My personal reading preferences are mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. I'm not a big fan of traditional fantasy or "high" fantasy -- more of paranormal and urban fantasy.
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Originally Posted by crich70
In truth I forgot about historical fiction. My bad. I left literary off because it's so hard to define (IMO).
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In my own reading statistics, I usually find that historical fiction I read also fits one of the other genres -- particularly historical mystery (Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters), historical fantasy (Deryni novels by Katherine Kurtz) and occasionally historical romance (Neville Family by Liz Carlyle).
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Originally Posted by Catlady
What age range do science fiction and fantasy appeal to? It feels like a majority of people here are heavy readers of those genres.
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One reason why you find a strong correlation between people who read eBooks and those who read SF/F might be Baen books. Baen was the first publisher to actively promote electronic books.
Personally, I started reading all the SF I could get my hands on when I was about 13. My mother also read SF, so I never had to beg too hard to buy a new book! As an elder, I tend to have exhausted the classic authors (Robert Heinlein, Ben Bova, H G Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Arthur C Clarke, A E van Vogt, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Andre Norton, Zenna Henderson, Hal Clement, Anne McCaffrey, etc.) Along the way, I diverged into other genres, particularly mysteries -- classic mysteries and even cozies -- so there are quite a few contemporary SF authors that I have not read such as China Mieville and Iain M Banks. But recently, I've accumulated a large number of books from Baen that I'm reading through, particularly David Weber and David Drake.
Fantasy is relatively new to me as well. I have never read
Lord of the Rings or
The Wheel of Time, for example. But when I picked up
Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon, I was hooked. Shortly after finishing that trilogy, I quickly read Brandon Sanderson's
Mistborn trilogy and
Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells.