2017 Year in Review - SF/Fantasy Reading, Part 1: Basic Summary

To celebrate the new year, I'm going to be spending a few posts looking back at what I've read over the past year throughout this whole week.  Post 1, which you're reading at this very moment, features a summary of what I've read and some basic facts.  Post 2, which will come out either tomorrow or the next day will go over some of my favorite novels from this year.  Post 3, coming out after that, will go over briefly my least favorite works - the novels I completed and didn't like and the ones that I began but failed to complete.

So what did I read this year?



Well, I completed 149 books on the dot this year.  Of these books:

98 were written by authors who identified as women.
45 were written by authors who identified as men.
6 were written by a combination of authors (of different genders). 

Similarly the authors I read included:
48 unique women authors
32 unique men authors
(6 mixed works)

The common perspective of SciFi/Fantasy writing is that the field is a male-dominated genre.  It's probably true that the majority of books at local bookstores are written by men, but that's not because the field doesn't contain a LOT of great female authors.  Evidence of that can be found in my own reading - nearly 2/3 of the books I read this year were written by women, and it's not just that I read a lot of works of a few female authors (although i did for a few) - well over half of the authors I read this year were women as well.  It's really not hard at this point to read the genre and accomplish this either - I wasn't trying to do it, I just was choosing books that interested me, and the places I found these books (others' recommendations, lists of books out each month on io9, a few blogs like scalzi's where authors explained there ideas) just led me to this distribution.

If your reading list is predominantly male, you simply need to look to other channels as places to find book recommendations.  You're missing out on some terrific works otherwise.

That said, while the works I read were diverse in terms of gender, I'm not sure I succeeded in terms of reading diverse works via other metrics, only 30 Works I read were by Writers of Color (13 by Asian Writers, 13 by Black Writers, 2 by Hispanic Writers, and 2 by other non-white writers).  That's not a good ratio, which isn't helped by the actual author count being significantly lower (4 of the 13 Asian-written works for example were written by Wes Chu, and 4 of the Black-written works were Octavia Butler).  I have tried to take special interest in works that I find with interesting premises that are written by non-White authors, but obviously I could do better.*

*For those who think it doesn't matter, or that doing so is simply an exercise in PC, you're very definitely wrong.  Works written by people of different viewpoints - and WOC have a different view of the world from White writers - are often very different in substance.  This doesn't make them by default BETTER, but it does make them at worst a change of pace and often very interesting, and sometimes amazing.  It kind of defeats the purpose of reading lots of works if you're always reading the same thing, and reading diverse viewpoints allows you to be frequently reading things that feel fresh and more unique.  

Finally, it seems clear to me that I did a good job in general at picking works that I wound up liking.  There were only three books this year that I began and did not finish, and the average grade I gave the 149 books I read this year on a 10 point scale was a 7.65.  Since I'm a harsh grader IMO and an 8 out of 10 means a book that I really liked, that's a really nice average.  Twenty Seven of the 149 books I read I scored a 9 or higher (meaning that I pretty much loved those works), which is a great ratio. 

Next post, I'll be going deeper into those books that I really enjoyed, particularly into those 27.