Couldn't find the original post for this one, but I saw it here. Same rules as for SF Mistressworks: bolding those I've read, italicizing those I own but haven't read, underlining those authors who have written other books I've read, and talking about the bold and underlined entries.

1. Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge (2002)

2. Warchild [Warchild], Karin Lowachee (2002)

3. Natural History, Justina Robson (2003)

4. Maul, Tricia Sullivan (2003)

5. The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (2003)

6. Spin State, Chris Moriarty (2003)

7. Dante’s Equation, Jane Jensen (2003)

8. Steel Helix [Typhon], Ann Tonsor Zeddies (2003)

9. Life, Gwyneth Jones (2004)

10. Nylon Angel [Parrish Plessis], Marianne de Pierres (2004)

11. The Courtesan Prince [Oka-Rel Universe], Lynda Williams (2004)

12. Survival [Species Imperative], Julie E Czernada (2004)

13. Banner of Souls, Liz Williams (2004)

14. City of Pearl [Wess'har Wars], Karen Traviss (2004)

15. The Year of Our War, Steph Swainston (2004)

16. Bio Rescue, SL Viehl (2004) I read Stardoc, WILL NOT ever touch any of her books again (rape is not love, rape is not romance)

17. Apocalypse Array [Archangel Protocol], Lyda Morehouse (2004)

18. The Child Goddess, Louise Marley (2004)

19. Alanya to Alanya [Marq'ssan Cycle], L Timmel Duchamp (2005)

20. Carnival, Elizabeth Bear (2006) -- Bear is one of my favorite authors. I put her under my Fangirl Alert! tag on my review blog. Carnival isn't my favorite of hers, but I certainly enjoyed it, and I was stoked when it became clear in Grail that it's the same universe as the Jacob's Ladder trilogy.

21. Mindscape, Andrea Hairston (2006)

22. Farthing [Small Change], Jo Walton (2006) -- LOVE this. Jo Walton is an auto-buy author for me, and Farthing *is* my favorite of her books. I didn't like the other two Small Change books as much, but this one was amazing.

23. Half Life, Shelley Jackson (2006)

24. The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall (2007)

25. Bright of the Sky [The Entire and the Rose], Kay Kenyon (2007) -- Did NOT like this. At all. The writing style made me feel like I was banging my head against the wall.

26. Principles of Angels [Hidden Empire], Jainne Fenn (2008)

27. Watermind, MM Buckner (2008)

28. The Rapture, Liz Jensen (2009)

29. Zoo City, Lauren Beukes (2010) -- I would have enjoyed this more had I not discovered I was all noir-ed out. Good if you like that sort of thing though!

30. Walking the Tree, Kaaron Warren (2010)

31. Birdbrain, Johanna Sinisalo (2010)

32. Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (2010) -- Found this kind of disappointing. Agreed totally with Farah Mendlesohn's review of it over at Strange Horizons, thinking that the book was disjointed and a lot (okay pretty much all) of the thorny ethical issues got pushed aside by the narrative. I did enjoy the girls-bonding-and-friendship parts though, and feel there need to be way more of those stories.

33. Song of Scarabaeus, Sara Creasy (2010)

That's 5 out of 33, which is a better percentage than in the pre-2000 list, and the other six that I own already are pretty high on Mt. TBR. Still concerned at how many of these I've never heard of though! 10 out of 33 where neither the title nor the author name rings even the faintest bell? And all the books were written since I graduated high school? For shame, self!

As for what titles I'd want to see added. . . despite the sequel being complete and utter crap, I still think Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia is brilliant. Not much else to add though; my reading has mostly been on the fantasy side of things this past decade-plus, and the authors I currently read that still write SF mostly wrote their best SF in the pre-2000 era.

Late to the party, as always. Originally posted here; I saw it here. Criteria were adult SF titles only (no fantasy or YA) published before 2000. Original instructions were to bold those I've read and italicize those I own but haven't read yet; I added underlining for authors who have written other books I've read and notes on the bold and underlined items.

1. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818) -- Loved this, but read it before I read critically (I think I was 12?) so I can't talk about it with people.

2. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

3. Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)

4. Lest Ye Die, Cicely Hamilton (1928)

5. Swastika Night, Katherine Burdekin (1937)

6. Wrong Side of the Moon, Francis Leslie Ashton (1951) -- Apparently a man.

7. The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett (1953)

8. Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, Zenna Henderson (1961)

9. Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)

10. Witch World, Andre Norton (1963)

11. Sunburst, Phyllis Gotlieb (1964)

12. Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore (1969) -- But this is fantasy.

13. Heroes and Villains, Angela Carter (1969)

14. Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, James Tiptree Jr (1973) -- I read Tiptree's Brightness Falls from the Air as a teenager and loved it; was delighted to discover a couple years ago that "he" was a she who was best known for absolutely brilliant short stories (that still had amazingly evocative titles). Thus far I've read about 1/3 of the way through Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, but have to wait until I'm in the proper mood to read more because Tiptree's stories always emotionally wreck me. Plus I read Julie Phillips' fascinating biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Secret Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

15. The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin (1974) -- OMFG brilliant. Read it just last year, but I clearly should have read it long before, given that I have also read and really enjoyed the first four books of her Earthsea Cycle and absolutely adored her Gifts/Voices/Powers trilogy.

16. Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)

17. The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975) -- Read How to Suppress Women's Writing a couple months ago; even wrote three blog posts about it.

18. Missing Man, Katherine MacLean (1975)

19. Arslan, MJ Engh (1976)

20. Floating Worlds, Cecelia Holland (1976)

21. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)

22. Islands, Marta Randall (1976)

23. Dreamsnake, Vonda N McIntyre (1978)

24. False Dawn, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1978)

25. Shikasta [Canopus in Argos: Archives], Doris Lessing (1979)

26. Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979) -- Read and loved both Wild Seed and Fledgling; there are few authors whose work I enjoy discussing more than Butler's.

27. Benefits, Zoe Fairbairns (1979)

28. The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge (1980)

29. The Silent City, Élisabeth Vonarburg (1981)

30. The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981) -- So much angst and melodrama, but in the best way. Would have loved it at 14, and definitely still admired it at 26, though I could no longer connect with that mindset.

31. The Many-Coloured Land [Saga of the Exiles], Julian May (1981)

32. Darkchild [Daughters of the Sunstone], Sydney J van Scyoc (1982)

33. The Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey (1982) -- The Dragonriders of Pern is the reason I read SFF; my mom made me read it as a punishment when I was ten or so and late returning some library books, and I never looked back. Read the whole Pern series up to the publication of Masterharper of Pern multiple times, plus the Tower and the Hive series through book #4, the Petaybee series, the Freedom Series through book #3, and random other titles. I can't read McCaffrey now because she's been visited by the Suck Fairy, and as you can see I always ended up getting tired of her series before she finished them, but she's definitely one of my formative writers.

34. Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)

35. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

36. Jerusalem Fire, RM Meluch (1985)

37. Children of Anthi, Jay D Blakeney (1985)

38. The Dream Years, Lisa Goldstein (1985)

39. Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, Sarah Lefanu & Jen Green (1985)

40. Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)

41. The Wave and the Flame [Lear's Daughters], Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (1986)

42. The Journal of Nicholas the American, Leigh Kennedy (1986)

43. A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski (1986)

44. Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987)

45. In Conquest Born, CS Friedman (1987) -- Read Black Sun Rising earlier this year and was frustrated by it; probably won't read more.

46. Pennterra, Judith Moffett (1987)

47. Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)

48. Cyteen , CJ Cherryh (1988) -- Cherryh is one of the authors both my parents adore, so I've read several by her: half of Downbelow Station (which I found boring, but I was about 15 and plan to try again someday), the first three Foreigner books (I plan to read the rest of the series eventually, but it's LONG and the narrative is kind of claustrophobic so far), the Gene Wars duology (yay desert planets!), Rider at the Gate, Cuckoo's Egg, Rusalka & Yvgenie. . . plus one of my favorite trilogies of all time, The Faded Sun. The central metaphor of the Game of the People, shon'ai, is the sort of thing I read SF for -- the way it worked through the denoument blew my mind, and sticks with me to this day. Plus, desert planet!

49. Unquenchable Fire, Rachel Pollack (1988)

50. The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy (1988)

51. The Steerswoman [Steerswoman series], Rosemary Kirstein (1989)

52. The Third Eagle, RA MacAvoy (1989)

53. Grass, Sheri S Tepper (1989) -- My mom has read and loved a lot of Tepper, so I asked her what she'd recommend I read by her and she gave me The Family Tree. I loved it. So I read Six Moon Dance and loved it more. Then I read The True Game, which I really liked and found fun. Then I read Beauty, and discovered why so many people are so virulently allergic to her writing. Still plan on reading more by her, and I really wish Beauty wasn't the title it seems like most people have read, because some of her other work is SO MUCH BETTER. But it's true, her politics are a little extreme.

54. Heritage of Flight, Susan Shwartz (1989)

55. Falcon, Emma Bull (1989)

56. The Archivist, Gill Alderman (1989)

57. Winterlong [Winterlong trilogy], Elizabeth Hand (1990)

58. A Gift Upon the Shore, MK Wren (1990)

59. Red Spider, White Web, Misha (1990)

60. Polar City Blues, Katharine Kerr (1990) -- Read the first 1 1/2 Deverry books and got fed up; probably won't read any more by her.

61. Body of Glass (AKA He, She and It), Marge Piercy (1991)

62. Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler (1991)

63. Beggars in Spain [Sleepless trilogy], Nancy Kress (1991) -- I read this as a teenager and liked it enough to read the rest of the trilogy, but it was before I read critically so I can't discuss it.

64. A Woman of the Iron People, Eleanor Arnason (1991)

65. Hermetech, Storm Constantine (1991)

66. China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992)

67. Fools, Pat Cadigan (1992)

68. Correspondence, Sue Thomas (1992)

69. Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle (1992)

70. Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992) -- Loved this, because it made me cry; have loved pretty much everything by Willis because it either makes me cry or makes me laugh.

71. Ammonite, Nicola Griffith (1993) -- So. Fucking. Good. Read it just last year. I think Slow River is the more accomplished work, however, though it's emotionally devastating.

72. The Holder of the World, Bharati Mukherjee (1993)

73. Queen City Jazz, Kathleen Ann Goonan (1994)

74. Happy Policeman, Patricia Anthony (1994)

75. Shadow Man, Melissa Scott (1995)

76. Legacies, Alison Sinclair (1995)

77. Primary Inversion [Skolian Saga], Catherine Asaro (1995)

78. Alien Influences, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1995)

79. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (1996)

80. Memory [Vorkosigan series], Lois McMaster Bujold (1996). -- LOVE the Vorkosigan Saga, and this is undoubtedly the best book in that saga. It's also now my favorite, surpassing A Civil Campaign now that I've read Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night and sadly can see how completely wrong ACC is.

81. Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon (1996) -- Read The Speed of Dark a couple years ago and was disappointed by it; I thought the entire book should have been written from Lou's perspective, like Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon was, because all the stuff from other perspectives' just undercut the really subtle and brilliant stuff she was doing with Lou. Then, of course, there was MoonFail, and I haven't really had any desire to read further in her catalog.

82. Looking for the Mahdi, N Lee Wood (1996)

83. An Exchange of Hostages [Jurisdiction series], Susan R Matthews (1997)

84. Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel (1997)

85. Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey (1997)

86. Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman (1998)

87. Vast, Linda Nagata (1998)

88. Hand of Prophecy, Severna Park (1998)

89. Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson (1998) -- Really enjoyed this, and plan to read more by Hopkinson, but I don't think she'll become one fo my favorite authors. Her characters are a little too realistically flawed for me -- I *do* read SFF partly for the heroes.

90. Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan (1999)

91. Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle (2000) -- I read Ilario several years ago and found it frustrating; I loved what Gentle was doing with gender, and was particularly impressed by subtle way that she depicted Ilario's changes between "he" and "she", but really bounced off the prose sentence-by-sentence, so I've been waffling on whether or not I'll read Gentle's more famous work.

So I've only read 8 of the 91, and I've read different books by ten more of the authors. Pretty sad, and even sadder to me is that there are 23 authors listed that I've never even heard of. This *may* be because the list was put together by a Brit and so a few of them might not be readily available here in the U.S., but. . . twenty - three. *Shudder* I have some reading to do!

There are also some authors that I think should have been included: Marion Zimmer Bradley deserves something on this list, probably The Heritage of Hastur because it's one of the stronger Darkover novels and explicitly SF (unlike Hawkmistress! which is the Darkover novel that probably holds up best but looks like fantasy). Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden should be here as the first of the Company series. Sharon Shinn's Archangel is excellent, though the series gets weaker as it gets more SFnal and of course it's tainted by those icky romance cooties. Patricia McKillip's Moon-Flash is amazing, but I'll admit it might be disqualified as YA. And Kate Elliott's Jaran is great epic science fantasy actually very much in the mode of Nicola Griffith's Ammonite, though again there are icky romance cooties to beware. But half the fun of lists is debating what was missed, right?

I was preparing dinner a little over an hour ago when my dad began his near-nightly ritual of selecting a bottle of wine to go with the meal, opening it with proper reverence, and pouring out just the littlest sip to examine with all of his senses. After he had done that for himself, he brought the glass over to me, so that I could take part.

He waited for me to swallow my sip and then provided his thoughts on the wine.

"It's dumb."*

I looked at him quizzically, and he elaborated, saying that the wine was in that in-between stage, where it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be, what it wants to say to him. It had not found its voice yet.

About half an hour later, there was a lull in my preparations. Today was a gloriously gusty post-storm day, and the sun had just set, so the backyard called me. I sat in the kitchen doorway, enjoying the the process of purple across the sky and air through the trees. My dad came out to smoke a cigarette, then noticed the wind.

"It's an unsettling sort of wind."

I looked at him quizzically again, and again he elaborated, saying that the wind was the sort that blows from many directions at once, so you never know where it's coming from. An unexpected sort of wind. Unsettled in its course.

I got what he was saying each time. But I thought of my dad's words ("It's dumb," and "It's unsettling"), and I thought of the ones I would have chosen ("It has not found its voice," and "It's unsettled"). Mine, particularly in the case of the wind, are descriptive in an objective sort of way, talking about the thing itself. My father's are more subjective, speaking of the thing being described in terms of its relationship to him.

It occurred to me that those sort of subtle differences of characterization are things I need to incorporate into my writing.

-----

WRT my previous post, he was using the word in its original meaning, saying that the wine was mute.

I curse rarely. I have no problem with cursing, but my parents did that parental thing of forbidding curse words when I was little, and I did my particular thing of internalizing rules, so I have to be in a very specific mood to even think of using a curse word. I also tend not to insult people much -- definitely not to their faces, and not even very often that impersonal sort of insult where you call the driver who cut you off an asshole.

So I am thankful that I run into this problem rarely.

But there is still this problem that I run into on the rare occasion that I want to curse or hurl an insult: So. Much. of the "bad" language  that I know is deeply, deeply problematic.

There're all the words that are sexist or outright misogynistic: "bitch," "cunt," "pussy," "whore," "hysterical," "skank," "bimbo," "diva," "prude," "sissy"

There're all the words that are homophobic/transphobic: "gay/lesbian" (used to mean anything other than "homosexual"), "faggot," "dyke," "trannie"

There're all the words that are racist/ethnophobic (is that a word?): <the obvious one about black people>, "chink," "beaner," "kike," "wetback," "spick"

There're all the words that are classist: "ghetto," "cracker," "redneck," "hillbilly"

There're all the words that are ableist: "lame," "crazy," "insane," "hysterical" (again), "retard," "dumb," "spastic"

Those are words that, as far as I can tell, should not be used ever as insults/curse words. They are indeed "bad" words not because they are "naughty" in some way, but because they are hurtful to actual living people and reinforce the kyriarchy.*

Then there're two words that have problematic roots, but which are (maybe? at least to my ear?) now less problematic: "bastard" and "moron." I *think* "bastard" is acceptable now because our culture has changed to the point where the actual meaning is not insulting? And I *think* the definition of "moron" as someone with a low I.Q. has been retired? Though that's just *my* ear, so I am willing to be corrected overall and am even now mindful of using either of those words around people who don't share my cultural background.

Which leaves me with the following in my repertoire: "ass" (and its compounds), "douche" (and its compounds), "jerk," "shit." And if I want to be faux-British I can add "naff" and "wanker" and "bloody."

And I can keep the most versatile of them all, from the title of this post: fuck.

I think "motherfucker" crosses a line, and "fucktard" is obviously a compound of a word on my ableist list, but I can use "fucker" and "fuckwad" and "fucking" and both "fuck" and "unfuck." I can use all of the maybe slightly twee alternatives to "fuck," like "fudge" and "fig" and (in SFF circles) "frak." I can say "fuckin'-A" or "I don't give a flying fuck."

I will grant, many of the words I feel are acceptable are still embedded in concepts I don't much like -- I think sex is generally a good thing, so the association of sex with badness is one I'm not fond of, and the rest of the words seem indicative of our society's rather absurdly (IMO) extreme dislike of the body and its various fluids and excretions. But as far as I can tell (and I am willing to be educated if I'm missing something!) actual living marginalized people are not hurt by their usage.

I know the First Amendment guarantees my Right to Free Speech and all that (/sarcasm), but all that means is that I am legally allowed to say those words. I see absolutely no reason why I would want to. Words hurt people. I think part of being a good person is that I try my best not to hurt people. So I don't say the words that I know hurt people. (Or at least I try not to. A couple of them I had to educate myself about, and I'm still in the process of retraining.)

-----

*When used by someone from outside the group, as an insult. Some of them have actual non-pejorative definitions that I am not objecting to, as when dog shows talk about "bitches" meaning female dogs. Others have been reclaimed by the group they have been applied to and used for empowerment.

You know all those wonderful SFF novels where the aliens/robots/orcs are clearly metaphors for nonwhite people in today's society? They are not actually about nonwhite people. They do not pass the Johnson Test. They may serve as valuable teaching tools to other white people. . . but I am not an alien or a robot or an orc, so they do not in any way, shape, or form help me feel less erased in my beloved genre. Stop bringing them up when I ask for that, all right?

Currently reading:
How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ
"Chapter 6: False Categorizing"
Wherein Russ categorizes the way that female artists are (deliberately) miscategorized personally (mentioned only as relations of male artists) and the ways their work is (deliberately) miscategorized as relevant only in some limited way (it's "regional" or an example of a particular "genre" or worthy of study only for its particular technique).

A note: In this post I will be applying the analysis to my school readings of writers of color. So I'll repost the relevant entries in my (likely incomplete) list of books read for school:

Roots, by Alex Haley* -- Mind-blowing, to see history brought to life this way! Also, I totally kick ass, 'cause I'm the only person in class who read this giant brick of a book.
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros -- God damn it! I avoided reading this book in 8th grade, why do I have to read it now? Nothing HAPPENS. It's not IMPORTANT. It's just in the syllabus to fill the minority quota, isn't it?
Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- Another minority book. But hey! This is my history! Well, sort of. But the internment wasn't that bad, compared to the shit everybody else had to go through. Like the Holocaust!
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston -- Another minority book. But at least this one is more interesting than The House on Mango Street. It sure sucked to be black.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison -- Minority book. . . OMG THIS IS AWESOME! I guess the minority quota IS good for something. . .
Dreamer, by Charles Johnson -- Another minority book. I guess they can't all be winners.

*Read for a class other than English.

Books by white people: 18 1/2 (+1 repeated), or 77.1%
Books by non-white people: 5 1/2, or 22.9%

What a remarkably similar percentage to that of women. . . and, of course, several authors fulfill both minority perspectives, as Sandra Cisneros, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and Zora Neale Hurston are women of color.

I've taken the liberty (hey, it's my blog post, I can do that) of underlining the key phrases up there: "history" and "minority" occur over and over again, and "quota" makes a couple appearances.

Russ was talking specifically about geographic regionalism in her book, where Willa Cather, with her focus on frontier life on the Great Plains, is a "regional" artist but William Faulkner, with his focus mostly on one southern county, is not. But I think the categorization of "minority" artist works the same way -- Cisneros' The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age tale and Knowles' A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age tale. Both take place against very detailed, very specific backdrops -- Cisneros' backdrop is a Chicano community in Chicago and Knowles' backdrop is a white prep school in New England. My classmates and I, kids from West L.A. and South Central (there was a lot of bussing), saw both backdrops as alien, and Knowles' was probably the harder to understand. But Cisneros was framed as writing about a specific experience, while Knowles was framed as writing about something universal.

This was not helped by the fact that the books by non-white authors so often blurred the line between fiction and history. I read Roots for a history class, not an English class; the only white-authored narrative piece I read in a history class was Wiesel's Night, which is a borderline case because Wiesel was Jewish and Night was about the Holocaust, and even though I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in my school curriculum Jewishness was almost as much a marked state as non-whiteness. And three of the non-white authored works I read -- Roots, Farewell to Manzanar, and Dreamer -- were marketed explicitly (to us at least) as being fictionalized history, instead of true works of fiction. The only white-authored works marked this way were again the books by Wiesel -- Night, an actual memoir like Farewell to Manzanar, and Dawn, a novel but described again as thinly-disguised history.

Many of the (non-Jewish) white-authored novels had, as far as I can tell, similar amounts of historical content: A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, A Passage to India. But though we spent a good deal of time discussing the historical setting of each of those novels, we never viewed them as primarily historical artifacts -- they were novels first, and the history was merely one of many interesting elements to discuss.

And in this particular case I'm pretty sure we weren't even doing this marking and framing ourselves. I believe that the idea of the school system having a "minority quota" actually came from my 9th grade English teacher; I can't quite remember that she used that exact phrase, but I distinctly remember her syllabus having a "multicultural" unit where she places all the works (novels, short stories, poems) by non-white authors, while the white authors got unit headings having to do with literary technique or theme. I had that same teacher in 10th grade too, so even though my next two English teachers didn't mark the non-white authors out explicitly, it was still in the back of my brain. I learned that we read white people because they wrote literature; we read non-white people so that we could glimpse the "minority experience."

Currently Reading:
How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ
"Chapter 4: Pollution of Agency"
Wherein Russ categorizes the way that female artists are dismissed because they are either improper persons, or they wrote about improper subjects.

I was thinking about the books I read in middle school and high school. I read everything assigned, but at this point I certainly can't remember all of the books. Still, here's what I do remember reading, organized by grade and then alphabetically by author:

Middle School
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (I think 8th grade English)
Roots, by Alex Haley (I think 8th grade History)
Shabanu, by Suzanne Fisher Staples (I think 7th grade, but can't remember if it was for English or Social Studies; it may have been for both, because it was a joint, two-period class)
Night, by Elie Wiesel (I have no idea)

9th Grade English
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Night, by Elie Wiesel

10th Grade English
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
Some other Shakespearean tragedy, I forget which
Dawn, by Elie Wiesel

11th Grade English
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver

AP English (12th Grade)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster
Dreamer, by Charles Johnson
Dubliners, by James Joyce

As I said, this list is incomplete; my memory is faulty, alas, and I'm pretty sure even at school-pace we got through more books than that. (Certainly I read more than four novels in all of middle school!) But I think it's near complete for high school at least; my school was on a weird variant of the quarter system, so I was only taking English for four months each grade.

Here're some stats from that list:

Books by Men: 19 1/2 (+1 repeated), or 81.25%
Books by Women: 4 1/2, or 18.75%

Which is not as bad as the break-down Russ talks about finding in anthologies of poetry, where women average 9% authorship. But what I find appalling, in retrospect, is the commentary that surrounded the books, in my mind and my friends' minds. Let me emphasize that these comments do NOT reflect how I feel now:

Middle School
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury -- Awesome! SF!
Roots, by Alex Haley -- Mind-blowing, to see history brought to life this way! Also, I totally kick ass, 'cause I'm the only person in class who read this giant brick of a book.
Shabanu, by Suzanne Fisher Staples -- What the hell am I doing reading this book in school?!? It's about menstruation. The narrator chronicles her breast growth by comparing them to different fruit. We're reading this because the author went to my school, right?
The Pearl, by John Steinbeck -- Okay, I hated Steinbeck when my dad made me read him, and I still hate him now. But school books are supposed to be boring, right? It's how you know they're serious.
Night, by Elie Wiesel -- Fuck. The Holocaust sucked.

9th Grade English
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros -- God damn it! I avoided reading this book in 8th grade, why do I have to read it now? Nothing HAPPENS. It's not IMPORTANT. It's just in the syllabus to fill the minority quota, isn't it?
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens -- Hey, this is nowhere near as awful as it was when Dad made me read it. I guess Dickens deserves his place as a classic author.
Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- Another minority book. But hey! This is my history! Well, sort of. But the internment wasn't that bad, compared to the shit everybody else had to go through. Like the Holocaust!
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare -- *Eye roll* Don't you all know that my dad was reading my Shakespeare in my crib?
Night, by Elie Wiesel -- I get it. The Holocaust sucked.

10th Grade English
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens -- Wow, Dickens can REALLY write! Kick ass!
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston -- Another minority book. But at least this one is more interesting than The House on Mango Street. It sure sucked to be black.
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles -- War sucks. But I guess this deserves to be a classic.
Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger -- Okay, I'm too old for this now. I loved it when my dad made me read it three years ago though. Certainly speaks to my generation though; my friends all adore it.
Some other Shakespearean tragedy, I forget which -- At least this one isn't Dying for Love. But still, I've done Shakespeare already.
Dawn, by Elie Wiesel -- This is some depressing ass shit here. Why do I have to read so much about war?

11th Grade English
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Fucking rich people. But still, I get why people teach this, I suppose. I'd probably like it if I had a better teacher.
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding -- Gah. So ugly, and so horrifying, and so kind of fun despite all that. This is MAJOR.
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne -- DUDE. SRS LITERATURE.
The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver -- Another minority book. And it's about parenting. Who cares?

AP English (12th Grade)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad -- SRS LITERATURE, SRSLY!
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison -- Minority book. . . OMG THIS IS AWESOME! I guess the minority quota IS good for something. . .
A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster -- Hey! India's cool! And maybe authors actually put all that theme crap in deliberately!
Dreamer, by Charles Johnson -- Another minority book. I guess they can't all be winners.
Dubliners, by James Joyce -- Okay, sometimes SRS LITERATURE is obnoxiously pointless. I guess I must not be *that* smart.

A particular pattern becomes obvious (actually two patterns, but I'm only talking about gender in this post; race will come next): books by men are "serious," while books by women are quota-fillers about seriously not-serious stuff.

And let me emphasize: there was serious vitriol surrounding the books by women that we read. All those books about war were emotionally wearing, but at least they mattered, right? But ask teenagers to read a book that addressed the female experience of puberty, the threat (or act) of rape, the responsibilities people feel to parents and as parents. . . and I'm afraid in our case we thought roughly: How on earth does that stuff matter? I mean, sure, it's stuff people go through. . . but it's not important in any way. Killing people is important stuff! That's how you know the author is saying something about society in general, not just some minority group. (And yes, we knew women were not a minority. We clearly would have been happy to read what women had to say. . . if they had anything important to say.)

A thought pattern straight out of Russ' examples: all the women writers just happened to be writing about improper subjects.

But what I want to talk about in more depth is what happened to the two white female authors, Suzanne Fisher Staples and Barbara Kingsolver. Though we didn't actually know Barbara Kingsolver was white; there wasn't an author bio/photo on the jacket, and there were Native American characters, so we assumed she was Native American of some sort. Thus we miscategorized her, and then dismissed her along with the two and a half non-white authors in a way I'll talk about in my next post.

But Staples was white, and we knew she was white, and that made her one step closer to being the right sort of person to be taken seriously as a writer.

So we attacked her personally.

What sort of person writes about menstruation? Describes breasts in terms of fruit? "Lesbian!" was muttered, though I did not take part in that particular bit of branding. What TRASH it was, and by extension she was! There's no way any teacher would put this on the reading list by choice -- so we developed the conspiracy theory that the school administration insisted it be read because Staples was an alumna. We even did a two-page spread in the school opinion page (yes, I was on my middle school newspaper staff) about the "controversy" surrounding the inclusion of the book in everyone's syllabus. We had to comb our entire class for someone willing to defend it, and it ended up being that guy that everyone knew was a total brown-noser. And even he couldn't convincingly refute the cronyism charge.

I didn't find out until nearly a decade later, when I worked in a bookstore, that Shabanu was a Newberry Honor Book.

The thing I find most galling is that I actually liked Shabanu at first. Being the sort of reader I am, I pretty much always read the assigned book whole, the first night, then had to go back to follow along at the class's slower pace. So I read Shabanu before all my friends, and I remember being. . . amazed and uncomfortable and delighted at seeing my experience reflected in a novel. I even liked The House on Mango Street as I read it during a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream (yes I was in theater in high school), despite my anticipatory snobbishness based on a two-page excerpt I had read the year before. But when my friends began muttering, began the process of dismissal, my somewhat tentative liking was pushed back.

A surprisingly insightful high school friend once told me that I was so constantly contrary because I wanted to stand out, to be different; this explained my insistance that winter was the best season (though it is) and my resistance to cell phones (though they are obnoxious) and my refusal to apply to Ivy League schools (though I probably wouldn't have gotten in). But even that contrary streak, that overwhelming desire to not think the way everyone else thinks, could not withstand the faux-intellectual disdain that I felt would have been aimed at me had I admitted to liking books by women, about women.

Currently Reading:
How To Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ
"Chapter 3: Denial of Agency"
Wherein Russ catalogues examples of scholars/critics insisting that female artists secretly hired male artists to produce their art, or that the art made itself with the woman acting as a medium, or the woman's "masculine" side produced the art, or the woman is not "merely" a woman at all, but something superhuman.

-----

I have long suspected gender bias in my father's reading tastes. His favorites authors are: Iain Banks, John Barth, Herman Hesse,
John Irving, John Steinbeck on the Straight Fic side of things; Iain M. Banks on the Spec. Fic side, and Kurt Vonnegut bridging the gap. Previous favorites that he has gotten bored with include John Barnes, Orson Scott Card, Alastair Reynolds.

When challenged on this, he would provide as counter-examples: Lois McMaster Bujold, C. J. Cherryh, Ursula K. Le Guin. (He has no female straight fic examples.)

Which is totally fair, and it is entirely true that he was the parent that put all three of those authors in my hands for the first time.

But I still felt a. . . niggling. There always seemed to be a lot of "but"s when he talked about Bujold, Cherryh, and Le Guin; "but"s that I did not hear when he talked about his male authors. He thought Barnes was uneven; OSC's politics started getting in the way; Reynolds didn't have enough narrative control. But Bujold got "fluffy" and "slight"; Cherryh was writing the same story over and over; Le Guin got "boring" -- as far as I can tell, the instant she became a feminist.

Again, to be fair, Bujold's Sharing Knife series does seem slighter to me than the best of her work. Cherryh's Foreigner sequence is up to, what, four trilogies and a fifth one announced? And papersky seems to agree that Le Guin lost something of her center, narratively speaking, in that time period. (I've only read early and late work from Le Guin, so I don't have an opinion to offer on that front. Though of the Earthsea novels I've read, the only one I loved was Tehanu.)

When I started suspecting a bias I tried to test it; I'd offer my dad the occasional novel that spoke to me, and try to track whether there was any pattern in the authors he liked and the authors he didn't.

It was an epic failure, mostly because my dad didn't like ANY of the authors I put forward. Eventually I concluded that he's one of those people that has to discover things for HIMSELF -- the act of someone else putting the book in his hand tainted the book beyond redemption. (I came to this conclusion after I gave him M. John Harrison's Light. He trashed it, then he went out and bought Viriconium -- which he also trashed, but insisted I read, something he only does when something about the book has been exceptional to him.)

I tried to swear off my experiment; I also tried to swear off ever recommending a book to my dad, because it was just too maddening. But then this past fall he ran out of books to read, and started agitating me to provide something for him. I placed an order online for him of books he missed by some of his reliably-enjoyable authors, but he still had a week to fill. So I gave him Catherynne M. Valente's The Habitation of the Blessed and China Mieville's Embassytown.

He hated them, as I should have known he would.

He actually thought they were quite similar: he thought they were both technically a mess, sentences too ornate, structure too convoluted and without purpose, story completely out of control. He is constantly pushing Banks and Barth on me because he loves the delight they take in language; he thought Valente and Mieville were both committing crimes against language, using obscure (or made-up) words for ego's sake.

And time and time again he referred to Mieville as "she."

I corrected him, over and over again, muttering "he" every time he used the wrong pronoun. Finally he responded "She is not!" I offered to show pictures, but that proof was brushed aside.

Now I will admit, at first I, too, thought Mieville was a woman. This was long before I read any of his novels though -- I just fell into the trap of assuming names ending in "a" are feminine. So I can understand my dad's initial reaction.

But the way that he kept insisting Mieville "must" be a woman strikes me as definitely suggestive. I have never heard him assert that because a piece of art is good, the female author cannot have written it. But this definitely seemed to me to be a case of the inverse -- because he judged that the art was bad, it could not have been written by a man, but must, secretly, have been written by a woman.

Some time ago, I was in a now-defunct bookstore, and I saw this in the SFF section.

A new edition of Longfellow's translation of Dante's Inferno with the tagline: "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game from Electronic Arts."

I had two thoughts pretty much concurrently:

"WTF?!? SRSLY WORLD?!?!? *headdesk*"

and

"I wanna see somebody who picked this up based on the tagline and cover art have that exact thought when they open the first page!" /malicious glee

This morning I was watching ESPN while eating breakfast. A Jeep commercial was on, showing a Jeep driving through snowbanks and sending up spray. I wasn't really paying attention. Until I heard, in a crackly old-timey voice:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

My head snapped up so hard my neck cracked, to confirm that I had, in fact just seen and heard what I thought I had just seen and heard. My thought was essentially "SQUEE! Robert Frost!"

I remembered the book, and wondered at the difference in my reactions: to the book, disdain and disgust; to the commercial, delight.

I think it has to do with the framing: EA and Del Rey were framing Dante's epic poem as relevant because of the video game; Jeep was framing their car as relevant because of the Frost poem.

In two (really rough, because I fail at LJ embedding and graphics in general) Venn diagrams, this is what I was perceiving as the messages:


( Behind a cut because otherwise the formatting doesn't work. )


So, you know, advertisers take note: I love it when you reference classic works of literature, but please don't be assholes about it.

Sadly, I doubt that they give a damn, because I do not have the proper reproductive equipment to be their target audience. Though I almost bought a (used) Jeep a couple months ago. . .

For as long as I can remember, I have spent the time between going to bed and falling asleep imagining stories.

It probably started whenever my dad decided my sister and I were old enough to go to bed on our own; I suspect that I missed him reading to us, and filled in the silence with my own narration.

In elementary and middle school the stories I told were mostly adventures with me as heroine; they usually involved a magical creature and a visit to some sort of fantasy land, and when I discovered science fiction I'm pretty sure they became vaguely high-tech and futuristic. Some of them, I see now, were very definitely proto-sexual fantasies, which made me feel weird in a good way. (Read: They aroused me, but I had no idea of what arousal was.)

Then I entered high school. I was thirteen. I developed my first crush. And somewhere along the line (I remember deciding, but do not remember when I made that decision) the fantasies shifted. They became romantic fantasies exclusively -- I kept the vaguely SFF settings, including alien and/or magical characters, but the plot was always a romantic plot, one where the dramatic tension came from the will-they-or-won't-they (of course they will) building of a relationship, and the culmination of the story was the Happily-Ever-After. (At first the HEA was signalled with an "I love you" and a passionate kiss; once I got online and figured out how sex works things got a little more explicit. But the point was always the HEA, not the sex.)

And while I was always the star of my pre-romance fantasies, when I decided to indulge my newfound desire for romance I changed that.

You see, part of the mythology of my depression was that I was completely unloved and completely unlovable. So I could indulge in romantic fantasies. . . but I could not place myself in them.

Instead, I developed an avatar for myself to play out the fantasies with. She was always gorgeous, of course -- thin, with a beautiful complexion, large blue eyes, and either red or black hair.

She was obviously white.

I also developed her (my) ideal mate. He was also gorgeous -- tall, broad-shouldered but slender, with beautiful hands, kind green eyes and black hair.

He was obviously white.

I didn't just tell the same story to myself over and over; I came up with new scenarios all the time, and usually had several going at once so I could pick and choose at bedtime which I felt like. I tried out different sorts of personalities, different lifestyles; I gave them Traumatic Backstories and unusual hobbies. The SFF settings became rarer, as I became even less interested in the world-building and focused solely on the relationship.

They never had any friends or family, or if they did the friends and family were there solely to be foils for the romantic relationship. And if my avatar had friends they were always male.

And I do that to this day.

But I set that pattern in stone when I was thirteen; at that point all I knew was our racist, sexist, heteronormative culture; I related to that culture uncritically, and I naturally assumed that I fit it perfectly.

I am now fourteen years older. I have now embraced (or at least I am working on embracing) the myriad ways that I do not fit that culture: half-Japanese, in an interracial relationship, feminist, pansexual, polyamorous. . . fat. And though I can (and do) pass in that larger culture often, I now view it very critically.

And, equally importantly (to me at least), I no longer feel myself innately unlovable, but I still have to fight against that pattern of thought every single day.

And so lately I've been feeling. . . dissatisfied with myself over this incredibly outdated fantasy life.

Kind of disgusted, really, though that intolerance of myself is also a legacy of my toxic thought patterns.

So I'm changing it. It's *my* fantasy life, after all. I'm not putting myself into it -- after 14 years I refuse to be bound in my storytelling by the mundane details of my own life. But I am going to start making my heroines more like me -- bi/multiracial, in interracial relationships, feminist, pansexual, polyamorous. . . at least not obsessively thin. After I've done this for a while I may even try making my heroines even less like me -- I don't think I've ever put, for example, any sort of religion into a fantasy. I've never made any of my characters non-U.S.A.ians. I've never explored non-cisgendered identities, though that will wait until I've done some more real-world research, in the hopes that I don't unknowingly use problematic tropes.

I've already started, as a matter of fact.

It's hard. Fourteen years of thinking one way cuts a pretty deep rut, particularly when I get all sorts of help continuing to think that way from the rest of my society. (Fourteen years is half my life, actually, which is mind-boggling. I don't feel that much distance from me-at-thirteen.) And that difficulty makes me almost reluctant to go to bed, because the point of the fantasies has always been to relax, to pander to my id, to escape.

But that, ultimately, is why I owe it to myself to put in the work now. Because with my old fantasies the only parts of me that were really relaxing, that were being pandered to, were the privileged parts: my half-whiteness, my attraction to men, my current state of monogamy. . . my sense that there is such a thing as an "ideal weight," and that that weight (for a woman) is always less than 120 pounds. I was contributing to the erasure of myself, in the privacy of my own mind.

And that's just fucked up.