I’m currently reading Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller. I’ve never heard of the book or the author. While I was drawn to the book’s title and cover design, I eventually decided to buy the book because it is written by a woman.
I have a reading commitment to support female writers. I’d like to think that this commitment has its roots in my university days when I was an active participant of the English Department’s Women’s Studies section. But thinking back further, I think it was shaped by reading choices from when I was a kid. Of course, in those days, I did not choose a book based on its author; I just chose what looked interesting, and based on what I’d read previously.
The very first author I read was the children’s writer, Enid Blyton. And the very first book I read by her was something about a circus (I thought the title was The Circus Comes To Town but I can’t find it in her bibliography). It had probably the first female character I ever read, and a strong one, too.
From Enid Blyton, I moved on to Agatha Christie. Over the years, there were many other writers, both male and female. And then in the 1970s, I found a book called Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. I was so taken by her that I went on and bought her second book, China Men, and later – much later! – her third book, Tripmaster Monkey. It was a gap of more than 10 years between the second and third books, and I’d been waiting all those years, so when the book was finally announced and available in England, I went and bought the hard cover version, costing more than £30 at the time, an amount I could hardly afford as a poor undergrad student. I went ahead and bought it anyway, but it did mean I could not afford to buy Toni Morrison’s Beloved which was released at around the same time.
Tripmaster Monkey had come out near the end of my undergrad years. By that time, I’d been discovering women writers, both old and new. And also women’s studies, and feminist criticism, too. It was around that time that I made a commitment to support women writers. How? By reading them. Even the not so well known ones.
I might never have heard of Nora Okja Keller before I saw her book, but the blurb on the first page of the book says she “received the Pushcart Prize for ‘Mother Tongue’, a piece that became part of Comfort Women and the novel has since won a 1998 American Book Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize.”
Yes, despite my commitment to support women writers, somehow I had never heard of Nora Okja Keller. To be honest, I don’t go out of my way to look for new women writers; I don’t even follow the Orange Prize award which is given to women writers. Even when I’m aware of the list of nominations, I don’t go out of my way to get the books. There’s a very practical reason for this – I can’t afford to buy books by unknown (to me) writers, even though they are female and are nominated for book awards, because I might end up liking only one of them.
Instead, what I do is I wait for book sales and patiently look at each title in each sales and then pick the ones that look interesting. This is how I found Comfort Women – at the 2007 Pearson Sale.
Of course, once I enjoyed a particular writer’s work, I would keep a look out for her next book, which I would buy when available (i.e., new and often hard cover). Toni Morrison is one such writer. Another is Isabel Allende. Maxine Hong Kingston, too, although I have to admit to being disappointed with Tripmaster Monkey, but have promised myself to go back and read it again … someday.
I do buy new books, of course, but usually after I’d found the writer to be good. Yiyun Li is one such author. I’d heard a lot about her first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which I couldn’t afford new but found a copy at an MPH book sales. After that, I looked forward to her next book. When The Vagrants came out, I bought it, new and expensive, and enjoyed it; less than a year later, the paperback was available, but I don’t regret buying the more expensive hardcover. There are some writers whose new books I would pay for; she is one of them, and the other is Toni Morrison.
During a recent visit to BookXcess, I saw they had Gail Tsukiyama in stock – not just one or two of her books, but almost the full list. Tsukiyama is an author I’ve heard of before, so I was excited to find her books available here (and cheap, too). I haven’t bought any yet – I still have a very long TBR list to read – but I might, the next time I’m at BookXcess.
Meanwhile, today is UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day, which is what prompted this post. I wanted to celebrate today by acknowledging, and re-affirming, my reading commitment to women writers.
