I'm going to have to think about GR. I know it's a stop-gap, and it's just the place where most people maintain another account -- and I love my BL community. But the whole GR thing is galling nevertheless.
It is galling. I've made my peace with it, but it is galling. It took 12 minutes for this post to so that I could respond to your comment, though, and that's a deal breaker.
And while it is as stopgap, I think that the gap is huge. I don't see anything out there that is even remotely plausible as an alternative. I'm basically just furious with the site owners who have failed us so completely.
Depressing. :( GR is just not the same.
Very pretty charts :) Personally I couldn't give a damn what type of chromosomes the author has or what is going on in their heads, so long as the story/writing is good or they write decent non-fiction.
GR is most definitely not the same. And I loathe the fact that I'm even put in the position of having to think about being active there, if only in one tiny corner ("The [BL] Outpost") and in order to stay in touch with the members of the BL community.
Re: Author gender and ehtnicity (and why should it matter?):
I used to think it didn't / shouldn't matter, too. Since I started to put greater weight on women's writing and books by non-white authors, I've come to change my mind.
1) It's not about "chromosomes", but about life experience. Women, even in today's society, experience life differently from men. That is true even for women who (like me) were raised -- not necessarily deliberately, but as it were "by default" -- in such a way as to embrace roles traditionally reserved for men from early childhood on (which incidentally frequently put me at odds with the boys in the playground), and who work in an industry that, even when I was in university, was still substantially dominated by (white) men, and to a certain extent still is even today (not in terms of access to the profession as such, but in terms of what is achievable and who calls the shots). And similarly, it is obvious that blacks, Latinos/-as, Asians, and members of other ethnicities experience society differently from whites -- it didn't take George Floyd's death and the Black Lives Matter movement to convince me of that.
So it is only natural that women -- and non-white authors -- also tell stories differently from men, and from white people, respectively. Not necessarily, perhaps not even overwhelmingly, the way that Bernadine Evaristo does -- a book like "Girl, Women, Other" could of course never have been written by a man or by a white person to begin with. (And that's precisely the reason why I said these are the people who most need to read this book -- because it reflects a perspective that they / we will only ever be able to understand, if at all, intellectually; never instinctively and from personal experience.) Nor do I necessarily mean that male writing is more "testosterone-soaked" than women's writing (though bad male writing almost invariably is), or that "men can't write women characters" (and vice versa). -- In most cases, the differences between men's and women's writing are so subtle that, as long as you don't pay any attention, you don't notice them at all. But if you come from reading a lot of books written by men (as I had, when I set out on this course a few years ago) and then you switch to reading books written mostly by women, you start noticing them after a while -- in details of writerly focus, in little things like a detail of an individual characters' response to a particular situation (or to somebody else's comment), in the way dialogue is framed, in what matters to a character in a given situation, etc. Again, none of this rises to the level of "good / bad" "realistic / unrealistic" writing, or to "men writing women as men with XX.chromosomes" (or women writing men as women with XY-chromosomes, or whites writing other ethniticities as black-faced whites, etc.), but it's there; and interestingly, it's there as much in, say, Golden Age mystery fiction and other 19th and early 20th century classics as it is in contemporary writing.
2) It's about industry access and noticeability. The publishing industry is, for all I can see, still way too much dominated by "pale stale males". Like in my own industry (the law), it's not so much a matter of a lack of women (or non-white) writers (and columnists, critics, journalists, etc.) But in the corporate structures, the old hierarchies die hard -- not only at the top (= the tip of the iceberg) -- and though I don't know a lot of writers personally, I know enough to realize how much harder it is for women -- and for writers of color -- to obtain the same amount of exposure that a white male author would be able to obtain in their situation. (Again, this isn't as simple as "good / bad writing" or a matter of talent -- it's about what it takes *in addition* to talent and good writing.) So if I can do my tiny little bit to help by actually buying and reading their books -- and by occasionally even talking about those books, whenever I feel motivated enough to write a review, or by deliberately tracking my reading and talking about that, I'm more than happy to do that.
I love your post and summary, tho. It's been interesting to see how the pandemic has affected everyone's reading, but BL and books - whether comfort reads, buddy reads, or new adventures - have really helped to cope with the last few months.
I loved Girl, Woman, Other and totally agree that the Booker got it right for once. So much so, I've got Evaristo's Mr Loverman lined up for whenever this stupid slump ends.
Btw, Love All and Green for Danger arrived this week. :D I'll post a haul pic once the other books arrive...they should have arrived this week, but alas...
Oooh so much data! I'm tempted to go in and add in some more charts on my tracking sheet now, but I don't think adding main character gender is really feasible in my case. I mean, so many books have multiple main characters and it would involve much more deliberate tracking.
*wolf whistle* 129 books in six months, congratulations!
Sadly GR really isn't the same. Wordpress might help on the blog site (and I really need to create an account and back everything up), but the whole community part of this site would be difficult to replicate on other platforms. Such a shame that the owners of the site kind of gave up on everything but their most basic work.
Well, the 129 books are essentially due to my Golden Age mystery binge (combined with mostly audio books elsewhere) -- I really didn't have the heart to go anywhere near anything truly weighty. (Except for Mantel's "The Mirror and the Light", which I can't bring myself to finish because everybody knows how it ends and I don't want to reach that point yet. Or maybe ever. :D ) As an absolute number, that's a very high total for me, though -- there have been years when I didn't even read half as many books in the entire year.
And yes, most of my Wordpress blog is strictly a BL backup at this point, too. Not all of it, and there are a few WP projects that never really got out of the drafting stage (and which I may finally get around to finishing if BL should bite the dust this time around -- though fingers crossed that it won't). One thing I *have* decided to do, though, is to turn those reading status updates copied over to WP that aren't officially reviews yet into real reviews, and then link to WP instead of BL (or maybe in addition to BL, but definitely not just BL alone) from the relevant book pages on LibraryThing. (All of which sounds like more work than it really is; I don't write all that many reviews, all told.)
That said, the BL community is what I'm most afraid of losing -- and indeed, seeing breaking up -- if the site goes down. I was one of those who came to BL as part of the big GR exodus almost exactly seven years ago (onnurtilraun: if you ever have too much time on your hands, here's the back story: http://pagefault.booklikes.com/post/713112/gr-debacle-101 ) … so I'm extremely loath to even have to think about going back to GR now; even if it's only as part of the "[BL] Outpost" group. And even that aside, posting on GR definitely isn't the same as blogging … and blogging elsewhere, without the book community connection (and without a book database attached) isn't the same thing as BL, either. (Deep sigh.) If only there were an easy solution ...
I really enjoyed this post. Sorry I'm so late responding to it but BL access only seems to work properly from my Macbook and even then it's slow.
Like you, I'm saddened at the thought of BL going away. If there was any active contact from the site owners, I'd be pushing for some kind of crowd funding or Patreon type deall to revitalise the site. Even click-through revenue could be enough to fund the running costs.
I'm envjous of your stats - both for how pretty they are and for the discipline needed to generate them. Looking at my reading for the past couple of years, I can see that the majority of books that I read are by women. Until recently, I hadn't bothered checking their ethnicity but it turns out that I really enjoy books that are written by people who aren't white. I'm a big fan of First Nation writers and I love the SF stuff coming from African and Afro-Caribbean writers.
I didn't start out reading these folks because they're not white. I read them because they're fresh and viivid and because I can more easily see the world from their point of view. I think that writing from the point of view of people who are excluded for some reason: gender, race, class, phyiscal or mental difference, not only critques the stories that the privileged tell themselves about how fair what they do is but accesses an engergy focused on survival and maintaining both identity and dignity in a world where none of those things can be taken for granted. These are the people I grew up with Even though I've long since passed from the excluded to the privilieged, I still hear the voices of my childhood feel like my native tongue while the voices of my privileged present feel more like polite academia or a neutral lingua franca.
I've been putting of buying 'Girl, Woman, Other' becaise I've been so disappointed in the Booker lists in recent years but now I'm going to give it a go.
Like you, I really enjoyed the Buddy Reads. I like the process as much as the content.
I didn't know that 'Green For Danger' was a book. I encountered it as a beautifully done film, starring the inimitable Alistair Sims as the police inspector. It's a long time since I saw it but it left a strong impression on my teenage mind. I thought it matched anything Hitchcock did.
I really have to get my hands on the "Green for Danger" movie. (In my case it was the other way around -- I knew about the book, but only learned that there was a screen adaptation after I'd read it.) I bet Alastair Sim made for a great Inspector Cockrill.
As for BL, I don't think it's lack of funding on *the owners'* side -- more like a profound lack of interest. Both BL and its parent company (Legimi) are financed by EU funds *and* venture capitalist funding; plus, they have advertising revenues. So the cash should be there, and possibly even *more* than enough of it. But they apparently think that BookLikes runs itself. Well -- it just doesn't.
My stats are actually fairly easily compiled at this point; I've been doing this for a few years now, and I have a basic Excel template that I use -- a standard table for the books and the various categories that I'm tracking, with a a text-based "count if contents = [xyz]" computation of totals at the bottom, and graphs (also all prearranged as part of the form at this point) based on those computed totals. It took a while to set up when I first created it, but now that it's there ... as I said, it's basically a matter of filling in the form. (Just for variety, I do like to play around with the colors and presentation of the graphs, though. :) )
And yes, if I read more speculative fiction, quite conceivably I'd come across authors of various ethnicities more easily than I have of late (though in the past couple of months, it's really down to my own laziness more than anything else -- it's not like I don't have several monumental reading lists for every part of the world that isn't Northern Hemisphere / predominantly white). The whole idea of "the other" / "alien" is literally built into many aspects of SF, so it's not surprising that it has such a draw for authors familiar with being seen [and excluded] as "the other" from personal experience.
I hear the voices of "the other" primarily in my heart to the extent that I'm a woman in what is still noticeably a man's professional world (not just the law as such, but my particular "corner" of it more than other aspects of the legal industry), as well as because I've grown up as a child raised by a single working mom -- earning her money in a low-paying non-academic job that, even today, by definition excludes those doing it from ever reaching management level -- in a time when divorce was anything but an everyday occurrence. But, like you, I know both sides of the medal; again in part because of my job, of course, and in part because of my family background; as my mother's family is, in fact, definitely middle class (for my grandma and her antecedents, "middle class" would arguably even have been a minor case of "coming down in the world"). My mom's divorce, and the fact that she henceforth had to earn her place in life was the one calamity that nobody had provided for ... like her sister, she was intended to be provided for by marriage (and by marriage only). So instead of letting her study (like her brother) -- she'd have loved to be a teacher --, they more or less pushed her into a marriage with a man who was *obviously* incompatible on pretty much every level.
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts about "Girl, Woman, Other."
I'd just like to add that unless you actively seek out new authors, SFF (I loathe the term speculative fiction due to Atwood) can end up pretty white washed. It's impressive that Mike has found that he reads as many diverse authors as he does without even trying.
And while it is as stopgap, I think that the gap is huge. I don't see anything out there that is even remotely plausible as an alternative. I'm basically just furious with the site owners who have failed us so completely.
Very pretty charts :) Personally I couldn't give a damn what type of chromosomes the author has or what is going on in their heads, so long as the story/writing is good or they write decent non-fiction.
Re: Author gender and ehtnicity (and why should it matter?):
I used to think it didn't / shouldn't matter, too. Since I started to put greater weight on women's writing and books by non-white authors, I've come to change my mind.
1) It's not about "chromosomes", but about life experience. Women, even in today's society, experience life differently from men. That is true even for women who (like me) were raised -- not necessarily deliberately, but as it were "by default" -- in such a way as to embrace roles traditionally reserved for men from early childhood on (which incidentally frequently put me at odds with the boys in the playground), and who work in an industry that, even when I was in university, was still substantially dominated by (white) men, and to a certain extent still is even today (not in terms of access to the profession as such, but in terms of what is achievable and who calls the shots). And similarly, it is obvious that blacks, Latinos/-as, Asians, and members of other ethnicities experience society differently from whites -- it didn't take George Floyd's death and the Black Lives Matter movement to convince me of that.
So it is only natural that women -- and non-white authors -- also tell stories differently from men, and from white people, respectively. Not necessarily, perhaps not even overwhelmingly, the way that Bernadine Evaristo does -- a book like "Girl, Women, Other" could of course never have been written by a man or by a white person to begin with. (And that's precisely the reason why I said these are the people who most need to read this book -- because it reflects a perspective that they / we will only ever be able to understand, if at all, intellectually; never instinctively and from personal experience.) Nor do I necessarily mean that male writing is more "testosterone-soaked" than women's writing (though bad male writing almost invariably is), or that "men can't write women characters" (and vice versa). -- In most cases, the differences between men's and women's writing are so subtle that, as long as you don't pay any attention, you don't notice them at all. But if you come from reading a lot of books written by men (as I had, when I set out on this course a few years ago) and then you switch to reading books written mostly by women, you start noticing them after a while -- in details of writerly focus, in little things like a detail of an individual characters' response to a particular situation (or to somebody else's comment), in the way dialogue is framed, in what matters to a character in a given situation, etc. Again, none of this rises to the level of "good / bad" "realistic / unrealistic" writing, or to "men writing women as men with XX.chromosomes" (or women writing men as women with XY-chromosomes, or whites writing other ethniticities as black-faced whites, etc.), but it's there; and interestingly, it's there as much in, say, Golden Age mystery fiction and other 19th and early 20th century classics as it is in contemporary writing.
2) It's about industry access and noticeability. The publishing industry is, for all I can see, still way too much dominated by "pale stale males". Like in my own industry (the law), it's not so much a matter of a lack of women (or non-white) writers (and columnists, critics, journalists, etc.) But in the corporate structures, the old hierarchies die hard -- not only at the top (= the tip of the iceberg) -- and though I don't know a lot of writers personally, I know enough to realize how much harder it is for women -- and for writers of color -- to obtain the same amount of exposure that a white male author would be able to obtain in their situation. (Again, this isn't as simple as "good / bad writing" or a matter of talent -- it's about what it takes *in addition* to talent and good writing.) So if I can do my tiny little bit to help by actually buying and reading their books -- and by occasionally even talking about those books, whenever I feel motivated enough to write a review, or by deliberately tracking my reading and talking about that, I'm more than happy to do that.
// TA steps off soap box.
I love your post and summary, tho. It's been interesting to see how the pandemic has affected everyone's reading, but BL and books - whether comfort reads, buddy reads, or new adventures - have really helped to cope with the last few months.
I loved Girl, Woman, Other and totally agree that the Booker got it right for once. So much so, I've got Evaristo's Mr Loverman lined up for whenever this stupid slump ends.
Sadly GR really isn't the same. Wordpress might help on the blog site (and I really need to create an account and back everything up), but the whole community part of this site would be difficult to replicate on other platforms. Such a shame that the owners of the site kind of gave up on everything but their most basic work.
And 129, wow, yes!
And yes, most of my Wordpress blog is strictly a BL backup at this point, too. Not all of it, and there are a few WP projects that never really got out of the drafting stage (and which I may finally get around to finishing if BL should bite the dust this time around -- though fingers crossed that it won't). One thing I *have* decided to do, though, is to turn those reading status updates copied over to WP that aren't officially reviews yet into real reviews, and then link to WP instead of BL (or maybe in addition to BL, but definitely not just BL alone) from the relevant book pages on LibraryThing. (All of which sounds like more work than it really is; I don't write all that many reviews, all told.)
That said, the BL community is what I'm most afraid of losing -- and indeed, seeing breaking up -- if the site goes down. I was one of those who came to BL as part of the big GR exodus almost exactly seven years ago (onnurtilraun: if you ever have too much time on your hands, here's the back story: http://pagefault.booklikes.com/post/713112/gr-debacle-101 ) … so I'm extremely loath to even have to think about going back to GR now; even if it's only as part of the "[BL] Outpost" group. And even that aside, posting on GR definitely isn't the same as blogging … and blogging elsewhere, without the book community connection (and without a book database attached) isn't the same thing as BL, either. (Deep sigh.) If only there were an easy solution ...
Like you, I'm saddened at the thought of BL going away. If there was any active contact from the site owners, I'd be pushing for some kind of crowd funding or Patreon type deall to revitalise the site. Even click-through revenue could be enough to fund the running costs.
I'm envjous of your stats - both for how pretty they are and for the discipline needed to generate them. Looking at my reading for the past couple of years, I can see that the majority of books that I read are by women. Until recently, I hadn't bothered checking their ethnicity but it turns out that I really enjoy books that are written by people who aren't white. I'm a big fan of First Nation writers and I love the SF stuff coming from African and Afro-Caribbean writers.
I didn't start out reading these folks because they're not white. I read them because they're fresh and viivid and because I can more easily see the world from their point of view. I think that writing from the point of view of people who are excluded for some reason: gender, race, class, phyiscal or mental difference, not only critques the stories that the privileged tell themselves about how fair what they do is but accesses an engergy focused on survival and maintaining both identity and dignity in a world where none of those things can be taken for granted. These are the people I grew up with Even though I've long since passed from the excluded to the privilieged, I still hear the voices of my childhood feel like my native tongue while the voices of my privileged present feel more like polite academia or a neutral lingua franca.
I've been putting of buying 'Girl, Woman, Other' becaise I've been so disappointed in the Booker lists in recent years but now I'm going to give it a go.
Like you, I really enjoyed the Buddy Reads. I like the process as much as the content.
I didn't know that 'Green For Danger' was a book. I encountered it as a beautifully done film, starring the inimitable Alistair Sims as the police inspector. It's a long time since I saw it but it left a strong impression on my teenage mind. I thought it matched anything Hitchcock did.
As for BL, I don't think it's lack of funding on *the owners'* side -- more like a profound lack of interest. Both BL and its parent company (Legimi) are financed by EU funds *and* venture capitalist funding; plus, they have advertising revenues. So the cash should be there, and possibly even *more* than enough of it. But they apparently think that BookLikes runs itself. Well -- it just doesn't.
My stats are actually fairly easily compiled at this point; I've been doing this for a few years now, and I have a basic Excel template that I use -- a standard table for the books and the various categories that I'm tracking, with a a text-based "count if contents = [xyz]" computation of totals at the bottom, and graphs (also all prearranged as part of the form at this point) based on those computed totals. It took a while to set up when I first created it, but now that it's there ... as I said, it's basically a matter of filling in the form. (Just for variety, I do like to play around with the colors and presentation of the graphs, though. :) )
And yes, if I read more speculative fiction, quite conceivably I'd come across authors of various ethnicities more easily than I have of late (though in the past couple of months, it's really down to my own laziness more than anything else -- it's not like I don't have several monumental reading lists for every part of the world that isn't Northern Hemisphere / predominantly white). The whole idea of "the other" / "alien" is literally built into many aspects of SF, so it's not surprising that it has such a draw for authors familiar with being seen [and excluded] as "the other" from personal experience.
I hear the voices of "the other" primarily in my heart to the extent that I'm a woman in what is still noticeably a man's professional world (not just the law as such, but my particular "corner" of it more than other aspects of the legal industry), as well as because I've grown up as a child raised by a single working mom -- earning her money in a low-paying non-academic job that, even today, by definition excludes those doing it from ever reaching management level -- in a time when divorce was anything but an everyday occurrence. But, like you, I know both sides of the medal; again in part because of my job, of course, and in part because of my family background; as my mother's family is, in fact, definitely middle class (for my grandma and her antecedents, "middle class" would arguably even have been a minor case of "coming down in the world"). My mom's divorce, and the fact that she henceforth had to earn her place in life was the one calamity that nobody had provided for ... like her sister, she was intended to be provided for by marriage (and by marriage only). So instead of letting her study (like her brother) -- she'd have loved to be a teacher --, they more or less pushed her into a marriage with a man who was *obviously* incompatible on pretty much every level.
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts about "Girl, Woman, Other."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zluRBp7al1I