Tomorrow is Ascension Day, which is a public holiday in Germany. Of course, most people call it Father’s Day these days (to be celebrated by all males, whether fathers or not, by going out to get drunk with their buddies), but it was Ascension Day long before it was Father’s Day.
Unfortunately, I’m rather tired today, because I spent the afternoon with my aunt who is in a care home, so here’s a linkdump with a proper post to follow tomorrow:
The discussion about the lack of women writers named among the favourite SF novels nominated by Guardian readers that I linked to in yesterday’s blog post has gone full circle, when The Guardian picked up the story.
The comments are very typical for this sort of discussion, full of “Well, who cares about the author’s gender as long as the book is good” (and good books are all written by men by some miraculous coincidence) or “I didn’t see gender, just names” (all of whom were male by some equally miraculous coincidence).
The Guardian once more proves itself to be the most genre-friendly of the major English language newspapers, because it also picked up on the discussion about the alleged addictiveness of romance novels which was kicked off by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books responding to an article from a Utah based regional news site about the alleged addictiveness of romance novels and the fact that they supposedly endanger marriages.
Of course, there’s nothing new about equating romances with porn. Right now, the two neuroscientists at the heart of last year’s SurveyFail controversy are making the rounds at respectable news outlets that should know better, shilling their pop-science book which claims that – drumroll – romance and pornography and fanfic for that matter are all the same thing. I still have my reservations about tagging that pop-science book with negative tags on Amazon before it was even published and anyone had read it, but those guys are just so wrong and obnoxious in their promotional efforts that I don’t exactly feel sorry for them.
Paul Jessup has an interesting guest post on genre labels at Aidan Moher’s blog.
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