The One Best Book

The Guardian book blog has an article on the “shrinking” presence of women SF writers, a response to an analysis of an earlier Guardian books reader’s favorites poll: when asked to list favorites, out of some 500 responses only ~20 were works written by women (about 4%).

I’m not entirely sure that the female presence can be called “shrinking” in a year where the majority of Nebula nominees, across all categories, were women. If anything, their presence is expanding, and women writers are receiving recognition both critically (with awards) and in sales (at least among the under 40 SFF writers in my acquaintance, women are kicking ass with sales figures and multi-book deals, whether writing traditionally “female” genres like paranormal romance, or male dominated genres like horror and speculative war fiction).

Merits of the title aside – headlines in journalism are often misleading, inaccurate, or exaggerated – there is the question of the poll. Does a poll of “best books” with 4% representation of works by women, represent sexism?

The original poll-taker suggested a bias towards classic SF – the older the work, the more likely the writer is to be male – while Nicola Griffith’s analysis and Guardian response David Barnett considered both industry sexism (clearly not the case) and sexism in the fanbase.

I don’t think either considered the limitations of the poll itself; the poll asked readers to name the best SF book – the best, which is one book – and explain why it was the best. It did not ask readers list their 5 or 10 or 20 favorites (though some did in comments).

If I were to name my top 10 or 20 or 100, my list – forever changing as I find new works and new authors – would most definitely include a variety of writers – women, men, my partner, friends and acquaintances who I meet at conventions, podcasters who’ve gone pro, people I’ll never meet, young people, people long dead, people of color, people from countries I’ve never seen.

Yet, no matter the books in the rest of my list of favorites, no matter the genders, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, countries of origins of the writers in that list – and no matter how many of my closest friends’ books hit the NYT bestseller list – if I were asked to name only one book? My favorite book would be the one book that I’ve read, listened to, and watched a hundred times, and probably will a few thousand more. It’s clever, witty, funny, irreverent, imminently quotable, and 30 years later still insightful. My one favorite will always, always be Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*.

I suspect that for many respondents, their response comes from the same place: it’s the book that’s affected them the most, the book that they re-read over and over, the book they’d take to a desert island or take into space (if they couldn’t take an ebook), the book that was profound at a key point in their lives, their *first* favorite book, and the book that they still love, after all this time.

The Guardian poll doesn’t mean that 96% of SFF’s reading list or that 96% SFF fans overall favorite books are written by men – it’s that for 96% of the respondents, the ultimate, one best book ever happens to be written by a man.

And that’s not a bad or awful or sexist thing.

*Omnibus edition… otherwise a dead, white, straight, Englishman will take up the first 6 spots in my top ten list (5 volumes of HHGTTG and the first Dirk Gently). Can’t have that, can we?