Book Selection Criteria

[bibliogramma]

Like most people who like to read books, I have a "book list" of books that I want to read. And a pile of "books waiting to be read" somewhere in my house.

Normally, the way that I add books to my book list is rather haphazard. Someone I trust recommends a book, or I'm wandering around the Internetz and I run across an interesting book review, or I read one in one of the very few magazines I actually subscribe to, or I read an anthology and find a new writer whose work intrigues me, or I discover through any one of many ways that an author I'm already familiar with has put out a new book. I even check footnotes and bibliographies of books I read to find info about other books in the same or a related field that might be of interest.

This would be how I've managed to create a book list that is currently 26 pages long, in Courier 9 point, with half-inch top and bottom margins. We don't really want to contemplate how many book are on that list, but it's probably over 1,000.

Which is why it's probably a very foolish thing for me to consider embarking on a new reading project... but I'm going to, anyway. I've been making up lists of the winners and short-listed nominees of the Tiptree, Gaylactic Spectrum, Carl Brandon Society and Lambda Science Fiction and Fantasy awards, with an eye to reading the ones that I have not already read that seem interesting to me. I'm not going to be obsessive about this and try to read every single winner or short-listed entry for each award, but I do think I should read more of the books that have been identified as significant works according to the selection criteria of the four organisations involved.

Obviously, I've already read at least some of the books that have been honoured, but I want to read more.