I (very crudely) track gender and race, leaving the field empty if I can't find anything definitive (and indeed was chastened to discover I had made entirely incorrect assumptions about Tobias Buckell, which was the point I started being more careful). I keep a mental tally of trans status and queernesstude. I don't seem to care particularly about disability in fiction I consume unless it's wrong, in which case it gets my back up.
The effect of this is to encourage me to ask friends for recommendations; to read well outside my comfort zone and discover lots of new favourites; and to begin to put together a piecemeal idea of the canons and cultures that aren't Greco-Roman or (my flavours of) Christian. Which in turn means that I look at the world differently and I look at the inside of my head differently; I know that if I'm not paying attention I read books mostly by white men, and conscious rejection of continuing to immerse myself in worldviews largely defined by them is a great relief, because fundamentally however well they mean that isn't escapism for me.
And then, of course, I come across someone like Max Gladstone, who writes brown disabled trans female queers whose identities are mostly irrelevant apart from the ways in which they highlight that they are damn good at their jobs, and he's some white dude, and I'm sufficiently astonished that I once again consider setting up a blog called "this [book] didn't annoy me", because... yeah. Yeah.
no subject
The effect of this is to encourage me to ask friends for recommendations; to read well outside my comfort zone and discover lots of new favourites; and to begin to put together a piecemeal idea of the canons and cultures that aren't Greco-Roman or (my flavours of) Christian. Which in turn means that I look at the world differently and I look at the inside of my head differently; I know that if I'm not paying attention I read books mostly by white men, and conscious rejection of continuing to immerse myself in worldviews largely defined by them is a great relief, because fundamentally however well they mean that isn't escapism for me.
And then, of course, I come across someone like Max Gladstone, who writes brown disabled trans female queers whose identities are mostly irrelevant apart from the ways in which they highlight that they are damn good at their jobs, and he's some white dude, and I'm sufficiently astonished that I once again consider setting up a blog called "this [book] didn't annoy me", because... yeah. Yeah.