between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Books 2012: 35-36

35-36. Jack Campbell, The Lost Fleet: Dauntless and The Lost Fleet: Fearless. Titan Books, 2011.

So people have been telling me about Jack Campbell for about four years now. And I have been ignoring them, because the first four pages of Dauntless kept annoying the hell out of me. Well, dear friends, those first four pages are still annoying. Once past them, however, we quickly enter solid space opera territory. Campbell combines the resource-poor fleeing-fleet tension of Battlestar Galactica with the least objectionable bits of early David Weber, and does it while staying tightly focused on his viewpoint character, Captain John "Black Jack" Geary, a hero rescued from a century of sleep hibernation.

The prose is workmanlike but manages to be for the most part gracefully unobtrusive. The battle sequences are well-done, and I am intrigued to see what happens next, but these are airport books, entertaining in an undemanding fashion.

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So the book review gender ratio has started to be mentioned again this year, which prompts me to go back over my book posts. My ratio is sadly skewed by my nonfiction reading, most of which is required, most of which is by men, and I'm not minded to do the work of breaking down fiction vs. nonfiction numbers. But let's assumed that between a sixth and a third of what I read is nonfiction, and that no more than a third of that is by women.

Where the gender of the author of an ancient source is unknown or various, I am assuming it to be male.

ROUGH COUNT
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Total Jan 1, 2008 - March 8, 2012: 667
Total by men: 358
Total by women: 311
Percentage by women: 46.63%

Percentage adjusted for approximate nonfiction percentages: 54%

A rough calculation puts the percentage of fiction read and mentioned by women at 54% or higher. But like I said, it's very rough (I took a third off the men and a sixth off the women, and redid my percentages to get an idea of the fiction count. I have a feeling the raw numbers of fiction vs. fiction actually break out closer to 40% men, 60% women - but I'm not counting by category, it'll take too long.)

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Preliminary list of books what I am packing:

Gemma Files, Rope of Thorns
Penguin 1001 Nights Vol. 1
Marx, Capital (OWC abridged)
The last two Patrick O'Brien Aubrey & Maturin
David Anthony Durham, Acacia
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
JACT Greek Anthology
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception
Jack Campbell, Lost Fleet #3&4, and hopefully 5&6 if the bookshop has them tomorrow
Leah Bobet, Above
Greek dictionary, modern
Greek grammar, classical

...And even at that, I'm going to run out of space. Assorted ebooks, also, of course, and hopefully the handful of review copies will actually reach me care of the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies at Athens. (Anybody else wants to reach me during the next eight weeks, please also do it c/o the Institute. Contact details are on their website.)