SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

For 2023, I want us to think about what it is we're reading and the world around us. What does our community look like as individuals? What does our personal bookshelf look like? How does our community feature in our bookshelf?

STEP ONE:

Pick a facet of your life--it could be geographical, professional, religious, or anything else that has statistics you can reference and that interests you to explore.

STEP TWO:

Pick a few demographics that interest you about that facet. For example, what percentage of that group are men, women or genderqueer? What percent are immigrants or non-native speakers of the local language? How old is that group, on average?

STEP THREE:

Look at your "Read" shelf and see how closely your consumption mirrors the life you're living.

STEP FOUR:

Pick a way to play!

Thoughtful

Read 1 book by an author in a demographic that is lacking on your shelf for each of the criteria you identified in Step Two.

Ex. I'm a US citizen. My bookshelf is 60% books by men, 39% books by women, 1% by nonbinary or genderqueer authors. The demographics in the US are 49% men, 50% women and 1% nonbinary or genderqueer. Therefore, I would read at least 1 book by a woman.

Experimental

Pick a number of books to pledge to this challenge. Can you make the books you pledge "look like" the world you live in as measured in percentages?

Dedicated

Can you make all the books you read in 2023 match the demographic percentages you focused on in Step Two?

Transformative

Read books to help make your "read" shelf match the demographic percentages you listed in Step Two. How close can you get in 1 year?

STEP FIVE:

Share your results! What does your shelf look like? How hard is it to find books that match the criteria you're seeking? How many other parts of your life could you try this with? What did you learn at the end of the challenge?

This challenge is awesome!

I love this! Looking forward to diving into the prompts.

Question... how do you find percentages without a pen and pencil? Is there a way to see those percentages on GR?

The easiest way I've found is either to have your own spreadsheet or to make shelves with GR. You can export your data to a spreadsheet and add whatever additional data you want (like gender etc) and then the spreadsheet can do the math for you. I bet if we ask nice someone will make a base sheet we can steal for our own use ^^

*gets excited in nerd*

I love me some spreadsheets! Maybe I’ll take a look at a template tomorrow!

A Very Good Friend emerges to help (time permitting!) Thanks Very Good Friend!

even with a spreadsheet, this will be a bit of a labor, but it does inspire me and I'll be looking at gender, country of origin, SF vs Fantasy, and possibly age of book and age of author

A great set of data, Chessie! Looking forward to it! Yes, this will require some work, but for those who enjoy such things, I'm hoping it's well spent!

Yes, I think this will be a bit much with my WTR shelf. I’ll give it a go with the 2023 TBR. :)

Allison wrote: "A great set of data, Chessie! Looking forward to it! Yes, this will require some work, but for those who enjoy such things, I'm hoping it's well spent!"

Wikipedia will be helpful

I already told Allison when she came up with this idea (which I love!), that I had just decided that 2023 would be my year of not giving a f*ck about my reading stats XD I'm not sure what I want to do, my reading spreadsheet will track the same things it has always tracked, I don't know if I can stop paying attention to them. I'm also not sure what new thing I'd want to add or concentrate on in 2023. I think I'll sit back and see what other people choose to examine, and then maybe I'll get an idea from that :)

The one thing I've wanted to read more of for several years now is Sámi authors, but the selection and availability hasn't been great :( It's the thing I most want to "fix" about my reading though, so maybe I'll try to make 2023 the year I finally try to get my hands on some of the books I've wanted to read. I'm not committing to it yet though, because I don't want to set impossible goals.

Another one I could do is read from immigrant authors in Finland, or authors who are children of immigrants. I used to live in an area of Helsinki that was really diverse in regard to the native language of the residents, I could try to find a book from all of those language groups. I do know that I have several books like this already on my TBR, so it would be an easier goal to achieve.

Apparently posting about how I don't have ideas gives me ideas? :D

I read mysteries as well as SF&F and there are a couple of authors I like who live in Finland:

Antti Tuomainen
Leena Lehtolainen

and I just bought a bunch by Kati Hiekkapelto

this website lists a lot of mystery writers there:

https://scandicrimeproject.wordpress....

Oh yeah I do read books by Finnish authors who were born in Finland to Finnish parents, but I want to add more books by immigrant authors. Like Aurinkotyttö by Nura Farah, My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, or The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, off the top of my head.

Farah was born in Somalia and writes in Finnish. Statovci was born in Kosovo and also writes in Finnish. Blasim was born in Iraq and writes in Arabic. They all live in Finland.

the cat one sounds interesting

It does, and I can't believe I haven't read it yet!

CBRetriever wrote: "Allison wrote: "A great set of data, Chessie! Looking forward to it! Yes, this will require some work, but for those who enjoy such things, I'm hoping it's well spent!"

Wikipedia will be helpful"

and it's going very slow. Female authors don't tend to have birth dates. The country and gender bits are going good though. I do have a question about genderqueer though - I would have thought Charlie Jane Anders was genderqueer but she uses she/her pronouns according to what I've read.

CBR, I love how enthusiastically you always dig into all the challenges! 😊

Oh and yes, CJA is a woman. I think we might have a list of genderqueer authors in the IBB 2018 challenge thread, and we also have a few on the group shelf. I’m not sure if Allison would prefer that we do recs in the recs folder or here?

I was having trouble with this, because mostly my reading is intentionally non-representative in ways I prefer, but I found an idea! I'm still poking at this a bit to figure out the specifics of how I want to play, but my general idea is to work on making my reading in 2023 more representative of Latinx authors. In the last two years (which is as long as I've been tracking this), only about 7% of my reading was from Latinx authors - the US population is nearly 20% Latinx, my state is around 30%, and my local area is 35-45% depending on where you count. Other dimensions I am considering include where authors were born or currently live, other racial identification (e.g. I know for sure I want to be sure to read at least one Afro-Latinx author), and translated works.

24/24


10 "Non-Finnish" ancestry

✔ Somalia - Tytöille, jotka ajattelevat olevansa yksin by Ujuni Ahmed
✔ Iraq - Kelloja ja vieraita by Hassan Blasim
✔ China - Suomen taivaan alla by TaoLin
✔ Vietnam - Varjo ja viileys by Quynh Tran
✔ India - Auringon asema by Ranya ElRamly
✔ Former Yugoslavia - Kissani Jugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci

✔ Sámi - Entiset elävät meissä - Saamelaisten historiat ja Suomi by Veli-Pekka Lehtola
✔ Roma - Mercedes Bentso – Totuus ja tunnustus by Linda-Maria Roine

✔ Third Culture Kids edited by Mona Eid, Koko Hubara
✔ Mixed by Alice Jäske, Priska Niemi-Sampan, Janina Waenthongkham


10 LGBTQIA+ authors/themes

✔ 23 transmyyttiä : Totta ja tarua transihmisistä by Mona Bling
✔ Bi- ja panseksuaalisuus by Jenny Kangasvuo
✔ Rakastan ihmistä – Keskusteluja biseksuaalisuudesta by Janne Ahjopalo, Olga Palo
✔ Rakkaudesta lajiin by Tiina Tuppurainen

✔ Nimeni on Alex by Miska Karhu
✔ Kissanaisia by Liliana Lento
✔ Ihana by Dess Terentjeva (Russia)
✔ Poika ja perhostunne by Jani Toivola
✔ Myrtti ja noitatukka + Myrtti ja kudelmataika by Ursula Mursu
✔ Lohikäärme, jolla oli keltaiset varpaat by Kuura Autere


4 Mental health themes

✔ Error – Mielen häiriöitä by Elina Järvi, Tiina Hotti
✔ Pakko — Kuinka OCD pakotti minut epäilemään kaikkea by Tuukka Hämäläinen
✔ Valvojat: tutkimusmatka unettomuuden historiaan by Pälvi Rantala
✔ Filigraanityttö by Anu Holopainen


Original post:

(view spoiler)[I have no idea if I'm actually following any of Allison's suggested modes, but this is what I came up with, and it's what I'll start out with :D I might change it later, but I wanted to make some sort of public plan, even if it's very tentative. I did look at statistics, and I'm using them as my basis, but I'm also kinda mixing things up a bit :)

I want to read from authors who live in Finland, but whose ancestry is not rooted here. These are the most common nationalities* living in Helsinki in 2021. All of these authors live in Finland, and some of them also write in Finnish. They were born in the countries listed. The books are all in Finnish. I'm saving one spot for a Sámi author, and one or two for non-fiction books.

I'm aiming for 10 or 12 books, not sure yet.

Former Soviet Union - Rakkaus kolmeen appelsiiniin by Zinaida Lindén
Somalia - Aurinkotyttö by Nura Farah
Estonia
Iraq - Kelloja ja vieraita by Hassan Blasim
China - Suomen taivaan alla by TaoLin
Vietnam - Varjo ja viileys by Quynh Tran
Afghanistan - Kuutamo by Morsal Haydari
Türkiye
India - Auringon asema by Ranya ElRamly
Former Yugoslavia - Kissani Jugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci
Nepal
Iran - Taruja läheltä ja kaukaa edited by Kiamars Baghbani

Sámi - Missä olet, Elle? by Kirsi Máret Paltto

Multicultural anthology, mostly by immigrants in Finland:
Mikä ihmeen uussuomalainen? with stories by Maryam Hamadon (Poland/Syria/Romania), Tiiu Näveri, Nitin Sood, Anita Kuronen, Olivia Šetkić, Alexandra Salmela, Joop Wassenaar (Netherlands), Aziza Hossaini (Afghanistan), Tarja Roinila, Naima Mohamud (Somalia), José Antonio Ruiz, I. Bilal Alqathi, Noomi Schulman

Non-fiction:
Third Culture Kids edited by Kiia Beilinson, Mona Eid, Koko Hubara
Mixed – Suomalaista elämää kulttuurien risteymässä

* https://pxdata.stat.fi/PxWeb/pxweb/en...
-> 11rv -- Origin and background country by sex, by municipality, 1990-2021 (hide spoiler)]

I'm beginning to think I'll need more young authors plus more translated books and books from other countries that aren't mysteries. I pretty much cleaned out the last two with the Circadian challenge this year.

I'll be interested to hear how it goes!

I looked at just my TBR pile

I looked at M/F percentages and my TBR is not too bad:

F = 229
M = 293

but the LGBTQ is lacking with only 7 on the shelf, so I will read those to bring the percentage up to 1.3% and will be on the lookout for more as the year goes by with the hope of taking it up to at least 2%. I'm thinking some of the authors are not listing that information on their bios. Here is what I have right now:

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
Flotsam by R.J. Theodore

Next I looked at translated books and books from other countries and decided I had far too many American, UK, Canadian and other writers in English so I added these given that the US has a large percentage of people originally from these countries as well as the ones aforementioned

The Widow Queen by Elżbieta Cherezińska = Translated from Polish
Automatic Eve by Rokurō Inui = Translated from Japanese
The Cabinet by Kim Un-su = Translated from Korean
Love. an Archaeology by Fábio Fernandes = Translated from Brazilian Portuguese
The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø = Translated from Norwegian
Incomplete Solutions by Wole Talabi = Nigeria
Bloodbusters by Francesco Verso = Translated from Italian
To the Sky Kingdom by Tang Qi Gong Zi = Translated from Chinese
Night Shadows by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir = Translated from Icelandic
Lex Talionis by R.S.A. Garcia. = Trinidad
Northern Wrath by Thilde Kold Holdt = Denmark
The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord = Barbados
added
The Moose Paradox by Antti Tuomainen = Finland

Then to the last category: I found to my dismay that a lot of the authors on my shelf are old, so I'm going to add some youthful (under 35) writers here:

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger = 35
The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson = 33
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow = 33
The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen = 31
The First Binding by R.R. Virdi = 32

None of the writers in my 500+ TBR pile were under 30, so I will be looking for the proverbial "fresh, young faces/voices)

This doesn't quite fit Allison's template, but it works for me

i think this is a very worthwhile interpretation!

aw thanks (blushes and shuffles feet)

My Thoughtful Goal(s):
-10% nonfiction
-maintain a 50% male/female split

This past year my reading was 6% non-fiction, so I will need to increase my non-fiction choices. 48% of books read were by female authors; 52% were by male authors. That is not perfect but is pretty good, IMO. This upcoming year I will be intentional about it.

I love this! Despite my penchant for spreadsheets, I've never analyzed my shelf.

I've been looking through my TBR stats and was surprised:

Gender splits: 61% F, 37% M, 2% NB
---I realized that I subconsciously thought of Sci Fi/Fantasy to be a male dominated industry and this proved otherwise, at least on my shelf.

Ages: majority evenly split between ‘70's and ‘80's with a surprising 30% born before 1950.

Country of origin: 65% authors born in english-speaking countries, which I thought wasn't too bad. But I don’t think I have enough Central/South American authors on my list.

So, long post short ;) - I made a shelf for spec fiction by Central/S. American authors and added these to start:

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
Terminal 3
The Lost Dreamer
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
Blazewrath Games

Wow! You're already finding good data, Sarah! That's fantastic!

A friend and I are doing a "Representation" challenge where we try to read more from different demographics. This is so timely and I will absolutely be looking at my reading statistics for this year. :)

Is there a script or program out there that will automatically fill in fields like gender/country of the author? I don't keep a spreadsheet, I just track books on GR. I'd be interested in my results, but not enough to manually enter in everything myself.

sorry, not that I'm aware of!

I don't believe there is. Being willing to research is part of the growth process?? I will recommend that if you don't want to make a spreadsheet, maybe just have a dedicated GR shelf for books with diverse elements so you can count and compare to your total books read. This wouldn't be a lot of extra work if you're already comfortable with GR shelving.

Since I have over 2,000 books in my Want to Read shelf, I'm loathe to do any statistics gathering. However, looking at what I have read and looking at the people in my life/environment, I realized that I am light in a few areas. My work team is primarily out of India (all male) and Mexico (all female), whereas my locale is primarily white with some Indian, Chinese, Black American and African (mostly Nigerian) scattered about with minimal LGBTQ (I have LGBTQ friends in other areas of the country). The majority of science fiction and fantasy books I have read have mainly been female and white American. (67% female, 52% white American, 22% male, 16% Black American, 20% East Asian or Australian/Pacific). Where I seem to be lacking is in science fiction and fantasy from Indian, Latin American/Mexican and African locales (I have read other genres from authors in these areas). So I am going to strive to read more of these. I already started looking up authors from these areas and found some books I want to read this year to diversify my shelf further.
Indian:
Chosen Spirits and The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu
The Wall by Gautam Bhatia
Generation 14 by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
The Beast with Nine Billion Feet by Anil Menon
Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan

Mexican/Latin American (there seems to be a dearth of science fiction authors here, but thankfully there are some fantasy authors that look good though):
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Certain Dark Things by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova
Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older

Nigerian:
Rosewater and Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
David Mogo Godhunter and Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (ok so she's Nigerian American, but her stories often take place in Africa)
Nigerians in Space and After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun

I think those will be good (and enjoyable) challenges to go after. And I'm getting more males in my mix ;)

the shelf i meant people to review first is their Already Read shelf, as in what you have already consumed! that's usually an easier one to manage and more useful!

and that looks like a great way to focus your search, Leslie, I hope you find some good books, and possibly a coworker to talk with!

Allison wrote: "the shelf i meant people to review first is their Already Read shelf, as in what you have already consumed! that's usually an easier one to manage and more useful!"

mine contains 4X as many as my TBR pile (a bit over 500) so I wasn't going there. I'm trying to make this year's reads change percentages.

Looking at this challenge and thinking about how to implement it makes my head hurt due to it's complexity. I'll probably just stick to the old tried and true random pick or whatever strikes my current fancy method. Good luck in your endeavors!

Lucky random picks never fail!

Whatever works for you, Chessie! I guess my point is no need to do this for every book you've ever looked at!

You could start small, William! just men and women or people from your country vs other countries :)

I want to officially thank Allison for this challenge right now, as I'm about to finish my first book for this challenge, and also my first read of the year. I don't know if I'd ever have come across this book if I hadn't done research for this challenge, and I think, with a couple of chapters left to read, that my year is starting with a 5 star non-fiction book! ^_^

(I'm not going to talk about the books I read for this challenge, as they're all in Finnish, but I wanted to mention this anyway, because yeah, I wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't decided to do this challenge.)

Yay! I'm so pleased this one is going well for you since so often you find such horrid stories haha

Okay, so I already keep my bookshelf in parity with authors who identify (or present, if they're dead already) as men or women. This year I'm going to focus on race. Given that I intend to focus on US demographics based on my supposed challenge of 75 books, I want to read:

13 books by people of Hispanic or Latin descent
8 books by Black/African authors
4 books by Asian authors
1 book by a Native author

This is subject to change if/when I realize I've completely embarrassed my math teachers

Allison wrote: ... This is subject to change if/when I realize I've completely embarrassed my math teachers"

The only book that I still remember in any detail from my undergraduate engineering days is How to Lie with Statistics. Not that I'm necessarily endorsing this approach if embarrassment looms or that I'd admit to having used it myself (and that book, in particular, is eye-rollingly dated in so many ways), but sometimes it's just how you look at it.

I'm my case I'd be looking at age (I live in one of the demographically oldest counties in the US) and at Indigenous authors (multiple tribal units have a presence in this area). I'll need to spend some time generating the (ahem) statistics for that.

This is a fascinating challenge. Thanks!

Yes, this is a bit wobbly given how many different ways you can make math give you numbers, but here it really is the thought that counts! eager to see what you find, Raucous!

I found analyzing my "read" shelf for this challenge to be a very interesting exercise. I looked at authors by gender, country, LGBTQIA+, and race, and then at books by genres and reading level (adult, YA, MG, and children's). I have about 10 years worth of reading data on Goodreads, and once I started reading chapter books aloud to my son, I began adding them to my "read" list (which has definitely impacted the genre and reading level categories).

I was surprised to learn that I have read more books by women authors (52%) than men (45%). (The rest were anthologies of mixed genders or nonbinary authors.) I could be doing a better job of reading non-white authors, though I have been more intentional about that the last three years. I sometimes had a hard time determining if an author was LGBTQIA+, so I feel like my analysis for that category is not very reliable.

I've read about 80% fiction versus 20% nonfiction, with a good mix of genres, though fantasy is definitely in the lead at 37%. (This is probably influenced by my son's love of fantasy adventure stories as read-alouds.) About 51% of the books I read were adult books, with the rest pretty evenly divided between YA, MG, and children's.

The area with the biggest noticeable gaps was author's country. Most of the books I have read were written by authors from the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, with a smattering of authors from other European, Asian, and African countries. I had only one book written by an author from South America, though, and no books written by Mexican, Central American, or Caribbean authors.

So, for this year, I'm going to be intentional in choosing some books by authors from the western hemisphere who are not from the US or Canada (and possibly from other parts of the world that I don't have much representation from). I'm looking forward to the challenge of finding some new authors (and I may be making a recommendations post to try to gather some ideas).

Yay! This is what I was hoping it would be like. I'm so glad, you're going to have so much fun exploring! And lots of warm fuzzies for reading to your son <3

Loving all the thought yall are giving this challenge.

I’ve found a potential book for Anna featuring the Sami people that is coming out this year:
Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius

Just thought I’d mention it in case you haven’t heard of it yet, Anna. I can’t link to it due to being on mobile.

The Finnish edition of it is already out, and it was one of my options, but I'm planning on reading one of my other options. I have many!

On the whole, I've been loving this challenge so much that I'm about to finish my *fourteenth* KTS book XD I've added a second dozen to my goal, but probably won't be updating it here, since they're still all books in Finnish.