Early in January, a group of readers assembled, heroes ready to tackle an extra to-be-read pile, and not a small one too!
We are now in July, the pile is done and dusted and the voting is now happening.
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I live about 30 kilometres from Cannes. So when I realised that Sheree Renée Thomas, writer and editor of the Dark Matter anthology (among others) would be there to talk about Afrofuturism, I had to be there. She very graciously added me to the guest list so I could attend the panels and, very excited about the prospect, there I went.
Please note that all errors in quotes or any misattribution of a quote would be entirely mine. Feel free to drop me a line if I did a mistake. What? You've missed what the The Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards are?
Well, it's a totally hype (seven pretty obscure readers and bookbloggers), very glamourous (mostly reading in their PJs at home), completely professional (making it up as they go along) new SFF award (we will hand out paintd pebbles to the winners if we meet them). Oh, also, there'll be drinking, as Bethan says. (For more information, please, check here.) Anyway, here's a first update on what's happening in the offing.
With 2017 drawing to a close, it's time to look back on the blog in 2017. In 2017, I had set myself a couple of goals, and both were achieved, I'm proud to say:
One of my initial goals was also to review two books a month. I suddenly changed gears barely a few weeks into 2017 by publishing three reviews a month. It seems to me like a good balance between my free time to write reviews and what a (very!) hypothetical reader faithfully following my recommendations would read within a month. I'm pretty happy about all the books I've reviewed. Looking back, yes, there are one or two that I wonder why I actually ended up reviewing them because a few months later I can say that I'm not as enthusiastic about them as I was when reading them. But for the vast majority, I stand by every single word I wrote. I'm also quite happy about the variety and diversity I've achieved through the reviews. You can check below the complete publication schedule with the details, including gender, race, nationality of writers ; genres ; small press / big press ; gender of the characters, etc. So if you enjoy doing statistics, be my guest! I'm pretty proud that I covered writers from almost every continent. I was also quite surprised - not - when I realised that most of the female main characters in the books I read were written by female writers. Please note: the disparity between male and female writers is because I reviewed an uneven number of novels. But parity remains when you look at the reviews since the opening of the blog and will continue in 2018 when the first novel reviewed will be written by a female writer. What about 2018?
I still won't apply any quota to QUILTBAG writers as it proves tricky since not all writers announce to the world if they are QUILTBAG and I certainly won't go to pester them to know about it. I hope you enjoyed the reviews in 2017 and that you will enjoy those to come in 2018. Thanks to every single one of you reading and following the blog and spreading the word about it! |
"While we were reading" is an irregular feature about reading science-fiction and fantasy. It can contain guest posts. Nothing fancy, come as you are.
It is also home to all the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards announcements. |