I'm sure those top 10 books are great books. GREAT books! But the only great books out there?... Come on. Men and women writers often have different sensibilities, and a list like that tells me that one sensibility is being favored over the other — or, worse, being called superior. Catch up, PW! The rest of us have already figured out that women's stories and voices have always been and are now more than ever relevant, intriguing, delightful and important.

Three cheers for SheWrites, for reminding us of this — and for calling out anyone who tries to tell us differently.

I have a habit of opening a book to a random page and judging it by where my eye lands. (While I was working on my own book, it drove me crazy to think someone might do this to me, and I'd continually open my manuscript to a random page, on the lookout for that still-unpolished sentence that might drive away a reader.) I opened Sarah Hall's "How to Paint a Dead Man" to page 10 and read:

"In her there is the bustle of the market where she has been shopping. Hurry is in her hands as she turns items over in the sink to rinse off the soap."

She had me at the beauty of hurry is in her hands.