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My response to NPR's Top 100 SF/F Books
Aug. 16th, 2011 03:54 pmThe NPR Top 100 SF/F Books list makes me want to brain myself, but having enjoyed seeing others's point-by-point responses to books on the list I present, in the style of a meme: what I've read, with notes.
Bold if I've read it, italicized if I plan to, underlined if I've read part but not all.
( 100 books and series. )
This list is in no way the best of anything, but it's representative of what a crowd of casual voters reads and thinks they should read, with uneven editor boundaries drawn between YA/adult, genre/not genre (and this genre/that genre, which is even more detrimental to this list), and book/series. What people read, by the way, are: white men (dead is optional), epic high fantasy, series (either trilogies or why-has-no-one-taken-my-pen-away endless cycles), cult-favorite authors (named Gaiman) and passing trends (called zombies), a few books which are famous just because they try to avoid the genre they write in, and a few challenging or diverse texts/harder bits of sci-fi/genre classics/books they may or may not have encountered in high school and college—or at least they read those once, and know they should again. They also read some truly random stuff because, hello, what is Sunshine doing on there?
It's not necessarily a bad list—but it's not the "best" of anything; it's pretty much just a glimpse of SF/F in popular culture. I've read—what, 52 of them? I even enjoyed quite a few. I get it. But oh god, I don't condone it.
Bold if I've read it, italicized if I plan to, underlined if I've read part but not all.
( 100 books and series. )
This list is in no way the best of anything, but it's representative of what a crowd of casual voters reads and thinks they should read, with uneven editor boundaries drawn between YA/adult, genre/not genre (and this genre/that genre, which is even more detrimental to this list), and book/series. What people read, by the way, are: white men (dead is optional), epic high fantasy, series (either trilogies or why-has-no-one-taken-my-pen-away endless cycles), cult-favorite authors (named Gaiman) and passing trends (called zombies), a few books which are famous just because they try to avoid the genre they write in, and a few challenging or diverse texts/harder bits of sci-fi/genre classics/books they may or may not have encountered in high school and college—or at least they read those once, and know they should again. They also read some truly random stuff because, hello, what is Sunshine doing on there?
It's not necessarily a bad list—but it's not the "best" of anything; it's pretty much just a glimpse of SF/F in popular culture. I've read—what, 52 of them? I even enjoyed quite a few. I get it. But oh god, I don't condone it.
