Reading habits as of late.

I've been quite bookish so far this year.  Sometimes, life will get ahead of me, and I'll go a few weeks without finishing a book.  However, thanks to a bit of down time during March Break and my current obsession with getting ebooks from the Toronto Public library, I've been reading quite a lot lately following a dry spell in late February/early March.

This year, I've seemed to solely read fiction with a focus on mystery/thrillers for the most part. During the school year, I crave escapism in my literary adventures, and I've found that my favourite escape these days is in a good mystery/thriller that also has an interesting theme and/or plot twist.

I've also noticed that as I have all of my life, I read a majority of books written by women.  I can go on and on about sexism in the literary world.  I closely follow writer Jennifer Weiner on Twitter because I like her books and her super hilarious tweets about The Bachelor.  However, I'm come to appreciate her also for being vocal about how books written by men are reviewed much more frequently than books written by women.  Books written by male authors, such as Jonathan Franzen and Jeffery Eugenides, that are about "women-centric" subjects like relationships and family are widely praised and reviewed, whereas similar books written by women are often belittled as "chick-lit".  Lori Lansens wrote an excellent novel called "The Girls" which is a fascinating story of the lives of conjoined twins.  I was dismayed when the paperback edition of this novel was slapped with a bright pink flowered covered that would scare off most men from reading this worthy story.  Of course, the fact that the colour pink is feared by men is another way in which the feminine is looked down upon in our society but that's another rant.

Anyhow, the point of this is that with entrenched sexism in literature, I don't really feel that bad about my very skewed reading habits.  However, I read an article somewhere earlier in the year (probably on Buzzfeed, I'm sure) about how a great new year's resolution would be to read more books by diverse authors since it's important to read stories about people who are underrepresented like women of colour, other ethnicities, and authors from the LGBTQ community; not to mention how important it is to support these authors so that there is more diversity in what gets published.

Anyhow, I have read a couple of amazing books in the past few months that are notable.  I love Roxane Gay's collection of essays "Bad Feminist" and her novel "An Untamed State" was excellent although brutal and graphic (not a light read). Celeste Ng's "Everything I Never Told You" because not only is it a fascinating look at an Asian American family and the prejudice faced by this community (which is entirely underrepresented in all forms of media), it's kind of a murder mystery!

This year I also want to read novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Helen Oyeyemi.  Are there any other books/authors that you'd recommend that would help me in my goal about increasing the diversity in my reading?