Paul's comments (member since Oct 02, 2009)

Paul's comments from the Published Authors group.

Everyone always forgets Mid-Wales :)

OK, that's a laudable objective. I'll visit sometime today.

Hi Susan, I did read the blog before posting. Nowhere did I see any data. Nor did I see the actual list. I did read in a response to Moonrat's blog, that the list referred to was mainly non-fiction, and that in the corresponding fiction list, half the authors were women.

So I went and had a look for myself. The fiction list is below.

Fiction
The Scarecrow
Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

The Fate of Katherine Carr
Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Spooner
Pete Dexter (Grand Central)

Dark Places
Gillian Flynn (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Man in the Wooden Hat
Jane Gardam (Europa)

Ravens
George Dawes Green (Grand Central)

Tinkers
Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

The Believers
Zoë Heller (Harper)

The Vagrants
Yiyun Li (Random)

How to Sell
Clancy Martin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

New World Monkeys
Nancy Mauro (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Last War
Ana Menendez (Harper)

Nemesis
Jo Nesbø (Harper)

Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips (Pantheon)

The Cry of the Sloth
Sam Savage (Coffee House)

Drood
Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese (Knopf)

The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Sag Harbor
Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Once the Shore
Paul Yoon (Sarabande)

I make that 11 men to 9 women.

Personally, if it's a damn good story, I don't care who wrote it, except to mark their names for future reference (and purchase).

While I appreciate the anger this list has aroused, since it is an opinion of the top 10 books in terms of quality, and not apparently in terms of sales, I might point out, in the interests of fairness, that people like Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Patricia Highsmith, Karin Slaughter, J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer (to hop across a few genres there) seem to do as well or better than most of their male counterparts.

If you'd like a mere man to make his opinion heard, then, by all means, I'm happy to do so. Selection by gender is reprehensible, whichever way the bias is felt.

Selection by quality is a far harder thing to pin down, but I have no problems with any of the authors listed above. There are many more women authors I've read and enjoyed (McCaffery, LeGuin, Andre Norton, Mary Higgins etc.) There are many lauded male authors whose output I don't like. But that's my personal opinion.

As apparently, is the PW list. The opinion of an individual or a committee.

And there is always the remote chance that many of us might actually agree that their top 10 are the best books of 2009, irrespective of who wrote them.

I'll keep you posted :) Thanks, Shelagh!

I feel like a bit of a fraud posting here. I'm not published - yet. OK, not a fraud, just presumptuous. I currently have 3 full 1st drafts of novels waiting for me to edit and revise and polish. After Nano, I'll have four.

So, from December, I'll be spending 4 months editng, revising anfd polishing and - drum roll - submitting.

Thanks all for all the info I've got so far from your great posts. I hope, sometime in 2010, I'll be able to post, happy - "My book is coming out with XYZ on 99th September."

Till then, I'll keep learning from you all.

Many thanks!