Questions of the day

Two questions posed by Carol Novack further down on that book list meme entry:

1. What the fuck is a "meme"?
2. Why am I reading Annie Proulx's The Shipping News?

To answer the first question: The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976): "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." In other words, memes are tunes, stories, ideas or cultural trends that propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain in the same way genes propagate themselves by leaping from body to body

The definition of "meme" seems to be quite malleable, though. In the "blogosphere" (I'm sorry but I find that such a silly term) it is used to refer to a question or statement posed on a blog that other bloggers then respond to on their blogs, thus the question or statement and subsequent responses propagate themselves all over the interweb.

To answer the second question of why I am reading The Shipping News: I realised a while back that my bookshelf is lacking in tomes written by women. I have made a conscious decision not to read books by women or that I don't like books written by women but rather the books I have always been drawn to have generally been written by men - the only exceptions being Angela Carter and Muriel Spark (and, even then, I've only read one book apiece by those writers).

I made haste to my local bookstore determined to redress the balance. I ended up buying A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Both had good reputations. Smiley's book was solidly written and intelligent but it didn't astonish me in any way. Proulx has a more adventurous prose style and is compelling enough but, again, I doubt it will linger in my mind long after I finish it the way my favourite novels do.

So, come on, which wildly inventive and possibly mad female authors should I seek out? Apart from Carter and Spark I have also dipped into Jeanette Winterson and Beryl Bainbridge. Who else?