Y'Know What?

I've been musing about a couple of things lately and figured I might as well write them down for some sort of posterity.  *LOL*

This morning, I read a blog post by Natalie Luhrs, 57 Mind-Blowing Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Books.  In it she speaks about the lack of female representation in lists of this sort and I realised that, for me, I've never really noticed nor questioned if I'm reading a male or female author, especially if the work is good.  On Monday, I went for lunch with my childhood best friend, as some of you may know from my Twitter feed.  We've not been in contact for over 30 years and it was funny to discover things like we both read lots of fantasy.  So she asked me to recommend stuff to her.  I did.  I sent her 10 recs - 9 of which are series, but that's a whole 'nother subject!  When I read Natalie's blog post this morning I went back to that email to see how many were female.  You know what?  7 out of 10 of my recs were female authors.

And now you're curious, aren't you?  What were my recs?  Well... In random order.

1.  The Deryni novels by Katherine Kurtz
2.  Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
3.  The Dragon Prince trilogy by Melanie Rawn
4.  The Riverside novels by Ellen Kushner
5.  The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
6.  The Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman
7.  The Tales of Aeron series by Patricia Kennealy
8.  The Black Jewel trilogy by Anne Bishop
9.  The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks.
10 The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

I could have recommended a whole bunch more too, but I didn't want to overwhelm her.  And in those that I could rec - including science fiction - I realise that my collection is pretty much evenly split between male and female authors.  And I have to add, I seldom read the paranormal, urban fantasy romance type books  (a la J.R. Ward or Patricia Briggs) which have a huge majority of female authors.

I find myself wondering if I am not the norm because I don't notice things like author gender. Notice or allow it to factor into my book buying/reading decisions.  Do the majority of readers really do that?  Are they that shallow?   I just want to read a good book.  :)

Another thing that's been turning over in my mind lately has to do with quite a few of the authors/bloggers that I follow on Twitter.  A good number of them are feminists, vocal feminists.  Quite a few of them offer their opinions on many news items of the day, which is great.  That's a big part of why I follow them - but I've begun to notice something that bothers me more and more and last night it really annoyed me.

Remember I did that post about TSTL - Too Stupid To Live?  Well this is sort of like that.  See... there's been talk for a long time about the horrible threats that female gamers are subject to, especially when they deign to speak their minds.  I mean things like rape threats and death threats levelled at them  And these authors that I follow, they decry this - and RIGHTLY SO! - they decry and condemn and demand change.  I'm all for that!  Yet.... YET.... these same people, many of whom I respect and value their opinions, these same people come up with (I'm paraphrasing)....  The roof should fall in on the Fox News studio with catastrophic loss of life... misogynists should all go away and die.... people who hold (an opinion not held by feminists) should just fuck off and die...   if you don't agree with this thing I say/believe then I don't even want to know you...  I've heard/read it all many times.  Do they think they're being clever?  It's SO damned hypocritical and you know what?  It makes these feminists sound like the stereotypical hysterical women having a tantrum.  It makes me sad that these bright, articulate, intelligent people allow themselves to do pretty much the same thing they condemn.  I wish they'd stop.

So those are the things I've been pondering.  As well as what am I going to make for supper.  ;)