Marginalized Genders Reading List: 2016 Edition

At the start of 2016, Renay of Lady Business issued herself a challenge to read work by 100 different women authors and artists over the course of the year. I liked this challenge so much that I took it up myself, with a slight adjustment to include nonbinary, genderfluid, and agender authors as well.

I counted everyone whose work was at least novelette-length for prose or issue-length for comics, and my year-end reading list looks like this, in alphabetical order:

Love At First Word

A fair few of my readerly friends tell me a book must hook them within a single page or they’re out.

If I read this way, I’d never finish anything.

I like a lot, but I’m picky about what I love--and I usually need to sink into a book before I can tell whether I’m gonna fall hard for it. Hell, in a few extreme cases it's taken me as long as two hundred and fifty pages to go from, “I really like this” to “OMG THIS IS BEST THING IN THE WORLD.”

Because I’m as suspicious as I am picky. Books have to trick me into trusting them, and precious few have ever managed to win my love within the space of two pages.

Even fewer have done it with a single paragraph. In the order I read them, they are:

On Reviewing Less

When I started this blog a couple years back, I decided I’d write about only those books I wanted to write about. Not necessarily the ones I loved the most; the ones I wanted to discuss in a public fashion, at greater length than Twitter allows.

The longer I keep this no-longer-new blog going, though, the fewer proper reviews I write. Every Sunday I pen quick takes and mini reviews, some of which stretch to more words than other peoples’ proper reviews, but I don’t often sit down and write the sort of responses that really dig into the mechanics of the thing.

I’ve been asking myself why that is.

Books On the Nightstand Bingo

A week or so ago, Janani and Shaina declared their intent to participate in Books On the Nightstand Bingo, a summer reading project that randomly assigns people a grid packed with twenty-four categories they should try to read from between May 28th and September 1st.

Now, I ain't so big on reading challenges and projects and all that. I swore them off a couple years back, and I didn't imagine I'd change that policy in light of my goals for 2016 (ie, to read whatever the hell I want). I'm a sucker for anything that's also a game, though, so I decided to make a no-pressure exception for this one.

I hopped onto the fancy-dancy bingo card generation engine thing and ended up with the following categories:

Some of them are totally me. Some of them rarely show up on my reading lists.

I still plan to read whatever the hell I want, but I figure it might be interesting to see how many of the things I pick up according to whatever whim rules me this week naturally fit into these categories. I'll check my card every time I finish a book and update the list below as things qualify.

The Death of Magic

Let’s talk about the Death of Magic.

This is a topic I’ve long resisted writing about because it’s tough to get into without concrete examples and I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone; however, it’s also something I’m keen to discuss because I fucking loathe it. The Death of Magic is by far my least favourite fantasy trope, even above Chosen Ones and contraction-free dialogue, and it had a major presence in my youthful reading life.

It messed me up. To this day, I live in fear that the exciting new series I've plucked off the shelf could end with the Death of Magic¹.

But let’s back up a sec. Maybe you’re one of the lucky few who’s never encountered this trope and you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Say you’re a fictional character with a major role in a fantasy novel. You’re either a longtime resident of a magical land or you’ve fallen through a portal and ended up in one. You’re obliged to go on all sorts of adventures, fiction being what it is, and magic is an abiding force throughout. Maybe you’re a magic user your own self, or maybe you face off against an Evil Wizard, or maybe your Wise Old Mentor is also a Good Wizard With Selfish Goals. (Pro tip: Wise Old Mentors always have selfish goals, and they're liable to fake their own deaths.) However your story plays out, magic is a big part of it.

Until the very end, when you’ve defeated the Dark One/Evil Wizard/Pretender King and put the world back on track. Now magic must depart forever to make room for progress.

Because it ain’t like we could progress with magic still in the mix, now is it?

Fictional Preoccupations

I spend a lot of time considering what I like, why I like it, and how I can best compile the things I like into definitive lists to which I may refer whenever anyone even hints they might be interested. Consequently, I’ve got Favourites lists for everything: literary characters, TV shows, novels, comics, things I’ve learned from the CW, and so on and so forth.

I am Very Serious about these lists. Some of them are downright life-defining.

Foremost among these life-defining offerings is my list of Stuff I Especially Love In Fiction. It contains, in no particular order:

• Random siblings. Half-siblings are best, but any sibling who pops up with minimal foreshadowing is story gold. Random siblings fuck everything up for everyone involved. They make characters question their entire existence and cause heaps of tension as everyone comes to terms with years upon years of lies. It’s the best.

On Spoilers

I had an unpleasant experience last month. I was poised to begin a book I was extremely excited about; a book I’d been looking forward to for nearly twenty years. I tweeted about it, as one does, and a person with whom I’d interacted perhaps two or three times replied with spoilers.

Now, I don't know what this person’s intentions were. Maybe they were trying to temper my expectations. Maybe they thought I was about to reread the book and we could have a conversation. I don’t know, and I guess I never will because I was so horrified that I muted them before they could tell me anything else.

The internet is full of spoilers, so you’ve got to expect you’ll come across them at some point or another. Those of us who’d rather remain spoiler-free must take steps to ensure we don't learn too much. I might steer clear of Twitter for a while if a lot of people are live-tweeting a show I want to watch later. I'll scroll quickly over a discussion of a book my friends have read but I still have on la TBR. I often avoid reviews of a book I’m anticipating, just in case I learn too much. Some social media apps even allow you to blacklist certain words; a good resource for anyone who's particularly worried.

It’s unreasonable to expect that everyone on the public internet will keep mum about that highly anticipated piece of media you haven’t got to yet. If you care about spoilers, you have to protect yourself.

And I do. I avoid spoilers because I recognize I can't expect the entire world to hold off on talking about things until I’ve finished them.

I put in the effort on my end, and I don’t think it's unreasonable for me to expect people to keep spoilers out of my mentions (or my blog comments, for that matter).

In the instance I encountered last month, the spoilers were admittedly unspecific. The person didn’t tell me who died or anything, thank goodness, and once I’d finished the book in question (A MEMORY OF LIGHT by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson), the tweet struck me as more of a personal interpretation I didn't share. Before I began, though, it read like confirmation of how the story would go down. I couldn't help but draw certain conclusions based on this crucial tidbit. I was upset, and I was shocked someone would come into my space and ruin this thing I was looking forward to.

The situation has got me thinking about when I do consider it appropriate to share spoilers directly with another person. It can be a dicey proposition, as evidenced by my pre-read and post-read interpretations of the spoilerific tweet, but I propose the following scenarios as appropriate times to bring spoilers into someone's space: