#ReadingOnlyBooksWrittenByWomen Archive

I get asked frequently why I'm still only #ReadingOnlyBooksWrittenByWomen and why I update the books I'm reading so often on twitter. I get that no one is religiously checking the list of books I've been reading each month because they are desperate to know what I've been reading. I'm not actually that self-involved. I list them because its important to me. I don't want to forget what I've read. I want their to be an archive of the books which have touched me and moved me and made me fall in love.

To me, this is an essential part of my feminist activism. It makes me feel a part of the feminist movement even on those days when my disability makes it difficult for me to walk or even focus enough to read. I can see the list and know I've done something to combat cultural femicide. I've read one woman's story and tried to share that love with others.

As Aminatta Forna says in Ancestor Stones, I believe that women are the keeper of stories: 

"For the past survives in the scent of a coffee bean, a person's history is captured in the shape of an ear, and those most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard. 

And it is women's work, this guarding of stories, like the tending of gardens."

The fact that we privilege male writers is because of the Patriarchy; not because women's stories aren't important. Men assume their "literature", because men never tell something so insignificant as stories, are the reality. They are wrong. Women's lives are silenced daily through cultural femicide. This has to end.

This week will be mostly book reviews. I will post new ones but also retweet old ones. Women are the keepers' of stories. I want to hear the stories of my sisters and I want to share them as the precious gifts they are.