VIDA count!
His recommendations:
HANS DE BEER “Little Polar Bear”
TOMIE DE PAOLA “The Knight and the Dragon”
JULES FEIFFER “Bark, George”
JULES FEIFFER “I Lost My Bear”
NEIL GAIMAN AND DAVE MCKEAN “The Wolves in the Walls”
ARTHUR GEISERT “The Giant Ball of String”
STEVE GOODMAN AND MICHAEL MCCURDY “The Train They Call the City of New Orleans”
RUSSELL HOBAN AND LILLIAN HOBAN “Bread and Jam for Frances”
MUNRO LEAF AND ROBERT LAWSON “The Story of Ferdinand”
ASTRID LINDGREN AND HARALD WIBERG “The Tomten and the Fox”
PEGGY RATHMANN “The Day the Babies Crawled Away”
COLEEN SALLEY AND JANET STEVENS “Epossumondas”
MAURICE SENDAK “In the Night Kitchen”
MARK ALAN STAMATY “Who Needs Donuts?”
SANDRA STEEN, SUSAN STEEN AND G. BRIAN KARAS “Car Wash”
For those of you playing along at home: that's fifteen books, seven female authors. The numbers go down even further if you filter the list: one solo female author, one female duo, three coed collaborations. Even better -- he brags about how great Eden Ross Lipson's book recs were. Surely she might have recommended more books by women? (Some of his omissions just baffle me personally. No Stone Soup? No Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs? No Curious George? Do kids even know who Curious George is anymore?)
"Someday my kids will open these boxes, gasp with delight, and eagerly read them to their own."
Or they might gasp with something other than delight -- surprise at the missing women.