Reading in 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n Probably the biggest influence on my reading year has been joining the Australian Women Writers’ 2012 Reading Challenge. The challenge forced me out of my comfort zone. Not too far out – I stuck with speculative fiction of course – but it did push me to seek out more authors. The results of my reading\/reviewing can be found at my “Mission Accomplished?” post<\/a> from a while back – in total I read and reviewed 17 books by Australian women speculative fiction authors in 2012.<\/p>\n I’ve looked back over this blog at reviews published in 2012 and come up with some statistics. Note: Given the number of novels, novellas, multi-author publications, anthologies etc, I’ve used a whim based system for counting up things I’ve read. Sloppy workmanship may also be a factor.\u00a0It is highly unlikely that anyone who could be bothered going through my back catalogue of reviews would come up with exactly the same numbers, however the percentages should be roughly correct. Stop complaining. What are you – perfect?<\/p>\n Stuff in book form:<\/em><\/p>\n Sean the Bookonaut has put up a post describing a\u00a0gender audit of his 2012 reading<\/a> recently. He has graphs. They are very impressive. As a homage, I am also including the following graph:<\/p>\n Stuff in magazine form:<\/em><\/p>\n On the short fiction side of things, in 2012 I tried to read\u00a0Aurealis<\/em>,\u00a0Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine<\/em>,\u00a0Asimov’s<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Analog<\/em>. I failed, but I did keep up with Aurealis and ASIM (I have a\u00a0lot<\/strong>\u00a0of Asimov’s and Analog to get through).<\/p>\n It wasn’t included in my review statistics above, but I also read every monthly edition of the online magazine\u00a0Antipodean SF<\/em><\/a>. This is partly because AntiSF was where all my flash fiction from 2012 was published. It was also because I like keeping in touch with what new and emerging authors are writing and AntiSF is an excellent venue for that. It was also also because I create the ePub version of AntiSF each month and get advanced access to the stories.<\/p>\n In 2011 I started broadening the base of authors I read, this trend continued in 2012. I also tried to become a lot more familiar with the Australian speculative fiction scene.<\/p>\n Looking back over my Goodreads reviews, my 5 star reviews included two books by Deborah Biancotti (Bad Power<\/em><\/a> and A Book of Endings<\/em><\/a>), Madigan Mine<\/em><\/a> by Kirstyn McDermott, The Silver Wind<\/a><\/em> by Nina Allan, The Last Days of Kali Yuga<\/em><\/a> by Paul Haines,\u00a0the Sprawl<\/em><\/a> anthology edited by Alisa Krasnostein\u00a0and Pyrotechnicon<\/em><\/a> by Adam Browne. So, I guess that constitutes my reading recommendations for the year that was.<\/p>\n 2013 Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve joined the Australian Women Writers’ 2013 Challenge<\/a>, so expect more reviews of Australian speculative fiction from some of our fantastic writers (starting with\u00a0Perfections<\/em> by Kirstyn McDermott – review coming soon).<\/p>\n There are quite a few “must read” books from 2012 that I haven’t actually read yet (e.g. 2312<\/em> by Kim Stanley Robinson). I also intend to have read the Ditmar and Aurealis Award short lists before the respective award ceremonies, especially so I can vote intelligently in the Ditmars.<\/p>\n In 2012 I completely failed to read the Hugo short list. I intend to fail to do so again this year.<\/p>\n I’m currently rethinking my short story approach, but I will look to read Jonathan Strahan’s Best of the Year for 2012 to catch up on the good quality short fiction from 2012 that I missed. I’m also considering committing to Strahan’s Eclipse Online series of short stories which I think is an excellent forum.\u00a0I will continue reading Antipodean SF, Aurealis <\/em>and\u00a0ASIM<\/em>\u00a0in 2013, and will give Asimov’s<\/em> and Analog<\/em> a red hot go. Apparently I can only commit to publications starting with ‘A’.<\/p>\n Apart from that, I suspect my short fiction reading will be spotty.<\/p>\n In terms of books:<\/p>\n That’s about if for now – I’m sure there is more to say but my\u00a0spidey-sense is telling me that you, dear reader, have run out of patience for reading this post. Stay tuned for a brief discussion of my writing year in review and thoughts for 2013.<\/p>\n Hope you all had a great 2012 and will have an even better 2013.<\/p>\n I’d love to hear your reading suggestions\/hopes for 2013 – feel free to comment below or provide links to your own blog posts on the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n <\/p>Hi,\n Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[84,201,53],"class_list":["post-1666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-awwc2013","tag-musings","tag-reading-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1666"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1762,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions\/1762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![\"2012](\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/2012-gender-reading.png\")
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