Menage à Trois Bingo

There's apparently been some internet kerfuffle about an article by K T Bradford, responded to by lots of people, Scalzi among them.

Since I had in fact been tracking my reading so far this year, I did some googling and ran some numbers on my January and February books. Reading whatever crosses my path or continuing series I had been following has so far resulted in my reading a much less diverse group of authors than I had thought. In January and February I read 44 books by 27 authors. All 27 authors are white. To the best I can tell, all but 4 are straight. There are 16 men and 11 women. 20 Americans, 7 other countries (3 UK, 1 Australian, 1 Czech, 1 German, 1 French).

I feel slightly shamed, because I do value diversity in my reading. So I have made a list of all the books and authors recommended on various lists and comments reachable from those links, and borrowed several of the books from the library. I'm going to continue some of the series I was reading previously, but I'll add more variety from the lists. Diving in now...

Starring the items from my compiled book list. (If the star is on the author name not the book title, then either my list contained a different book by that author which I was unable to find (yet), or it contains only the author's name without a specific book recommendation.)

1. Darker Still, *Leanna Renee Hieber


2. *A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar


3. *Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson


4. The Circle Opens: Shatterglass, Tamora Pierce


5. *The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine


6. Trumps of Doom, Roger Zelazny (audio, reread)


7. *Warchild, Karin Lowachee
   Almost gave up on this in the first section, which is written in second-person. I understand why she did it; I did the same thing with some short bits of my abortive attempt at fanfic (well, it might get added to one day). But it went on for a long time and I was getting kind of tired of it. However I kept with it and in the end I found the book complex and engrossing, although I was a bit disappointed by the ambiguous open ending.


8. Specials, Scott Westerfeld


9. *Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier


10. *The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka
    This book is unique in my experience, in that it is written in the first person plural. It's the story of a population rather than an individual, the young women who immigrated to America from Japan in the early 1900's.


11. *The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson
    This might actually be a reread. Parts of it felt very familiar. Either I read a reasonably large portion of it but didn't finish--might be one I picked up in the bookstore or library but didn't take home because reasons--or I've read it before and didn't entirely remember the plot. Probably the former.


12. Great Sky Woman, *Steven Barnes


13. Extras, Scott Westerfeld


14. *Fortune's Pawn, Rachel Bach


15. *Ash, Malinda Lo


16. Shakespeare Saved My Life, Laura Bates
    Big Library Read


17. The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean


18. City of Lost Souls, Cassandra Clare