A Book A Week By Women Authors

In 2023 I realized that my reading rate had both stalled, and become saturated by male writers. To redress that balance I swore on oath to read at least one book a week, and for those books to be entirely by women authors. In the end, I read 123 – all by women – and wrote reviews for the vast majority of them. These are those reviews.

These were originally published as Patreon newsletters for my subscribers. They’re now replicated in largely unedited form. As a warning though, I wrote these for an audience of people who were actually paying cash money for my opinions and thus they knew what they were getting. These represent unvarnished thoughts.

Because I am a tiresome nerd, I kept some stats as I went through this. I read 123 books in total, at a rate of almost 139 pages a day. The average book was 391.4 pages long. My average rating was 3.9 out of 5 stars – a very good year. Books in bold below are the 4.5 and 5 star bangers.

Reviews

  • Books 1 to 5
    • A Thousand Ships
    • Embrace Your Weird
    • The Space Between Worlds
    • Piranesi
    • Ancillary Justice
  • Books 6 to 10
    • The Slow Professor
    • The Bird and the Stone
    • Design is Storytelling
    • The Queens of Animation
    • The Memory Police
  • Books 11 to 15
    • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
    • Kim Jiyoung Born 1982
    • Sea of Tranquility
    • A Memory Called Empire
    • Rise of the Rocket Girls
  • Books 16 to 20
    • Jade City
    • The Housekeeper and the Professor
    • The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
    • Mexican Gothic
    • The Invisible Library
  • Books 21 to 25
    • The Binding
    • A Closed and Common Orbit
    • The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
    • The Unwomanly Face of War
    • Matrix
  • Books 26 to 30
    • Daisy Jones and the Six
    • Babel
    • Word Perfect
    • A Room of One’s Own
    • Are You Happy Now?
  • Books 31 to 35
    • My Year of Rest and Relaxation
    • A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    • The Kingdoms
    • Severance
    • Sharp Objects
  • Books 36 to 40
    • Gideon the Ninth
    • Record of a Spaceborn Few
    • My Dark Vanessa
    • Gods and Robots
    • The Woman in the Purple Skirt
  • Books 41 to 45
    • The Atlas Six
    • The Bear and the Nightingale
    • The Night Raven
    • Dark Places
    • The Song of Achilles
  • Books 46 to 50
    • A Desolation Called Peace
    • Convenience Store Woman
    • The Glass Hotel
    • The Raven Tower
    • Assassin’s Apprentice
  • Books 51 to 55
    • Enchantress of Numbers
    • Crying in H Mart
    • You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
    • Neon Gods
    • The Ten Thousand Doors of January
  • Books 56 to 60
    • Carrie Soto is Back
    • Girls of Paper and Fire
    • Gearbreakers
    • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
    • The Last Children of Tokyo
  • Books 61 to 65
    • Jade War
    • It Ends With Us
    • Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
    • The Girl in the Tower
    • Iron Widow
  • Books 66 to 70
    • Book of Night
    • Strong Female Character
    • The Poppy War
    • Bunny
    • The Night Circus
  • Books 71 to 75
    • Trans: Where reality meets ideology
    • All the Lovers in the Night
    • Confessions
    • Among Others
    • The Silence of the Girls
  • Books 76 to 80
    • The Galaxy and the Ground Within
    • I Who Have Never Known Men
    • Because Internet
    • Hidden Figures
    • If We Were Villains
  • Books 81 to 85
    • Girls Like Girls
    • Eileen
    • Nefertiti
    • A Visit from the Goon Squad
    • The Outside
  • Books 86 to 90
    • Lessons in Chemistry
    • Fifth Season
    • The Secret History of Wonder Woman
    • Ancillary Sword
    • The Power
  • Books 91 to 95
    • The Women of Troy
    • The Bell Jar
    • The Calculating Stars
    • Jade Legacy
    • The Sirens of Mars
  • Books 96 to 100
    • SPQR
    • The Astronauts Wives Club
    • Circe
    • The Just City
    • Ancillary Mercy
  • Books 101 to 105
    • Feed
    • The Golem and the Djinni
    • The Once and Future Witches
    • Gone Girl
    • The Winter of the Witch
  • Books 106 to 110
    • The Jasmine Throne
    • Stone Blind
    • The Dragon Republic
    • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
    • Eletkra
  • Books 111 to 115
    • Royal Assassin
    • The Historian
    • Harrow the Ninth
    • Ninth House
    • The End of Everything

The Books I Didn’t Review

It took so long to post these to my Patreon newsletters that by the time I got to the End of Everything I’d gone on a deep hiatus. So, books I didn’t review but did read:

  • The Radium Girls
  • Uprooted
  • The Searcher
  • The Testaments
  • Americanah
  • The Secret History
  • Assassin’s Quest
  • The Burning God