hatgirl | Entries tagged with sf&f book chat

Last week The SF&F Book Chat started up again after our annual summer break, and I have just realised I have been running this weekly drop-in book club for three years now. Three years! Time flies when you're ~~desperately trying to find short-yet-interesting-books on a weekly basis~~ having fun.

Over the years the core concepts of the Chat have remained the same - every week I turn up in a Dublin café to chat about a standalone SF&F story that is always legally available as an ebook or online - but we have made two significant changes since the Chat started:

From October of last year we've been putting the Chats up on Meetup.com. This has really helped the Chat break out of the friend-of-a-friend attendee pool that can hamper a club from expanding. If you're running any kind of regular event where strangers are welcome, I highly recommend spending the ~€3 a month required for an Organizer account.
The Chat was 3 months old when I had a Road To Damascus moment courtesy of Juliet McKenna and decided to make sure 50% of the books chosen each month were by women. That has been... a challenge, to put it mildly, but I have actually managed to achieve that target every month. And I have found it progressively easier to come up with stories by women each month, because now my brain has been trained to see them when they're right in front of me. Like Rubin's Vase. And my every-increasing Amazing Must-Buy Authors list is testament to the success of this strategy (Oh, that list is so long now...).

So if you're in Dublin, and you want to chat about SF&F stories, do pop in. The more the merrier.

So I was reading Juliet E McKenna's SFX article Everyone Can Promote Equality In Genre Writing, cheerfully nodding along with everything she said while comfortable in the knowledge that there wasn't much I could do to impact the situation one way or another, when I remembered that I choose the books for a weekly drop-in SF&F book club.

Eep.

I pulled up the schedule and worked out the stats.

Good News

I am at least hitting the 30% "need to do better but not deliberately sexist" mark.
Every month has had at least 1 woman writer on the list, the first month we had 2.

Bad news

30%. That's not even a handy conversational "a third". Oh dear...

Excuses

13 books is a very small sample size. If I tried to pitch a research paper with a sample size that small, I would get a hell of a lot of raised eyebrows, and probably outright mockery.
It's been surprisingly hard to find suitable novels. First off, each week of the month has its own Stream (SF, Current Awards Lists, Fantasy, Cross-Genre and every 3 months So Bad It's Good) to a) try and mix up the reading list so we don't end up reading about vampires three weeks in a row and b) so that if people want to they can turn the weekly SF&F book club into, say, a monthly Fantasy book club. Secondly, to encourage new people drop in, I don't choose books that have published sequels/prequels. Thirdly, the book has to be in print, and available as an ebook. And finally, I am trying to avoid Epic Tomes. It is a weekly book club, after all. With hindsight, this week's choice of a Peter F. Hamilton novel was an error in judgement *shudder*

The Future
Excuses aside, it looks like I'm just going to have to add another item to the list of criteria we look at when we're nailing down what books we're going to read. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? *

*Yes, I have considered The Mote in God's Eye for the Book Chat. But no sequels/prequels, remember? Told you it was hard to find suitable books...

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Entries tagged with sf&f book chat

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