Further inquiry regarding female taste in sci-fi & fantasy

The sub-plot of "Boy and girl meet, hate each other at first, but grow to love each other through shared hardship". Just don't go there! It makes me put down the book and not pick it up again.

Suddenly moving a character to a different place without first mentioning him/her going there or describing the place.

I have no problems with sex in a story, as long at it fits naturally into the story and is kept to what is strictly relevant to the story.
 
Am not very fond of chick-lit and detest the title of the genre to boot. Always have visions of fuzzy yellow chickens sitting in neat rows reading books by Marian Keyes or Sophie Kinsella. Am not much of a fan of romance novels either though I have to admit that the covers are fascinating the way train wrecks are.

I like the long convoluted Asian epics and I really love the classic British whodunits. I also read ancient history and myth and cookbooks.
 
I loved the Bridget Jones series personally. I also read quite a few of the Sophie Kinsella books. If I'm not reading Sci-Fi or fantasy, I really enjoy Joanne Harris.

For Sci-Fi/Fantasy I grew up with Robin McKinley, Pamela Kaufman and others who tended to place a teenaged female into the main character spot.. Sydney J. van Scyoc is one who is no longer writing, but who had quite a few strong woman protagonists.

I am finding that I gravitate to post-apocalyptic themes or harder Sci-Fi (old Arthur C. Clarke, etc.) than I used to. I used to be able to read Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffery, but couldn't read more than a page or two these days.
 
Just picked up a book by JV Jones, who's a female author, and found the book very hard to read. She writes, what I find to be, quite shocking violence and sadism. Although it was necessary for the story line, I nearly didn't stick with the book. Also, she seems to be overly fond of all derivations of the word 'urine'; it was smelling, trickling down peoples' legs, freezing in the cold, and staining clothes all over the place.

That's one of my BIG peeves; overusage of a word. I have a tendency to use '...' a lot when typing, and it bugs me when I notice it, but I hate authors doing similar. When I was a kid and I read my mum's mills and boon books, Penny Jordans' heroines were always having 'frissons'... four or five times in a book! USE A THESAURUS, AUTHORS!!!! (note non-intentional use of ..., sorry)
 
There seems to be a general dislike of chick-lit. Hooray! I don't like terms such as chick-lit, chick-flick or any term with chick in it. As far as I'm concerned, a chick is a baby bird, not a human female. :)

I read widely, fiction and non-fiction. In non-fiction I enjoy science, technology, politics, history, social sciences and the occasional biography and memoir. I love Bill Bryson's books - his travel and language books. At the moment I'm doing a quite a lot of reading about psychopathy.

Fiction - thrillers, crime, horror, SFF, novels, some of the classics.

A few favourite non-SFF fiction authors:

Kathy Reichs
Ian Rankin
John Connolly (though his books veer into the Fantasy genre)
Isla Dewar
Joanna Trollope
Elizabeth Berg
Jane Smiley
Jane Hamilton
Peter Robinson
Faye Kellerman
Dennis Lehane
Alice Sebold
Patricia Cornwell (I have a love/hate relationship with her books)
Ruth Rendell
Lynda la Plante
PD James
Stieg Larsson
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
Arnaldur Indriðason
 
SF and fantasy are equal favourites for me, and I prefer them to anything else. Having said that, I do enjoy good thrillers, mysteries, and crime fiction (Rankin is my fave at the moment), with the (very) occasional dose of chicklit to lighten the mix. (Bridget Jones' Diary made me laugh and laugh - and I didn't mind the movie, either). I have to say there are certain times of the month when I just like to read a bit of pap, so I have a bit of Nora Roberts squirreled away for emergencies, like a chocolate stash.

Basically if its well written, good characters, good story, I'll read it and enjoy it. I like humour (love Austen) but am not so keen of lashings of sentiment (parts of Jane Eyre make me sick, and I can only really read romance novels if the moon is right). Can't deal with horror on the whole - I get too disturbed. Or it just makes me sick and I don't see the point.

But if I had to choose - it would be SFF.
 
Daisy-Boo~ Patricia Cornwell (I have a love/hate relationship with her books)
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Have you ever read Portrait Of a Killer?

It's about her theory concerning the identity of Jack the Ripper and how and why the murders occurred. She took a real pounding from Ripper buffs over some of her assertions, but validity aside I thought it was a great book.
 
I've been reading science fiction and fantasy since I was a child, and my father stuffed The Hobbit into my little hands. He also had me reading the classics, and while I did love William Saroyan's The Human Comedy, nothing stuck with me so much as sff stories.

Other than Jane Austen, I'm not huge of romantic stories. Not really big on any other form of fiction either, except perhaps historical fiction. I mainly read non-fiction books on scientific topics. Even inside the genres I like, I'm a very picky reader. If I don't like something, I tend not to finish reading it.
 
Well, I've never been a typical female, so it's hard to say what anybody might learn from my favorites list.

I read mostly sf and mysteries, and in the last couple of years a lot of what I call "crime fiction" or "cop fiction"--not exactly mysteries, because you generally know who did it but they spend the whole book catching them.

Here's what I can think of off the top of my head, in not-quite particular order:

Robert Heinlein
Spider Robinson
David Weber
Lois McMaster Bujold
Piers Anthony
Orson Scott Card
Michael Crichton
Jeffrey Deaver
John Grisham
John Irving
Pat Conroy
Ann Rule
Connie Willis
Michael Palmer
John D. MacDonald
Dorothy Gilman
Robert Asprin
Clifford Simak (funny, how far down the list considering username here)
Ray Bradbury
Stephen King
Harry Harrison
Steven Saylor
C.J. Cherryh
Douglas Adams

These are the people whose books I have in droves--I'm sure there are a few more that escape my attention at the moment. I notice that only four women made the list. But I have been known to read romance novels, from time to time--Danielle Steel actually wrote at least one very good historical sort of romance, The Ring, and I do love Gone With The Wind and, oddly, love even more the much-maligned sequel, Scarlett. But as someone else said earlier here, put a book in my hand and I will read it. Heck, put a cereal box in my hand and I will read it. :)
 
Four women? I make it five, (Bujold, Rule, Willis, Gilman and Cherryh).

Unless you know something about one of them that I don't...:confused::eek::D

Good list, though...:)
 
Ha, you're right! I believe I was thinking four and then added Cherryh to the list and forgot to count her. She might be a bit displeased at the sudden transformation.
 
I like sf more than f. I just started a discussion exploring why I read more male authors than female authors. I like WWII espionage novels, historical fiction, biographies, anything by Daphne DuMaurier, especially Glass Blowers, which is historical fiction. Because I review SF, tough, I rarely have the opportunity to others. On the other hand, those I have said yes to, that were offered for review that were outside of my genre have tended toward novels set in different cultures and historical fiction. And I won't touch a romance novel with a ten-foot pole, but found a SF romance author I like, so I make exceptions for her. I like her sense of humor and her protags. I don't read mysteries, but it's mostly because I'm afraid I'd like them too much. ;)
 
There are very few things I can't read - horror, non-fiction, and straight 'novel' type fiction, especially those that have The Novel in the title.

Anything else with humor, monsters, magic, dragons, wars, battles, assassins, history, time travel, romance, alternate history, mysteries, thieves, wizards and whatnot. Anything, basically, that is not a part of my normal life (or the normal life of some person I don't care about) pretty much anything that is well-written and enjoyable but different and not about to give me nightmares :)
 
Agree absolutely, dwndrgn.

To paraphrase a quote I once read (no idea who said it, though):

I don't want to read about nasty boring people leading nasty boring lives in nasty boring places - I get all that in my everyday nasty boring life...
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I don't know who is reading the chick lit. Someone must be reading it. I've seen 2 people on the tube reading things with purple covers and sillhouettes of shoes on the front with script titles like 'something shopping' or 'secret something'. But they were both boys.

You see the books in the shops. I'll believe that in the 60s and 70s (and before/after?) zillions read Mills & Boone. But chick lit now? Who has witnessed anyone reading it?
 
I've seen people reading books with chick lit covers - all women, as far as I can remember.

When I was in my teens I sometimes read Harlequin romances and other books in that vein. They made for entertaining reading for a period of time. In my teens and 20s I also read some Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz and Jacqueline Susann. That's about it for me and chick lit.
 
Confession: I'm not really sure what chick-lit is...*actually* is.

Never read romance. Never read Bridget Jones Diary. Couldn't get through page one of The Bridges Of Madison County it was so poorly written - but I'd have to say the same of the DaVinci code.

So what's chick-lit again?

Genres geared to women?? Like...romance??? What?

I love books by Jane Austen and George Elliot, Edith Wharton and Toni Morrison: literature written by women but not chick-lit.

I read some current literature/fiction, lots of SF & fantasy (about which I am very picky), mysteries, non-fiction (history, biography, current events, science) and historical novels. I don't like horror very much, but I like atmospheric ghost stories a great deal (The Innocents). Don't like most current best sellers, in fact, but there are terrific books that still come out.

My two favorite historical novelists are Patrick O'Brien (Aubrey-Maturin series) and Dorothy Dunnett (Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo), both, alas, deceased. I've also enjoyed Bernard Cornwell's books and C S Forresters Horatio Hornblower novels, alhtough they are not as well written as either O'Brien's or Dunnett's. (I am very fond of tall ship tales in general as well as stories set during the Napoleonic wars).

I read a fair number of the usual English lit suspects: Dickens and Twain especially but also Thackery, Fieldin and 20th century authors like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Green, even Margaret Atwood. I also read a fair amount of poetry, from Shakespeare and Donne to Wallace Stevens and W H Auden.

I love the old mysteries of Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey and Nagaio Marsh. I like more recent ones by P.D. James, Lawrence Block and Dennis Lehane. I adore the comic heist novels of Donald Westlake. Another author dear to my heart is John Mortimer, most familier from his Rumpole Of The Baily books but author of other fine novels as well.

I don't think there is ONE specific thing in a book that would turn me off except rampant prejudice or bad writing, anything that was preposterous, silly, out of place or poorly thought out - all examples of poor writing IMO. And there would be more than one instance of that in any given book. Sex per se, violence per se, strangeness per se = not an issue except where its (again) extraneous to the story which is (again) further evidence of poor writing.

I'm mainly intereted in "good", well written books, of almost any genre.

Here are some of my favorite SF & F authors, male and female:

Iain M Banks
Sheri Tepper (selective here, the ones I like I LOVE, some are too polemic)
Vernor Vinge
Ursula K LeGuin
Roger Zelazny
Ray Bradbury
Alfred Bester
Dan Simmons
Samuel R Delaney
Orson Scott Card
John Harrison
Mary Doria Russell
Michael Moorcock (Dancers At The End Of Time, mainly, not the S&S)
John Harrison
Octavia Butler
Theodore Sturgeon
George Effinger
Frederick Pohl
Phillip K Dick
Robert Silverberg
Brian Aldiss
Walter Tevis

Hmm..there's a lot of classic SF authors in there...

And there are many other authors who have moved and/or inspired me with perhaps a single book who are not on the list.

And lest you think I'm too artsy fartsy I have several Star Trek books I will never part with including Ishmael, Strangers From The Sky and the Entropy Effect.

But no chick-lit.

OK, I did read The Joy Luck Club, and I did cry, but my mother was dying. That's as close as I've ever gotten to chick-lit.
 
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