Jonathan Franzen, call your office.

The latest campaign for the oh-so-politically correct is titled: “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Authors for One Year.”

Hope J.R.R. Martin doesn’t turn out that sixth mega-volume of Game of Thrones before March 2016!

Yes, this is for real. The idea got its first big publicity boost from by H. Tempest Bradford (she’s apparently the author of some short stories in the fantasy genre) on Feb. 22, and it’s already gone viral. She’s issued her manifesto on xoJane :

[T] the privileged view is everywhere and pervasive. It's easy to buy into it without really knowing that you are.

It doesn't help that most high-profile venues that exist to alert readers to new books and their worthiness are skewed heavily toward privileged voices. A few years ago, some best-selling women writers pointed out that the New York Times reviewed significantly more books by men than by women. The problem is not limited to the Times. Nor limited to just men vs women. If the majority of books being held up and pronounced Good and Worthy are by white, straight, cis men, it's easy to slip into thinking that most good and worthy books are by authors that fit that description.

So here’s what you need to do:

The "Reading Only X Writers For A Year" a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the U.S. or in translation, books by people with disabilities.

After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author. In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths, working class or poor, and asexual (as a start).

So, hey, you could spend your entire life avoiding reading Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy or any number of other dreaded cis-het men who professed the Christian faith and made some money off their writing. I, for, one, plan to start with “asexual” authors. That should be fun!

Bradford was inspired by Govinnage, a U.K. Guardian columnist who announced on Feb. 19:

Slowly but surely, the world is noticing that “meritocracy” in the arts and entertainment industries is as fictitious as Westeros. The inherent biases in publishing and book media are real, though; one study showed that only three out of the 124 authors who appeared on the New York Times’ bestsellers list during 2012 were people of colour, and that “no African American authors made the Top 10 Bestsellers list that we looked at in 2012”.

As the blog Book Riot has pointed out, readers (that is, consumers) play a key role in addressing this:

The only way to work against the biases in our industry and the biases we carry, even if we are unaware of them, is to be deliberate in seeking out and sharing books by writers who are not white.

There’s also a Tumblr site, “We Need Diverse Books.”

And here’s Gizmodo’s Saladin Ahmed acolding those right-wingers who actually think people buy books written by white cis-het males like Jeffrey Archer or Neil Gaiman because they write entertainingly:

'Bestselling author' is, functionally, a job. And nearly every single one of those jobs goes to a white person (quite often a white man). When women still make only seventy five cents for every dollar that men make, and 98% of the New York Times bestseller list is composed of white authors, anyone who reads primarily white male authors is contributing, quite directly, to the economic inequalities that pervade our culture. Now, some readers — particularly those of a politically conservative or libertarian sensibility — don't give a s*** about this. Indeed, they may be actively hostile to the very notion of egalitarianism. The market, in their view, is a pure meritocracy. But many other book buyers believe, as I do, that the market itself is racist and sexist in all sorts of unseen ways. Choosing to buy and read books by women and people of color is one small way to address this.

Ahmed concludes:

Now certainly, one could spend one's life reading only books by straight white men, and never run out of wonderful material. But this is akin to spending a lifetime's worth of vacations visiting only Disneyland. Whether or not one agrees with 'the SJWs' that it's ethically contemptible, it is, in a word, boring.

That Homer—he’s so darned boring.