Mmmmm....can you smell it??

Le Tour de Testosterone

My reading history is a strange one. Although I was a voracious reader from the age of 6 or so, it was a long time before I read anything that could be called "literary fiction"--probably not until college, as a matter of fact. And even then, I took classes on Greek and Roman literature and Victorian literature and Shakespeare. I read very little modern literature at all--a bit of Hemingway, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway--nothing written after 1940.

But after a while, sticking with what I knew, Dickens and sci-fi and non-fiction, began to bore me, so I slowly worked up the courage to drag my reading habits into more recent decades. I found Douglas Coupland, Richard Russo, Margaret Atwood, and A.S. Byatt, among others. Still, I came to feel that I was purposely avoiding some important uncharted territory--the "Great American Novelists" of the mid-20th century, names I came across again and again in literary criticism. Names that some critics praised to the skies for their grasp of the human condition, and other critics damned as white male sexist relics.

To be honest, neither description made them sound all that appealing, especially to someone like me who gravitates toward female writers. At the same time, not reading someone just because of a stereotype is a bad idea, and encourages ignorance. As a writer and a reader, I don't have to like something just because it's critically acclaimed, but I shouldn't dislike it for that reason either. I should make up my own mind.

Hence my new experiment, the Tour de Testosterone. Using the Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, along with some other recommendations from chicklit.com, I picked out the most important (according to the critics) works of six well-known white male novelists that I have never read. I'm going to check them out of the library, read them, and write an honest review.

So, over the next few months, I'll be reading and reviewing the following:

I tried to pick the works of each author that seemed both accessible (at least for them) and critically praised. I think it's going to be interesting. And I believe that all of my selections are shorter than Atlas Shrugged, so that improves my chances considerably.