Putting
Kindle arguments aside, there is something egalitarian about electronic
reading. A book loses its genre straightjacket when you are taken immediately into
its pages: bypassing any cover and arriving directly at the first page of
chapter one.
When I was a child, my parents had shelves of penguin
originals. I used to pull books off the shelf to read without actually knowing what
type of novel they were – they were simply orange-and-cream, or green-and-cream
stripes. I still have some of these books, they now have an
antique charm. But in terms of the cover, there’s nothing much to choose
between authors as different as Daphne du Maurier, and Aldous Huxley.
Contrast this with today where genre is king. We do
judge a book instantly by its cover, and women’s commercial fiction gets the
short straw. I read my first Victoria Hislop book recently – on a kindle, so
without the benefit of cover art. I found the writing good, the story serious,
and the outcome for some of the major characters brutal and bleak. Later
browsing online I was surprised to discover Hislop referred to as chicklit.
Really? Perhaps because they hadn’t looked further than the covers of her six
novels – all swirly-girly lettering and island seascapes (probably not her
doing).
Hannah Beckerman, author of ‘The Dead Wife’s Handbook’,
recently started a pitch to help women writers get reviewed, particularly
commercial fiction, under a new hashtag, ReviewWomen. She says that the only
genre not currently being reviewed in the heavyweight press, is women’s
commercial fiction. With light, bright covers and easy prose, it is overlooked.
Many serious minded reviewers will not consider women’s
commercial fiction at all. But women certainly read it. Perhaps this accounts
for the rise of the book blogger, who isn’t so prejudiced. We are told that the
fiction book industry is kept alive these days by women readers aged between 16
and 65. Why then are so many authors men? It seems that men want to write books
but aren’t so keen to read them. Perhaps if they did, we'd have genre officially termed bloke-lit. Wonder what those covers would look like?
