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San Francisco, 3:28 AM
Tue Dec 1
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11/13/09
Or are they gender-blind, like Stephen Colbert?
If neither of these things is true, has anyone considered the possibility of an unconscious bias? (You know, the whole reason we need controls and double-blind studies in science to prevent scientists who want to "ignore gender" or whatever other factors from messing up their own results unconsciously?) Didn't a single person involved in making that list ever take PSY100?
What percentage of the people making this totally unbiased list were female? If it was a pretty low percentage, couldn't that have contributed to an unconscious bias? If that percentage was reversed, and a mostly-female group was tasked with choosing the ten best books without considering gender, would they have perhaps chosen some written by women, without consciously thinking about it?
11/13/09
11/13/09
What I talked about isn't some minor insignificant effect: It is a fact, proven by (properly designed) psychology experiments, that yes, unconscious biases about gender do affect the way a woman's work is evaluated versus that of a man. And obviously this is important in the real world: You can talk all you want about how these top-ten lists don't mean anything, but it should be obvious that if the world of publishing is filled with people who judge women's writing unfairly -- while claiming to be 100% unbiased, no less, and thus prone to dismissing any criticism -- this is likely to lead to, you know, some problems for women writers as a group. So... why isn't this worth analysing, exactly? #books
11/13/09
I'm saying that overanalyzing is bad and leads only to one of two things 1) either hyper sensitivity to the point where the quality of the story becomes totally irrelevant as long as you meet the gender quotas or 2)
an end to any such endeavour at all, because its simply not worth the headache.
Sorry if I'm a little vehement. The subject pissed me off to no end when it came up in a tor.com post some time ago. Uber-PCism to the point where the subject matter itself becomes totally irrelevant really really bothers me. #books
11/13/09
ARGH! I HATE IDIOTS! #books
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11/13/09
I have nothing against women. I have nothing against men or blacks or even people from the middle east. Just because they were born under different circumstances than a white man doesn't mean they should obtain special privileges. Perhaps, oh, I don't know, white men have so much more because they actually work to obtain it. I state the truth of the matter, but I'm sure you'd only call me a sexist/racist. Whatever. Pretend you live in a world where we can all be equal. We don't. We never will. If you want to be taken seriously, if you want to have all that others have then you need to work for it. You need to prove yourself by your actions. You don't get something just because you are who you are. Minorities are always sided with, the preferred choice for job offers, etc. Because why? Everyone's so afraid of being the racist one. It's ridiculous. And who ends up suffering because of it? I do. Even if I'm more qualified, even if I'm ten times better, I still won't get to pass them by because idiot society dictates that those who don't have as much get to have more given to them. Yes, those who don't try to do it all get to have it all. THAT makes sense. I guess that's why Obama's president now though, eh? #books
11/13/09
11/13/09
Which are really quite subjective. I'd argue the practice of such lists should be abandoned, but let's face it, they're fun. Not a bad way to seek out new stuff to read, either.
I think people just need to accept everyone's definition of "best of" differs. Don't have a cow because your favorite of favoritest was excluded - heck, make your own list. :) #books
11/13/09
so let me get this straight...the group of people picked what they thought were the best 10 books of the year - without basing those choices on anything but the quality of the books...and people are bitching about it?
isn't this what we WANT?!?!
don't we all want things like gender, genre, race, etc etc to not matter?!?!?
Hypocrisy, you're dong it right! #books
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11/13/09
I guess the only way to be sure would be to market books without any author information. Might be a bit too extreme, though. #books
11/13/09
Besides, if I gave you a list of ten books all written by women, and told you that these are the best books to come out this year, and I did not consider gender at all, and the fact that all the writers turned out to be female was due to pure chance, deep down, would you really believe me? If not, why do you believe the people behind this list? #books
11/13/09
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt because the number of books written by men is probably much higher than those written by women...
damned if you do, damned if you don't...
I would have just put out the list with the statement "Here's our list. Suck It." #books
11/13/09
You know what really peeved me off, though? The fact that they actually claimed to be completely unbiased, that they actually said, "we ignored gender." They didn't even accept the possibility that their list might have an unconscious bias -- and I think that's an even bigger problem than the list itself, because we already have a hard enough time convincing people that unconscious bias *exists,* and that we don't already live in a perfect egalitarian utopia. #books
11/13/09
bias, unconscious or not, exists and will always exist...and it's interesting to me that your focus is on this one aspect of the list - that there are no women - and seems to assume that the reason there are no women on the list is because of gender and not that the people who made the list picked the books they thought were better...isn't it possible that all the books under consideration written by women were simply not as good (in their opinion) than the ones written by men?
that they claimed to be completely unbiased is unfortunate, simply because, as you've pointed out, this is impossible and saying otherwise simply invites the criticism.
who were the Publishers Weekly judges? were they all men? 51% women, 49% men? does it matter?
what were their criteria?
what does the Top 100 Books of 2009 look like (I'm too lazy to look it up and I should really be working right now)?
I'm realizing now why I find this kind of this annoying and frustrating...it's because it's petty...not to say that women don't get the shit end of the stick in almost every aspect of our society, but jebuz! to not be included on a top 10 list isn't a social injustice...
I seem to have lost track of my point...
over the past year or so I've been very consciously buying books by women, because I've felt that, though my reading habits are reasonably(?) broad they do tend toward male writers (mostly I think because of the subject matter and my tastes), but I've been bucking that trend, taking more chances. when choosing between two, otherwise identically interesting back cover blurbs, I'll pick the one written by a woman...just to hear a different voice. different, not necessarily better, as the results have been mixed, like always.
oh and based on the linked article, that Linda Lowen person is a loony...
11/13/09
Also... of every genre book written by a woman last year, "Boneshaker" was the one that got shafted? Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but it's about as crunchy, inaccessible, and niche as you can possibly get. All due props to Cherie Priest for not trying to be all-things-to-everyone, like Niffenegger, but I doubt very much Priest thought she would be in the running for the Booker prize, either. #books
11/13/09
09/11/09
I can't have book discussion with my peers because they talk about what was on Oprah and Dr Phil! Or they are Hockey Moms and they constantly talk of the drama that is organized hockey in Canada. I smile nicely while my eyes glaze over. Depressing I know.
io9 you are my only hope!
09/11/09
09/11/09
I have found most everything that I have looked for and ordered those that weren't in stock. I have found new releases and older books as well.
The only ones I can't get my hands on are Alastair Reynolds' first two books which are unavailable for order at this time. I will have to hunt them down in used book stores but my allergies deter me. We seem to have many British authors that I have heard are not as easy to find in the States but it could just depend on location.
09/11/09
Didn't have one of them, although possibly they could have ordered them. The problem is I live quite some distance from Toronto and any other Chapters/Indigo store, so I mostly get my books from Amazon--but they've been hopeless with the American new releases lately.
09/11/09
09/11/09
- Partly by its author being high-profile, esp. online - i.e. have not John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow made their new books indispensable in some substantial part by way of their prominence in online conversation? Ditto Jeff Vandermeer, Charlie Stross.
- I do still think it's something slightly peculiar to the specific field, though. Gender issue has gone unmentioned - but I do find that recommendations from (to crudely generalize) male SF fans (i.e. "best book ever"-type recommendations, which fall under your rubric) have often fallen flat with me. Randomly chosen ex.: Robert Charles Wilson's "Spin." A lot of the central-to-the-conversation books in SF are lengthy and ideas-rather-than-prose-driven in a way that is somewhat counter to the things I read for.
- Still not sure that the book club/consensus-driven fiction model is a genuinely attractive one! Often I would rather read an almost-off-the-radar book than a culturally central one... there is often something a little easy/middlebrow/dull about the books that get this sort of attention!
09/11/09
It's the same problem I've seen with other niche things, and it seems you can only have these niches in a world with the internet. To draw from a comment below for instance, steampunk in my mind has been entirely an online thing. I've never seen any of the accoutrements in "3D". I suspect that if you really want to put together a book club, online is not the way to do it, as otherwise you'll have a very skewed view, which produces stories like Escape Pod's latest offering "Penumbra's 24 hour book shop" or somesuch, which while a good story had as much "neat" tech crammed into it as would fit, making it sometimes awkward.
09/11/09
This is an interesting question, and I think you have done a pretty good job covering a lot of the issues concerned here. But I think that a major reason that there isn't a consensus list for SF readers is there is too much sub-genre specialization. Within what we could paint as the SF book community, you have your space opera fans, your Star Wars EU readers and so forth, your Dickheads, Stephenson fants, etc. There isn't necessarily a lot of crosstalk among those groups, since those novels don't have that much in common apart from the basic SF label. Most of the books enjoyed across these subgroups are really classics like predate the later specialization- Wells and Verne, Asimov and Bradbury, etc.
However, I think the same thing exists in "mainstream" book clubs as well. You have your Oprah-influenced, mass book club reads, which are mostly pretty lowbrow novels dressed up as being more literary than they are (Dan Brown, Mitch Albom, Life of Pi, etc.). Then separate from that, you have your actual highbrow literary must reads list (Delillo, Roth, McCarthy, etc.) These are really pretty separate, although the occasional literary novel creeps into the Oprah set, just as the occasional SF novel (Stephenson, Nifenegger, etc.) can invade those.
But I do think that part of the appeal, and at this point, the responsibility, of communities like io9 is to try and bridge this gap and put some of these specialized reader communities on at least a similar foundation. It would be cool for io9 to create more definitive lists, if not of current books, at least of the classics of the various subgenres that they could recommend to all readers. The Onion AV club has a cool feature called "Gateways to Geekery" that they use to orient readers to different specialized genres- recommending things to give people a foundation in a new area and a path to potentially pursue. I personally followed their recommendations to immerse myself in Steampunk, reading a few of the fundamental works to at least understand the essentials of the genre, while steering clear, initially anyway, of some of the more esoteric works. I think that approach would be a good way to get people on a similar footing.
And why not a book club feature here on io9? You could recommend a book, or two, and a deadline date, and people could get ready to join in a more interactive discussion. I think that would be a lot of fun, having everyone commenting on a work that they have just read (or re-read). You could even have readers help suggest selections going ahead. This could be a feature to expose the community at large to the real cornerstone books under the SF umbrella, and could be spun off into separate clubs for people with different interests down the road. Just a thought...
09/11/09
1. Life is too short to read crap.
2. 90% of everything is crap. (Theodore Sturgeon)
3. It's a different 90% for each of us.
4. Finding the common subset is probably an NP-Complete problem.
09/11/09
Kidding, kidding. That'd be kinda ironic for a topic about reading!
I'm doing my part by scaring away all the weaklings that would be able to pass muster in an io9 book club, by being completely and utterly insane.
09/11/09
To know you have arrived in the mainstream? To sell to these book clubs?
I can see the economical point, but no other worth to this.
You want a neverending revenue stream, get books into the lit curriculum of colleges. It's how the classics stay in print.
09/11/09
09/11/09
A literature canon (in the broadest sense) only limits the conversation by limiting the things and the angles to examinate those things to discuss. Especially since an established canon usually comes with established interpretations. It is entirely possible to discuss the idea space of SF without taking recourse to discussing (a) specific book(s). In fact, that makes the discussion more interesting. Of course, that doesn't work for discussing plot and specific meaning of any particular book. That's what the internet is for - finding the people who (like) read the same things you do. Those freaks.
I would claim it is relatively harder to have a good discussion about movies. Sure, it is easy to have a discussion about Transformers 2 or Terminator Salvation. But it is no problem discussing Anathem or Terry Pratchett's new one, either.
Try to have a discussion about Sunshine, or the Fountain, not so easy. And these are not particular obscure or cheap movies. There are a lot fewer genre movies than there are genre books, and accessibility is much higher for movies.
IMO, book clubs are selling tools and do not have much use besides that. The general visibility of a certain piece of art in society does not enhance the conversation, it just adds a lot of noise and a few general consensus interpretations, each for a subset of the audience.
In other words, in every way but financially, book clubs are the devil. Which I took many, many words to say.
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