2012 National Year of Reading

This post was STOLEN (shock-horror) from the fabulous Helene Young's blog!

Australian Women Writers 2012 National Year of Reading Challenge

Keen on romance, fantasy, crime, YA, literary, mainstream women’s fiction? Contemporary or historical? Memoir, other nonfiction or poetry?

Whatever your preference, whether you’re a fan of one genre or a devoted eclectic, the 2012 Australian Women Writers Book Reading & Reviewing Challenge invites you to celebrate a year encountering the best of Australian women’s writing.

Objective: This challenge hopes to help counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds that has continued throughout 2011 by actively promoting the reading and reviewing of a wide range of contemporary Australian women’s writing. (Recent discussions on gender bias.)

Readers should approach this challenge with a spirit of willingness. There are no failures, just personal goals. Reviews can be long or short, favourable or “this book is not for me”. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll all discover some future classics and perhaps a few surprises among genres we’re not familiar with. The main aim is to have fun.

Challenge period: 1 January 2012 - 31 December 2012

Goal: Read and review books written by Australian women writers – hard copies, ebooks and audiobooks, new, borrowed or stumbled upon by book-crossing.

My thanks to Elizabeth Lhuede for initiating this challenge. She’s been championing Australian women’s fiction across the blogsphere over the last month and this is another wonderful opportunity to support those writers.

Along with Helene and a bunch of other wonderful people, I’m accepting the challenge for 2012 as I know I won’t have to work very hard to achieve ‘Franklin Fantastic’ Status. Some of my favourite Australian women writers have books coming out in 2012 so I’m aiming to read one a month. They’ll cross most genres from romance to crime to contemporary women’s fiction to literary work.

My list will include Cathryn Hein, Fiona Palmer, Fleur McDonald, Helene Young, Karly Lane, Jaye Ford, Leah Ashton, Fiona Lowe, Lisa Heidke, Kelly Hunter, Sarah Mayberry, Coleen Yan, Loretta Hill and no doubt more!

Who's joining us??