On how and what we read

Voting for the Hugo awards just closed last night, and for the first time I bought in to the voting process.* Awards are not something I pay a lot of attention to, or rather that I only pay attention to now that they show up in my twitter feed. (I feel like award juries often exercise... different kinds of elitism than I do.) But I enjoyed that the Hugos specifically state you should rank things in order of what you liked best. And there were a couple categories where I picked my first choice because it was just *nicer* than the others, or secondary world fantasy instead of SF, because between otherwise good things, that's where my allegiances lie. There were also a couple categories I just didn't vote, because I don't like podcasts much and don't watch tv. And there were things I didn't finish reading, because it was obvious already that I didn't *like* them.

One of the conversations that I see fairly often is about weighted demographics in reading-- white guys tend to get various sorts of better visibility, and are more read by other white guys who then get defensive when this is pointed out to them. And, you know, societal problems being what they are, and the internet being what it is, there are also rounds where people suggest "Let's try [interval] of reading [minimized/none of] X demographic!" and then other people get up in arms about being dictated to. (For values of dictated that include essays from strangers on the internet...) You probably know how it goes.

Everyone looks for slightly different things when they read and therefore has idiosyncratic values of "try something new" that are awesome and mind-broadening as well as ones that are terrible and time-wasting, and that's as it should be. The problems come in when people try to be elitist or prescriptivist about reading habits, whether other people's or their own, and when it's so very much harder to *find* the things that don't fit in particular demographic or marketing niches. And occasionally trying something new that you're not sure whether you're going to like is a good thing; there are several thousand ways to micro-describe a book, and maybe the jacket copy and/or the person who mentioned it to you didn't hit on the reason you'd enjoy it. (Or even wildly disagreed with you on what the book is about!)

But the thing is, every time there's another round of "not/only books by straight white men" I squirm a little. Because if I wanted to expand my reading demographically, I ought to read *more* straight white guys. If I were to engage in a year of mind-broadening by cutting one authorial demographic, it would be white women. And I'm just as "um, no" about that as the people yelling on the internet about their straight white guy books, except that I feel no need to yell at people about it. I'm also pretty "um, no" about a lot of the big name male writers, and vintage science fiction, and the moral superiority of having awful things happen to your characters. There may be some correlations that could be drawn here. I am aware that I'm just as elitist as anybody; I just draw my lines in different places.

My reading log is a bit skewed at the moment because of the Megatherium, but so far this year I've finished 30 longer-than-picture-books.** Of those, there are 2 plant books by 4 white guys, 4 longer kid books by 2 white guys, and 3 by non-white authors (2M, 1F). (co-authors and series make the statistics a bit weird...) The rest is all white women. And I *do* have a pretty good network that signal-boosts a variety of books, and I do a lot of ordering up library books based on those recommendations. It is very easy to be insular, even when you are paying attention.

(I'm not really trying to draw big overarching conclusions here; it's just one of those things where the finger-wagging is not pointed at me because I don't align with the cultural norms, and yet I feel like I do my own version of the same thing. I partly mention it because I'm vaguely curious if other people do this, too.)

---related/not related:

Our library has a big shelf of summer reading club recommendations sorted by grade level just outside the children's area, and after pulling a bunch of potential read-alouds (we're good with up to about 3rd grade labeling, so long as the picture/word ratio is high enough) I picked up Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent on a whim. (Her A Hidden Magic was a semi-formative influence around 6th grade, but I hadn't read anything else by her.) It's a light read, YA with a couple chapters of frame story to set up a virtual reality game and then add urgency to it, and then she's free to spend nearly all the book running successive iterations of a portal fantasy, complete with many and various ways to get killed and have to start all over. Utterly brilliant in a writer-geeky kind of way.

------(footnotes!)

*Hugos are distributed by Worldcon, and for those not going to the con a $40 "supporting membership" gets you award voting rights. This year there was Drama caused by a few loud and awful people successfully ballot-stacking a bunch of the nominations, and a whole lot of other people deciding that $40 was worth getting in on the argument.

**plus 5 comics for the hugo ballot, which I'm not counting because I wouldn't have known they existed otherwise.

On how and what we read

Voting for the Hugo awards just closed last night, and for the first time I bought in to the voting process.* Awards are not something I pay a lot of attention to, or rather that I only pay attention to now that they show up in my twitter feed. (I feel like award juries often exercise... different kinds of elitism than I do.) But I enjoyed that the Hugos specifically state you should rank things in order of what you liked best. And there were a couple categories where I picked my first choice because it was just *nicer* than the others, or secondary world fantasy instead of SF, because between otherwise good things, that's where my allegiances lie. There were also a couple categories I just didn't vote, because I don't like podcasts much and don't watch tv. And there were things I didn't finish reading, because it was obvious already that I didn't *like* them.

One of the conversations that I see fairly often is about weighted demographics in reading-- white guys tend to get various sorts of better visibility, and are more read by other white guys who then get defensive when this is pointed out to them. And, you know, societal problems being what they are, and the internet being what it is, there are also rounds where people suggest "Let's try [interval] of reading [minimized/none of] X demographic!" and then other people get up in arms about being dictated to. (For values of dictated that include essays from strangers on the internet...) You probably know how it goes.

Everyone looks for slightly different things when they read and therefore has idiosyncratic values of "try something new" that are awesome and mind-broadening as well as ones that are terrible and time-wasting, and that's as it should be. The problems come in when people try to be elitist or prescriptivist about reading habits, whether other people's or their own, and when it's so very much harder to *find* the things that don't fit in particular demographic or marketing niches. And occasionally trying something new that you're not sure whether you're going to like is a good thing; there are several thousand ways to micro-describe a book, and maybe the jacket copy and/or the person who mentioned it to you didn't hit on the reason you'd enjoy it. (Or even wildly disagreed with you on what the book is about!)

But the thing is, every time there's another round of "not/only books by straight white men" I squirm a little. Because if I wanted to expand my reading demographically, I ought to read *more* straight white guys. If I were to engage in a year of mind-broadening by cutting one authorial demographic, it would be white women. And I'm just as "um, no" about that as the people yelling on the internet about their straight white guy books, except that I feel no need to yell at people about it. I'm also pretty "um, no" about a lot of the big name male writers, and vintage science fiction, and the moral superiority of having awful things happen to your characters. There may be some correlations that could be drawn here. I am aware that I'm just as elitist as anybody; I just draw my lines in different places.

My reading log is a bit skewed at the moment because of the Megatherium, but so far this year I've finished 30 longer-than-picture-books.** Of those, there are 2 plant books by 4 white guys, 4 longer kid books by 2 white guys, and 3 by non-white authors (2M, 1F). (co-authors and series make the statistics a bit weird...) The rest is all white women. And I *do* have a pretty good network that signal-boosts a variety of books, and I do a lot of ordering up library books based on those recommendations. It is very easy to be insular, even when you are paying attention.

(I'm not really trying to draw big overarching conclusions here; it's just one of those things where the finger-wagging is not pointed at me because I don't align with the cultural norms, and yet I feel like I do my own version of the same thing. I partly mention it because I'm vaguely curious if other people do this, too.)

---related/not related:

Our library has a big shelf of summer reading club recommendations sorted by grade level just outside the children's area, and after pulling a bunch of potential read-alouds (we're good with up to about 3rd grade labeling, so long as the picture/word ratio is high enough) I picked up Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent on a whim. (Her A Hidden Magic was a semi-formative influence around 6th grade, but I hadn't read anything else by her.) It's a light read, YA with a couple chapters of frame story to set up a virtual reality game and then add urgency to it, and then she's free to spend nearly all the book running successive iterations of a portal fantasy, complete with many and various ways to get killed and have to start all over. Utterly brilliant in a writer-geeky kind of way.

------(footnotes!)

*Hugos are distributed by Worldcon, and for those not going to the con a $40 "supporting membership" gets you award voting rights. This year there was Drama caused by a few loud and awful people successfully ballot-stacking a bunch of the nominations, and a whole lot of other people deciding that $40 was worth getting in on the argument.

**plus 5 comics for the hugo ballot, which I'm not counting because I wouldn't have known they existed otherwise.

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