Comments on: Why I Read Women

By: Australian Speculative Fiction Blog Canival – December ‘09 InkyBlots Edition | InkyBlots

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:19:16 +0000

[...] her post Fiction By The Pound, Quality Versus Quantity, thinks about what she has learnt from the Last Short Story Project and why she reads women, and in a moment of insanity, Tansy and her Nanomates come up with the Nanowrimo Reality TV [...]

By: Jumbled Words

Jumbled Words — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:03:35 +0000

[...] second great post was written by TansyRR, and it’s about reading mainly female authors and whether it’s hypocritical to get all up in arms when you see others best-of-lists and [...]

By: Kaia

Kaia — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:43:53 +0000

I didn’t even REALISE my bias towards women in music, books, and um, pretty much everything, until you pointed it out. Though I have to say that I am still sad that my favourite male author of all times is Swedish and thus I can’t share his work with you! Some of his book has admittedly been translated, but mostly to German which REALLY doesn’t help…

By: tansyrr

tansyrr — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:50:16 +0000

Aww nice to hear that you enjoy LSS – we are all rather addicted to it now, I think.

My biggest challenge to biases this year was that I considered not reading some of the bigger SF (and male-heavy) anthologies, not because I mightn’t like them but because – well, I was worried my biases against hard SF, male authored stories might unfairly affect the group rating of those stories, which I knew other readers in the group (heh, Alex) thought were completely wonderful.

Jonathan talked me out of my fears in that instance, saying that anthologies had to appeal to a wider audience than just the ‘hard SF’ inner circle of fans, and it was interesting to compare feedback from non-SF readers. So I sucked it up and read them and while I’m sure I was a lot less generous to them overall than some of the other readers, I managed to find some stories that I really loved and otherwise would have missed out on.

I think it’s partly because I use LSS to challenge my biases and literary boundaries so much that I feel perfectly comfortable with letting my novel reading be far more ‘self-indulgent.’

Though really the fact that I feel like I should be reading as if it’s my job and that I have to JUSTIFY doing it for fun is more my issue than anyone else’s…

By: Trent Jamieson

Trent Jamieson — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:53:28 +0000

I think that’s perfectly fine. You’re aware of your biases, and you read within the context of those biases – and you challenge them. I think this sort of thing is only a problem when people act as though they don’t possess biases and what they are presenting is in some way definitive and absolute beyond themselves. That’s what I love about Last Short Story, seeing where people’s taste melds and where it doesn’t, and understanding that it’s a personal reading journey for all of you. If it isn’t how else are you going to get passionate and engaged debate?