But who gets to decide what’s “great” and deserves inclusion in this list?
And why why WHY do we need to know who wrote a book before we can decide whether it’s worth reading?
I can’t believe how huge the focus on gender is this year. Maybe it’s been this way for ages but I didn’t notice till I started using twitter?
I bet we could ALL put together a COMPLETELY different list of “fifty great books by female authors.” And then “fifty great books by male authors.” With relatively little overlap, too. And with what possibly justification could you say that any one of those lists have priority over the others?
Except that naturally MY lists would include the BEST books.
ps — hey, just realized, I’m not on that list! QED it is clearly not a legitimate list!
Please Feel Free to Share:
The focus on gender, gender bending, and other grievance categories has been growing for a while, at least ever since Racefail and Mammothfail, which I watched with the appalled fascination of witnessing slo-mo train wrecks.
i don’t like it.
Well, I don’t mind people critizing lazy writing, but keep the focus on the writing and complain about easy outs like a magical Negro, or all these folks need is a honky, and quit with emphasizing the grievances. We all want better writing, don’t we?
Although judging by that list, which contains an awful lot of writers that IMO are mediocre at best, maybe we don’t. Be glad you’re not on it :-)
You might want to look up Raymond’s Kafkatrap, which is an analysis of the various ways of shutting down conversations about grievances.
“Kafkatrap”? Interesting name! And it sounds like JUST what I need.