Best books? Says who?

[Sandra Parshall]

The Publishers Weekly list of the "100 best books of 2009" includes shockingly few works by women. So what else is new? The Sisters in Crime response has been posted by SinC President Marcia Talley at http://sisters-in-crime-sinc.blogspot.com/.

Take a look and offer your own views on the topic.

[John McFetridge]

Yes, it would be a lot better if they called the list, "Our Favourite Books," instead of, "Best."

This attempt to make it seem objective is silly. This is art not science. We can give long explanations as to why we like something more than something else and sometimes we can even be convinced something is good by this kind of discussion but it's very rare.

[Jon Loomis]

Yes, it would be a lot better if they called the list, "Our Favourite Books," instead of, "Best."

+1.

[I. J. Parker]

Absolutely agree.

Of course, it all comes down to who the judges are. Does one trust their "judgment"? What experience do they bring to the process? What is their critical background? Are they known to be unbiased? (Perhaps at this point someone will ask how many of the judges were women. That might be slightly more relevant than asking how many women are on the list).
Surely PW, with it's background of critiquing huge numbers of new books every year can be trusted to have some qualifications.

[Dana King]

I was going to stay out of this, but IJ brings up a point I wish had been discussed in more detail during the Bouchercon panel referred to above.

So far the one comment here with which I wholeheartedly agree is John McFetridge's: they should have called it "Our Favourite Books." (Or even "favorite.") IJ's point is the key to the discussion. Who were the judges? I don't know and I'm not going to guess, but if women represented 50% or more of the panel--or even close to it--this is an entirely different discussion.

Discussions have been floating around the blogosphere for several weeks about the graphic and sometimes disgusting violence done to women in books, many of which are written by women. Some seem to excuse the authors by saying these are the books that sell. No one seems to have a good answer as to why they sell so well to women. (I'm not advocating censorship here, except possibly by the individual. I don't write stories like this, and won't. I don't knowingly read them, either.)

Too often discussions of this sort take on the attitude that the group in question is oppressed by The Man. What's the verdict here is most of the selectors were women? Will it be that women have been conditioned over the years to choose male writers? That's a whole different , and probably more valuable, discussion.

[Sandra Parshall]

I don't know why some women enjoy reading about women being mutilated and tortured, but there's no denying that women make up a big chunk of the market for that sort of book. If you write about serial killers, your victims will probably be women, and that aligns with reality. According to FBI statistics, most serial killers are men and most of them kill only women. (Gacy and Dahmer were exceptions.)

[Dan Coleman]

There you go.

[B.R.Stateham]

Boy! I have to sit back and admire the way Jon and John D can just pick a subject and create a mountain-goat butting heads brawl with just a few well chosen words!

Makes me all teary-eyed in admiration.

[I. J. Parker]

Love it! And yes, more power to them. Even though Jon is wrong on this occasion.

[Steve Mosby]

I think Jon is right on this occasion. If most people flipped a coin and got 10 heads in a row, I doubt they'd say "well, perhaps heads are just more prevalent this year".

The subjectivity of 'best' confuses the issue. You'd expect more women to turn up, simply by chance; it's massively improbable for them not to. So either there was a selection bias (of some kind) or else women didn't write as well as men this year. Does that last option really make any sense?

[I. J. Parker]

But this argument has nothing whatsoever to do with quality. Coins are all the same. Books are not.
And subjectivity isn't really the only issue. It exists. But objective judgment also exists. One hopes the judges know a good book when they read it, and one hopes their criteria are sufficiently high.

[John McFetridge]

I know I could never be on any kind of judging committee or jury for anything like this. By the time a book has passed through the agent/editor/publisher requirements almost all are of a certain quality. Especially these days when almost ever writer has been through a creative writing degree and most have an MA in creative writing. Pretty much any kind of objective criteria would be met by pretty much every book. All we're left with is subjective.

[Jon Loomis]

I think there's often a clear objective difference between mere technical competence (what the generic MFA ought to confer, at the very least) and anything like mastery and/or genuine invention. But it may be true that you have to have pretty broad experience as a reader to know the difference.