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The James Davis Nicoll List Thingy
Jan. 13th, 2019 06:18 pmFine I'll do the thing. There's only so many times I can see people talk (even briefly!) about all these SFF books without throwing my own two cents into the ring.
So:
Bold means I've read it
Underlined means I've read something else by the author
*Asterisked means I own it but have not yet read it
( It's 100 books, be warned! )
So it took someone snarking in the comments on the post for me to realize the list is 96% female authors -- I knew that women were well-represented, but hadn't quite clicked that there were only three men (all non-white). (Someone in the comments claimed to count only 92 female authors, but I think they're confused by a few of the distinctly male pseudonyms.) Also, I got all the way to the "W"s before I realized it was alphabetical by author! Clearly I am not at my most observant today.
I've only read fourteen, which seems very low for me. I can only add ten more counting the entries where I've read other books by that author, just not the specific one on the list. Another fifteen are waiting patiently to be read on my bookshelves, but that still doesn't bring me to even half. If I included books I have access to via my parents' library, which is chock full of SFF paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, I think I'd finally break the halfway point.
But looking through the entries where I have nothing marked. . . there's a lot of subgenres I'm just not into. Apocalypses, dystopias, cyberpunk. . . they just really aren't my thing, and I'm not going to be adding these books to my to-be-read pile when there are so many more books that *are* more my thing already on it.
Which is to say, while I very much admire the intent behind the list to highlight non-white, non-male authors (in contrast to all the other year-end lists that are invariably overwhelmingly white and male), it still is not the list *I* would make, if I were to make a list of a hundred SFF titles people should consider reading in the coming year. :)
So:
Bold means I've read it
Underlined means I've read something else by the author
*Asterisked means I own it but have not yet read it
( It's 100 books, be warned! )
So it took someone snarking in the comments on the post for me to realize the list is 96% female authors -- I knew that women were well-represented, but hadn't quite clicked that there were only three men (all non-white). (Someone in the comments claimed to count only 92 female authors, but I think they're confused by a few of the distinctly male pseudonyms.) Also, I got all the way to the "W"s before I realized it was alphabetical by author! Clearly I am not at my most observant today.
I've only read fourteen, which seems very low for me. I can only add ten more counting the entries where I've read other books by that author, just not the specific one on the list. Another fifteen are waiting patiently to be read on my bookshelves, but that still doesn't bring me to even half. If I included books I have access to via my parents' library, which is chock full of SFF paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, I think I'd finally break the halfway point.
But looking through the entries where I have nothing marked. . . there's a lot of subgenres I'm just not into. Apocalypses, dystopias, cyberpunk. . . they just really aren't my thing, and I'm not going to be adding these books to my to-be-read pile when there are so many more books that *are* more my thing already on it.
Which is to say, while I very much admire the intent behind the list to highlight non-white, non-male authors (in contrast to all the other year-end lists that are invariably overwhelmingly white and male), it still is not the list *I* would make, if I were to make a list of a hundred SFF titles people should consider reading in the coming year. :)
