In the interim, here are a couple of links that I like:

First, I point you to Con or Bust! That’s an effort, associated with the Carl Brandon Society, to assist fans of color to attend science fiction conventions. The last two years they’ve assisted people who wanted to go to WisCon, and they are looking at adding Arisia support next year. Con or Bust! funds come primarily from the auction of donated items. This year’s batch includes things such as pie from Nisi Shawl, getting yourself written in as a god in N. K. Jemisin’s upcoming novel, signed books, lots of crafted items, and more.

Second, James Nicoll is doing a project I thought about doing after my Pyr post last month, but hadn’t yet started. He’s going through all the speculative fiction publishers and tallying authors and protagonists by gender. He’s using the tag cooties to label these posts. Seems to be about two publishers/imprints a day. Head over there to see the numbers (which don’t look good for some publishers), but also to help by proofing his work. A lot of his protagonist marking is done by reading the promo copy for the book, so he can use people who’ve read the books in question to provide information about books.

And yes, this does mean I plan to do the occasional link roundup on the new blog.

Photo by out0fwave used under a CC By license.

My reading goal for the last year has been to diversify my reading.

So my reading goal for 2010 is more of the same: After I finish any book by a white man, I will start reading a book by a writer of color or woman.

I am officially not attempting any quantity goals for the year. I expect I’ll still read quite a number of books, but I’m not going to track reading rate this year, or even think about it.

The idea was to make sure that I was getting beyond my default of fun easy reads by white dudes. I’ve rarely read exclusively in from that category of authors, but that very much comprised the bulk of my reading, and was what I defaulted to. I actually started that rule of thumb in May of 2009. Somewhere in 2010 though, I stopped needing to think about whether I was meeting that goal and reading authors who don’t look like me became a little more automatic. My manner of reading is still like a privileged white guy, but the texts are less so.

Here’s the breakdown of what I read by category:

• By author’s race (does not count anthologies):
  • White: 35
  • Black: 12
  • Asian: 6
• By author’s gender (does not count anthologes):
  • Female: 28
  • Male: 25
• A combination of the two:
  • White males: 19
  • Everyone else: 34
• By source:
  • Library: 12
  • Review copy: 10
  • Free ebook: 6
  • Borrowed from a friend: 2
  • Gift: 2
  • Bought: 23
• By genre:
  • Biography: 2
  • Crime fiction: 6
  • Economics: 2
  • Fantasy: 9
  • General fiction: 10
  • Horror: 1
  • General non-fiction: 3
  • Romance: 3
  • Science fiction: 10
  • Young adult: 6
  • Mixture: 1
• Total pages read: 16660

For 2011

Photo by lululemon athletica used under a CC By license.

Again, more of the same. I may tweak the rule of thumb because, as noted, I haven’t needed it to think about whether I’m reading outside of my default. I may give myself a more stringent version during the year. For the moment, I’m comfortable with the general idea as it stands.

Additionally, I will be reading along with A Year of Feminist Classics. I’m not a joiner by nature. It makes me cranky to set hard rules and schedules for my reading. So I’m only going to be loosely following their schedule. Some of these works I might read early, some might come in late.

Here’s the reading list as it currently stands, from their blog:

• January: Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft AND So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
• February: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
• March: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
• April: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• May: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• June: God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi
• July: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• August: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• September: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
• October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks AND Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism anthology
• November: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
• December: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

I’ve also joined an offline book club, currently called simply the Feminist Science Fiction Book Club. It’s purpose is discussion of the world view and politics of science fiction from a feminist perspective. The organizer tells me she’s going mix the topics between tradition book club questions and world view interrogation to get people used to the idea. We’ll see how that goes. It’ll be my first actual book club. For all I know, they’ll chew me up and spit me out. That’s not the worst possible outcome.

As you can tell, I’m a little worried about the experience. I expect some of my views will be challenged, and that’s not the most pleasant thing in the world.

I’ve been reading less, mostly due to caring for my grandparents in the last months before they died. I’m still averaging a book a week (26 total), which surprises me.

• Racial breakdown:
  • 17 white caucasian authors
  • 7 black authors
  • 2 asian authors
• Gender breakdown:
  • 8 female authors
  • 18 male authors
• What I’m currently interested in is the intersection of the two previous sets.
  • White males: 11
  • Others: 15

  My goal is to get my reading of others above 50%. So far, success! I do that by using a rule of thumb. If I finish a book by a white male, I start a book by someone not in that category. Yes, these are somewhat arbitrary categories, as race is a nebulous cultural construction.

• Nationality breakdown:
  • 21 United States authors
  • 5 foreign authors
• How acquired breakdown:
  • 6 borrowed from library or friends
  • 11 purchased
  • 4 free downloads
  • 5 review copies

  That one I think is somewhat of an anomaly. I’ve gotten LibraryThing Early Reviewers books four months in a row, bumping up my percentage of review copies.

• Book categories:
  • 2 Biography
  • 1 economics
  • 2 literary fiction
  • 3 popular fiction
  • 4 crime fiction
  • 3 fantasy
  • 1 horror
  • 5 science fiction
  • 3 young adult (all science fiction)
  • 1 a mixture

  I’ve definitely been trending toward more fiction lately, and toward more genre fiction. I’d like my non-fiction fraction to be somewhat higher, but I don’t want to muddy my diversity goals, so I’m not going to make a specific effort here. Nevertheless, now that it’s sitting in the back of my mind, I might spread the love a bit more in this area.

• Total pages: 7746

  That one is just for kicks. I don’t really care how many pages I read anymore.

Over at Presenting Lenore, Lenore has requested romance novel recommendations. She wants to try out the genre, since it’s not in her comfort zone. Seems like an opportune time to make the same request, albeit with some different caveats. So, please recommend some romance novels for me.

Here’s the caveats:

• It’s gotta be something a guy would like. I know that’s kinda nebulous. I have no real idea what I mean by that even, other than this: Romance is read and written mostly by women and there’s reasons for that. I don’t know enough about the romance genre to know what reasons those are. But I am most assuredly not immune from whatever cultural bias keeps men from liking most romance novels, as I have been proven to have most other biases common to men. So make your best judgment, those of you who have read romance and liked it. (Particularly any guys who have read romance and stumble across this entry.)
• One of the things that’s kept me from reading romance is a presumption on my part that the female characters in such novels don’t have much agency, nor do they make particularly good decisions (e.g., picking loser men). I could be totally wrong about that. But rest assured, if the female characters fall into one or both of those categories, I won’t like the book.
• I rarely like Victorian era settings, or really any upper-crust novel of manners. Regency romance is probably going to just irritate me.

At some point in the future, I’m not sure when, I will pick something generally called a romance and read it. Once I’ve picked one to read, I’ll close comments on this entry. So recommend away!

Photo Dorchester cover shoot with Mr. Romance by Flickr user rtbookreviews is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.0 license.

Well, now I’m another 75 pages further into the section. Yup, I’m still not impressed. More of the same. Roman à clef it may be, that only makes me inclined to dismiss the infrarealist movement that Bolaño founded. Perhaps if the visceral realist poets in the book described what their movement was about, I might be more favorable. But they don’t. Hell, they don’t even have a coherent movement in terms of group dynamics.

My favorite characters from the first section appear very differently now. Instead of Quim and Maria Font being the subjects of Juan García Madero narrative, they give brief interviews about other people. Rather than the people I care about, I get Belano and Lima, or other side characters who never become interesting.

One review of The Savage Detectives on LibraryThing says the plot becomes apparent in the last 100 page. It can’t come soon enough.

Warning: my read-along thoughts contain spoilers.

The second half of section one reads like the first half, except with 50% more aimlessness and indolent artiness than before. Juan García Madero bounces everywhere but where he should be, at home with his aunt and uncle. Between nights of sleeping with the various women who throw themselves at him, he wanders between cafes and bars writing poetry, steals books from multiple bookstores, and gossips with his fellow visceral realists.

For the most part, I like him even less than I did before. The primary reason is that he doesn’t participate in his own life. He’s not only a follower, he follows others merely because they happen to be in front of him at a particular moment in time. I despise that kind of aimlessness (even though I sometimes partake of it myself).

The side characters become more interesting though. I cannot for the life of me determine what motivates Quim Font, the father of one of García Madero’s love interests, Maria Font. But in a weird way he endears himself to me. Both he and his daughter have an agency that I admire. Quim is a crazy man. One moment he’s encouraging García Madero, giving him money. The next he’s pretending to be his daughter when he answers the phone in order to get information out of her paramour. It’s not because he’s trying to meddle in her affairs, it’s because he knows the boy will confide if he thinks it’s her. Maria acts the haughty sorority girl, but has her own moments of tenderness. I love these mixed portraits, and the two of them became very real and thus interesting characters in my mind. My worry is that they disappear in the following section.

I noted above that for the most part I didn’t like García Madero. He ended the section on a note I appreciated, making a decision and acting in his own life, even if without much thought. This made me perk up! An auspicious lead in to the following section.

Man, do I ever focus on agency! There’s probably a lot I’m missing here. One entry in this first-person diary like section consists of a list of the works and poets that García Madero stole that day. There’s got to be some intelligent commentary to extrapolate from the poets mentioned throughout the section, or from the references to the Paz camp but I don’t have the foggiest idea about poetry, particularly Spanish poetry, to stick my nose there.

Ah well, that’s it for this week. Maybe I’ll catch up a day or two for this next week.

In fact, my reading will probably be quite slow for the rest of the month and I may not finish any of the 4 or 5 books I’ve started before April. Two weeks ago my grandmother had surgery for cancer, but her prognosis is poor. The day after her surgery, my grandfather had a heart attack while visiting. He died in the operating room last Wednesday. Those of you reading along on Facebook know this already. Obviously, that’s been what I’ve been thinking about, not my reading. And my duties are not yet ended.

Nevertheless, I have not put aside the books. I just will be playing catchup for a bit. Better late than not at all.

What’s my impression of The Savage Detectives so far (at page 75 or so)? Not really impressed yet. Not driven away either though. Bolaño can write; he can move things along pretty well. But I’m not so enamored with the characters, particularly García Madero, the narrator. He’s a young kid at university, living with his parents and without any real world experience. He falls in with a group of ne’er-do-well poets and general layabouts who call themselves the visceral realists. García Madero drifts from person to person, looking for a place in the world vicariously. The secondary characters have not yet been fleshed out.

I do like one secondary character, Maria Font. She’s a willful girl who sleeps around. I like that she doesn’t apologize for seeking pleasure, and she asserts herself with the men she beds. So far, I’m not too happy with how the characters treat her though. Several of the boys in the story pejoratively call her a slut and act as if her behavior is less savory than their own participation. Typical male, of course. Roberto Bolaño isn’t writing anything that’s untrue.

I read somewhere that this is a Huck Finn story from a South American Spanish perspective, but I’m not seeing the similarity yet. Perhaps later.

So, what am I doing? The Bibliolatrist is hosting a read-along for Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. The more literary of the blogs I follow (such as Three Percent and Conversational Reading for example) have been touting Bolaño for a while now. I am not particularly literary, but I dabble now and then. I’ve wanted to see what this was all about for a while. But I needed a spark, I guess. Bibliolatrist’s read-along seemed perfect.

The read-along schedule is not aggressive: 9 weeks at about 75 pages per week, starting tomorrow. If the text turns out to be difficult (Bibliolatrist says not so far) I can easily keep up with that. I hope. I wasn’t able to maintain that for another translated work, Ričardas Gavelis Vilnius Poker.

Anyhoo, follow along and see how this works out for me. Point and laugh. Or join in.

So what happened? The book a day goal was too ambitious for me. I’ve averaged two books a week in the past, so that should have been something I could accomplish, but two things interfered. First was that I read a lot of short story anthologies this year. I never work through those quickly. The second event that prevented me from reading so much was my return to work in June. There was a noticeable decline in quantity after that point. At the end of May, too, my reading goals changed.

For my trip to Wiscon, I decided I would read only books by female or non-white authors for the trip. Just as an experiment. I knew my reading skewed white male. The panels and discussions at Wiscon didn’t directly change my goals, but the experience there was nevertheless a turning point. After I returned, rather than have a vague goal to increase my reading of non white male authors, I decided to put in place a general rule that would actively increase my reading in that category. For every book I read by a white male, I would start a book by someone non-white or female. It’s not a rigid rule, just a rule of thumb that would keep me reading more diversely than I had previously.

Before Wiscon, I read 37 novels¹. 25 by white males. 11 by white women. 1 by a black woman. No novels by any male writers of color. I read 11 non-fiction works. 10 by white men. 1 by an Arab man. I read one anthology, a Gardner Dozois Year’s Best collection.

After Wiscon, I started 29 novels. 10 by white men. 10 by white women (one of which I gave up on). 1 by an Asian woman. 2 by black women. 1 by a native American man. 4 by black men (one of which I gave up less than a couple dozen pages in). 1 by an Asian man. For non-fiction, I read 8 books post Wiscon. 3 by white men. 2 by white women. 3 by Asian men. I read 6 anthologies post Wiscon. 2½ edited by white men. ½ edited by a white woman. 1 by an Asian man. 1 by Hispanic women. 1 by a black woman. Something to note about the white men who edited the anthologies I read during this period: their anthologies make an effort to be diverse.

Quite the change for the better I think.

So my reading goal for 2010 is more of the same: After I finish any book by a white man, I will start reading a book by a writer of color or woman.

I am officially not attempting any quantity goals for the year. I expect I’ll still read quite a number of books, but I’m not going to track reading rate this year, or even think about it.

Last year I set a couple of goals for my 2008 reading. First, read 104 books during the year (i.e., average two books per week). Second, read twelve current science fiction or fantasy books.

On the first goal, I just missed achieving my target. I suppose I could still make it if I tear through some reading in the next couple of hours though. Result: 103 books read. I’m going to count this one as a success.

On the second goal, I surprisingly made it as well, though with a slight fudge. I really didn’t pay attention to the goal after April. However, I still managed to read nine books published in 2008 during the year. I also listened to the METAtropolis audiobook and read two genre magazine issues during the year. Not bad at all. In the back of my mind for this goal was I was hoping to be able to have a coherent opinion on who should be in the running for the upcoming awards season. I didn’t read anything about which there was significant buzz during the year, except for Little Brother. I’ll have to sit on the sidelines again.

I haven’t yet decided what my goals for the next year will be. Perhaps in a day or two. I probably should make an effort to read out of the stash of unread books I already own. I need to think about it.

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