{"id":221,"date":"2013-07-15T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/07\/15\/the-other-things-i-read-while-reading-the-as\/"},"modified":"2013-07-15T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T11:00:00","slug":"the-other-things-i-read-while-reading-the-as","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/07\/15\/the-other-things-i-read-while-reading-the-as\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other Things I Read While Reading the As"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The thirteen books filed under A on the shelf weren&#8217;t all the fiction I&#8217;ve read over the last six months &#8211; there were also fourteen books from the library.  While I was putting together the stats for the books on the shelf (<a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/filed-under\">post<\/a>) I also looked at these other books.<\/p>\n<p>The books were as follows (links go to posts):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Isaac Asimov<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/06\/17\/foundation-isaac-asimov\">Foundation<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Kate Atkinson<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/06\/24\/life-after-life-kate-atkinson\">Life After Life<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Paula Brackston<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/02\/25\/book-shadows-paula-brackston\">The Book of Shadows<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Myke Cole<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/04\/11\/control-point-myke-cole\">Control Point<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Maurice Druon<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/04\/25\/great-waters-kit-whitfield-iron-king-maurice-druon\">The Iron King<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Barbara Hambly<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/01\/31\/ran-away-barbara-hambly\">Ran Away<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Deborah Harkness<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/05\/16\/shadow-night-deborah-harkness\">Shadow of Night<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Hugh Howey<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/04\/24\/wool-hugh-howey\">Wool<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/06\/10\/shift-hugh-howey\">Shift<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Howard Andrew Jones<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/01\/17\/desert-souls-howard-andrew-jones\">The Desert of Souls<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>L. E. Modesitt<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/06\/02\/flash-l-e-modesitt-jr\">Flash<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Brandon Sanderson &#038; Robert Jordan<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/05\/23\/memory-light-robert-jordan-brandon-sanderson\">A Memory of Light<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Chuck Wendig<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/06\/30\/blackbirds-chuck-wendig\">Blackbirds<\/a><\/li>\n<li><b>Kit Whitfield<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/04\/25\/great-waters-kit-whitfield-iron-king-maurice-druon\">In Great Waters<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"flickr\"><a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/ReadAllTheFiction\/nota.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/ReadAllTheFiction\/nota_small.jpg\" alt=\"graphs of statistics for other books read while I read those filed under A on the bookshelf\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>(You can click on the graph for a slightly bigger version where the text is a little easier to read.)<\/p>\n<p>When I started thinking about looking at the stats for what I&#8217;ve been reading in posts like these I thought to myself that whilst the books filed under A might have very male-skewed authors &#8220;obviously it&#8217;ll be 50% or more women for the other books&#8221;.  Er, no.  Fourteen authors, 9 male &#8230; still just 36% female.  Not much better than the &#8216;main&#8217; author stats for the As.  So that&#8217;s rather disappointing.  In terms of nationality it&#8217;s still a very US dominated list, and only one author was neither UK nor US (Maurice Druon is French and his book was originally in French (I read it in translation)).<\/p>\n<p>Genre-wise they skew towards fantasy and historical novels.  Eight books fall into some category of fantasy, seven books are in some way historical (they overlap).  Perhaps a reaction against all the early science fiction I was otherwise reading?  Certainly nothing deliberate in the choice.<\/p>\n<p>This selection is mostly fairly recent books, probably because I reserved most of them after reading reviews or excerpts.  The outliers are the Asimov (reserved because I don&#8217;t own book 1 of the Foundation trilogy and it seemed a shame to skip it) and the Druon which was recently reviewed on tor.com because George R. R. Martin has cited it as an influence on his Song of Ice &#038; Fire series.  Both of those were published in the 50s.<\/p>\n<p>The mean star rating was 3.6 as compared to 3.1 for the As, with the mode being 4 rather than 3.  Again influenced by reading reviews\/excerpts before reading the book because I could weed out most things that weren&#8217;t going to be to my tastes before reading them*.  Not flawlessly tho!  The three books that were my least favourite included one I&#8217;d read before (the Asimov), one that I read &#038; liked an excerpt from (the Cole) and one I read a very positive review for (the Whitfield).  I&#8217;d say that the Cole was probably my biggest disappointment, the type of story I thought it was going to tell is a type I particularly like so it was sad not to get it.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"navi\">*Whereas the stuff on the shelf included a lot of things I bought more than 20 years ago and my tastes have changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Those that were my favourites were all liked for different reasons and oddly I&#8217;d only recommend them to other people with caveats.  A Memory of Light was a very satisfying conclusion to a series I&#8217;ve been reading for something like half my life, but you definitely couldn&#8217;t start with that one &#038; the series as a whole does get bogged down in the middle so I could understand not wanting to read it all.  The Atkinson gets better every time I think about it, and I think it&#8217;s got something interesting to say about environment, culture &#038; personality and how those affect your life &#038; your sense of self (both more &#038; less than you&#8217;d expect).  But I think you&#8217;ve got to be happy reading something very non-linear to enjoy the book, and it doesn&#8217;t have a plot <i>per se<\/i>.  And lastly the Wendig is a vivid &#038; intense urban fantasy\/thriller crossover &#8230; but it&#8217;s pretty gruesome in places &#038; if you&#8217;re easily offended by swear words you&#8217;re not going to enjoy it at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The thirteen books filed under A on the shelf weren&#8217;t all the fiction I&#8217;ve read over the last six months &#8211; there were also fourteen books from the library. While I was putting together the stats for the books on the shelf (post) I also looked at these other books. The books were as follows &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2013\/07\/15\/the-other-things-i-read-while-reading-the-as\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Other Things I Read While Reading the As&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[438],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}