becomes rather obvious why there are less woman authors at all!
Also, check out some of Ursula Le Guin's work if you are into sci-fi.
Okay, let me just say then that your tone is very, very confusing. What with the "Obviously, everyone here is a sexist. Wake up people!" It sounds like you were being sarcastic? Were you being sincere?
I'm totally sincere. But don't let that influence you. Be rational.
When something seems ambiguous you need to shed your biases and follow the logic and evidence. Read what I wrote in my response and both dispute and reason about the logic and evidence behind it. If you find the logic to be correct then we're good, if you find it to be incorrect then both of our premises are logically flawed.
Social constructs are real, but somewhat arbitrary. There's no genetic difference between Catholics and Protestants. If you were Catholic as a child, you could become Protestant as an adult.
Religion is socially constructed, but its differences still matter to people. Someone could legitimately ask why there were no Catholic US presidents prior to JFK.
