Year of reading not men
Nov. 6th, 2016 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsSo! I finished that thing where I wasn't reading cis men for a year.
Technically, I finished it back on September 30 and have been meaning to talk about it since, but you may recall that September 30, 2016 was followed immediately by October 2016, and those of you who know what I do for a living will understand that I exist inside a black hole of sleeplessness and obsession and screaming tension right now and that I don't remember what normal is anymore, so there you go. Also, unsurprisingly, this means that I'm barely reading, since my only real reading time is my commute time, and these days I spend that either frantically work triaging on the way in or sitting in complete silence trying not very successfully to become a human being who can talk about something other than work on the way home, which is doubly hard since I mostly can't talk about work at all with muggles.
Sorry, that wasn't supposed to come out.
Anyway, the year of women and trans authors. It was amazing you guys, and I highly, highly recommend it. My overall pleasure in my reading shot way up, I appreciated most things I read even if I didn't love them all, and I felt – "safe" is not the right word, too strong, so let's go with comfortable. I felt comfortable as a reader in ways I am not accustomed to.
I will hopefully have more brain for this later, but two observations that come to mind off the bat. Focusing on women/trans authors freed me from the final trailing sense of canon obligation. You know, 'but it was written by a famous man and it's on all those lists of the most influential scifi of the blah blah blah so--.' Honestly, I thought I was long over that, but it turns out no, it was still lurking back there. So when I took away the ability to read all those male authors, suddenly it was clear to see how much I actually didn't want to read a significant portion of them at all. And from there it was easy to delete them off my reader, and out of my life.
The second thing is that this exercise made me want to find the same satisfaction and the same clarity in other kinds of consumption. I have unsubscribed from so many male-only podcasts in the past year, and my life is better for it (though do you know how hard it is to find sports podcasts featuring all or mostly women?). Same thing with blogs, same thing with a lot of the people I read for professional reasons (though again, kind of hard given the gender balance in my field, ahahahaha ha ha *cries*).
Will I do it again? Definitely, though not right now. Right now I'm barely reading, so it's a moot point. In calendar year 2017, I plan to read only authors that I have never read before, which I'm pretty excited about. But frankly 2017 is on the other side of some epic work for me, so that's all I can manage right now.
Technically, I finished it back on September 30 and have been meaning to talk about it since, but you may recall that September 30, 2016 was followed immediately by October 2016, and those of you who know what I do for a living will understand that I exist inside a black hole of sleeplessness and obsession and screaming tension right now and that I don't remember what normal is anymore, so there you go. Also, unsurprisingly, this means that I'm barely reading, since my only real reading time is my commute time, and these days I spend that either frantically work triaging on the way in or sitting in complete silence trying not very successfully to become a human being who can talk about something other than work on the way home, which is doubly hard since I mostly can't talk about work at all with muggles.
Sorry, that wasn't supposed to come out.
Anyway, the year of women and trans authors. It was amazing you guys, and I highly, highly recommend it. My overall pleasure in my reading shot way up, I appreciated most things I read even if I didn't love them all, and I felt – "safe" is not the right word, too strong, so let's go with comfortable. I felt comfortable as a reader in ways I am not accustomed to.
I will hopefully have more brain for this later, but two observations that come to mind off the bat. Focusing on women/trans authors freed me from the final trailing sense of canon obligation. You know, 'but it was written by a famous man and it's on all those lists of the most influential scifi of the blah blah blah so--.' Honestly, I thought I was long over that, but it turns out no, it was still lurking back there. So when I took away the ability to read all those male authors, suddenly it was clear to see how much I actually didn't want to read a significant portion of them at all. And from there it was easy to delete them off my reader, and out of my life.
The second thing is that this exercise made me want to find the same satisfaction and the same clarity in other kinds of consumption. I have unsubscribed from so many male-only podcasts in the past year, and my life is better for it (though do you know how hard it is to find sports podcasts featuring all or mostly women?). Same thing with blogs, same thing with a lot of the people I read for professional reasons (though again, kind of hard given the gender balance in my field, ahahahaha ha ha *cries*).
Will I do it again? Definitely, though not right now. Right now I'm barely reading, so it's a moot point. In calendar year 2017, I plan to read only authors that I have never read before, which I'm pretty excited about. But frankly 2017 is on the other side of some epic work for me, so that's all I can manage right now.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 01:53 am (UTC)Yes, definitely. Though I will say right now that I missed nothing. Seriously. I worried about this ahead of time, and I will say that I was glad that the new Rivers of London book got delayed until November so it didn't come out when I wouldn't have read it. But otherwise, didn't miss a thing. Never thought, 'oh, but that's written by a dude, that's a shame.' Mostly I think because even though I haven't been reading much, I've always been excited about what I'm reading, and what book comes next. Also, now that I can read anything, I am reading men again (well, tbf, it took until the end of October to pick up my first book by a man) but I'm sticking to the good stuff. Male authors I specifically already know I'll like, or have a good reason to think I will. The whole thing was really illuminating.
Totally different topic, what are you doing for turkey day?
no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 11:05 pm (UTC)I am soooo not in charge of planning anything, but we are in town. Stay tuned.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-07 06:12 pm (UTC)I wish you time to do pleasure reading again at some point in the future. I'm sure that will happen soon. Right? Obviously.