Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 2: General Science Fiction & Fantasy

Here's the second in my series of posts looking at how my reading habits have changed over time. This one covers science fiction and fantasy that is neither tie-ins nor comic books. In the Excel sheet I'm basing these posts on, I break out authors; some authors of course write both sf&f and non-genre literature. For the purposes of these posts, I'm placing authors in the category where the majority of their work that I've read falls. For example, M. T. Anderson and H. G. Wells write sf&f and literature and even nonfiction, but most of their work that I've read is sf&f, so I'm including them in this post.

Note that I only break out an author when I purposefully read three books by that author and I intend to read more. That is to say, if I read four John Scalzi novels not because they were by Scalzi, but only because they were Hugo finalists, I don't see that as worth tracking. I also include relevant nonfiction and comics with an author's count; a book about H. G. Wells is included in my Wells count, so too would be a comic adaptation of The War of the Worlds. (As that also implies, derivative works are also lumped in with that author; a Gregory Benford Foundation novel would go with Asimov's total.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
L. F. Baum / Oz	0	7	1	13	41	62	2.1%
H. G. Wells	0	7	10	15	3	35	1.2%
U. K. Le Guin	7	0	8	5	4	24	0.8%
The Expanse	0	0	0	8	10	18	0.6%
L. Snicket / D. Handler	13	2	1	0	0	16	0.5%
T. Pratchett	0	0	0	2	12	14	0.5%
I. Asimov / Foundation	2	10	2	0	0	14	0.5%
M. T. Anderson	2	5	2	3	2	14	0.5%
J. R. R. Tolkien	0	1	10	0	1	12	0.4%
S. Lem	6	2	2	1	0	11	0.4%
Pern	0	1	0	0	10	11	0.4%
Lensmen	6	4	0	0	0	10	0.3%
O. Butler	5	0	0	2	3	10	0.3%
His Dark Materials	0	8	0	1	1	10	0.3%
T. Pierce	0	8	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Duane	8	0	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Lessing	1	6	0	0	0	7	0.2%
N. Okorafor	0	0	0	5	2	7	0.2%
D. Gerrold	5	1	0	0	0	6	0.2%
A. Leckie	0	0	0	4	2	6	0.2%
G. Griffith	0	2	4	0	0	6	0.2%
Hyperion Cantos	2	0	1	3	0	6	0.2%
P. K. Dick	1	1	0	0	4	6	0.2%
The Dark Is Rising	5	0	0	0	0	5	0.2%
Y. H. Lee	0	0	0	4	1	5	0.2%
N. Novik	0	0	0	1	4	5	0.2%
I. Calvino	1	3	1	0	0	5	0.2%
L. M. Bujold	0	1	0	1	3	5	0.2%
B. Chambers	0	0	0	3	1	4	0.1%
B. Sanderson	0	0	0	0	4	4	0.1%
M. Padmanabhan	0	1	1	1	1	4	0.1%
K. S. Robinson	3	0	0	1	0	4	0.1%
C. Miéville	0	0	2	2	0	4	0.1%
Harry Potter	3	0	0	0	0	3	0.1%
O. S. Card	2	0	0	0	1	3	0.1%
R. Shearman	0	1	2	0	0	3	0.1%
V. Singh	0	0	1	2	0	3	0.1%
S. Pinsker	0	0	0	1	2	3	0.1%
Other SF&F	14	70	62	76	95	317	10.8%
TOTAL	86	141	110	154	207	698	23.8%
PCT	15.6%	23.2%	16.3%	25.0%	42.8%	23.8%

2016 was the first year I read for the Hugo Awards, and you can see that that's clearly when sf&f becomes a bigger part of my reading diet. I was a bit surprised to see general sf&f also fares well in 2007-11, but now that I think about it, that makes sense—I bought a lot of stuff from used bookstores around the time I graduated college, and would have read much of it over the subsequent years. But these days it's over 40% of my reading, both Hugo books and books I've read because of them.

On the other hand, what's a bit surprising to me is to see how there are some authors I think of as favorites, and whom I am actively reading my way through... and yet I haven't read anything by them for some time! For example: Lem, Calvino, Shearman. I need to prioritize them more... but I suppose by the very nature of the idea, you can't prioritize everything!

I was not very surprised to see that Le Guin and Wells (other than Baum) topped my list. Thank grad school for Wells, and I've been fairly steady with my Le Guin.

Some other thoughts on specific authors:

• Lemony Snicket / Daniel Handler: In college, I read all the Series of Unfortunate Events books, which were big favorites in my family, but other than his (excellent) adult novel Adverbs, I haven't read anything by him since.
• M. T. Anderson is, a bit to my surprise, the only one of these authors that I read in all five four-year slices—the most consistently read. I have another five books by him on my "To be read" list, so there's a good chance this could continue to be the case.
• Stanislaw Lem: I didn't realize I hadn't read a book by him in so long—not since April 2016, and even that was just a tribute anthology with only a few stories actually by him. I have eight books by him on my "To be read" list.
• Lensmen: I have read all of this series and am unlikely to reread, to be honest, but I do have E. E. "Doc" Smith's four Skylark books, plus a concordance, on my list.
• Diane Duane: I really must finish the "Young Wizards" sequence someday, though I would probably need to reread all of the earlier books first.
• Doris Lessing is probably not best known as an sf author, but I read her five-book sf series Canopus in Argos: Archives after finishing college. I own her Children of Violence series but haven't gotten to it yet. (And I think my wife owns The Golden Notebook.)
• Philip K. Dick: The official number of six is slightly deceptive, as three of them were Library of America collections containing four or five novels—this could be sixteen if I counted those constituent novels separately, which would vault him into my top five!
• Italo Calvino is another one where I'm surprised how long it's been; I last read a book by him in August 2012! But I do have four on my list.
• Naomi Novik, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Brandon Sanderson are all authors whose series I plan on methodically working my way through series soon, so I anticipate seeing these numbers be a bit higher in another four years. Sanderson's Cosmere every nine months; I haven't firmed up my plans for Novik's Temeraire (three read, six to go) or Bujold's Vorkosigan (three read, fifteen to go) yet.

Overall, I'm pretty happy that I read more sf&f, and especially more contemporary sf&f, than I used to... but I wish I read some of my supposedly favorite authors more often! We'll see if that's rectified in the coming years as I continue to tackle my reading list.