Yesterday on Twitter I spotted this piece of genius: Tegan (aka BellJarred) has a message on her Tinder profile that tells people to only message her if they’ve read five books written by women. Inundated, she is… but not with messages from guys who’ve read five books by women.

There are two things here that annoy me. Primarily the point that these people have obviously ignored the one criteria she stipulates. Regardless of whether you agree with the criteria, that’s pretty frustrating, no? And secondly the fact that good books by women are not exactly hard to find. Here’s the deal: you don’t have to read books to be a good person. I bloody love a good book, but I’m not going to shit on you if you’re not a reader. What I will be really fucked off about, though, is if you are a voracious reader and yet you can’t name five books you love that are written by women.

In a rage after reading some of the messages sent to Tegan, I did a quick whip-round my bookshelves and picked the first few books I could see that were written by women.

Check out the lists below, recommend more awesome books in the comments (and you get to enter a competition in the process which is FUN), or go and read BookCunt’s blog, because she’s spectacularly funny and sweary and reads way more books than I do.

(more…)