"There is a trick of Pavlovian conditioning that I’ve been using lately on my best girlfriend. She is a person who sends a lot of text messages and a person who does a lot of Crossfit, so that particular Venn diagram means that she is she a person who sends a lot of text messages about Crossfit. As a person disinterested in both Crossfit and long text conversations, this arrangement works poorly for me. So, when she sends a non-Crossfit related text, I make my best effort to respond. A message about the Leon Bridges concert? Here is your treat in the form of a smiley emoticon. A message about deadlifts? Crickets. This strategy has not changed the volume of texts she sends, nor the number to which I reply—about thirty percent—but it has slightly changed the volume of Crossfit-related to non-Crossfit-related texts.
What if male-authored pirate books are the Crossfit texts of the publishing world? And what if I, in my capacity as a book reviewer, have the power to shift the ratio of rubbish pirate books by dudes to meaningful literature by women? The publishing houses will keep putting out books about buccaneers and they’ll keep appearing on my monthly review list but what if I don’t expend any mental energy or spill a drop of ink about them? This wouldn’t change the number of books by women that are published every year, nor the total number of books that Publisher’s Weekly reviews—some eight thousand per year, mostly for librarians, the media, and booksellers—but if someone is reserving all of their mental energy and all of their ink for female-authored books, then perhaps these books will be covered sooner, the gems among them celebrated louder, and the publishing industry will slowly adjust the definition of the type of book that is deemed worthy of attention. It seems like a better strategy than doing nothing, so moving forward, I’m only going to review books written by women."
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