The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I don't like Valentines Day. Too many libraries buy too many romance books.

That means women read more than men, so libraries cater to their wishes.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

That means women read more than men, so libraries cater to their wishes.

I wonder if a factor in this is that libraries stock fewer books that men want to read. Although I enjoy an occasional romance novel, I'd rather read science fiction and non-fiction books.

[DNSB]

Looking at the last set of statistics for fiction book sales I could find, 41% of all fiction sales are romance, 20% are crime/mystery, 20% are religious/inspirational, 17% is SF/F and 2% is horror. I was actually surprised by the last one since I though horror was a larger chunk of the market.

Going back to my library's last 7 days purchase of 108 books, 41% would be 44 books so pretty close to the actually purchase number of 42 books.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I wonder if a factor in this is that libraries stock fewer books that men want to read. Although I enjoy an occasional romance novel, I'd rather read science fiction and non-fiction books.

It's worth checking if your library has a way for you to ask for particular books to be purchased.

My library allows patrons to suggest two books a month for purchase. My latest suggestion was ordered and I'm now first in line for The Far Edges of the Known World: Life beyond the borders of ancient civilization.

[Quoth]

I prefer old Romance novels to Modern SF.
However I can't stand most contemporary Romance. Not interested in reading (or watching) detailed sex interaction. That's lust or porn or voyeurism, not Romance.
I prefer 19th C to 1960s Mystery/Detective to most modern ones and dislike ones full of gore & sex.

Baffles me why some sites lump horror & fantasy.


Most liked contemporary novels seem to be YA fantasy

[JSWolf]

I've noticed that a lot of the books I like or might like can also have a good wait list. So it's not just romance that gets read. That's the issue. While other books that work for more then just (overall) women get read, it's women that get catered to more often sometimes.

[j.p.s]

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
John McCarthy

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've noticed that a lot of the books I like or might like can also have a good wait list. So it's not just romance that gets read. That's the issue. While other books that work for more then just (overall) women get read, it's women that get catered to more often sometimes.

Jon, Jon, Jon... Are there remedial math courses available in your area? The libraries are not catering to women per se. They are catering to their customers and getting the books that their customers want to read.

I went back through the 108 new books (it gave me something to do while waiting for Sigil compiles to complete). The average wait time is slightly higher for the romance genre with mystery & SF/F coming in at 13 weeks. Horror is down to 10 weeks. Oddly, the authors you've heard of are likely to be the ones with the greater than 6 months times (Stephen King in horror for example).

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

it's women that get catered to more often sometimes.

Yowch. Just don't, please. Look at the world and say that "women get catered to more often sometimes"? Sometimes, as in rarely almost never? Which seems accurate to me.

[Renate]

I rarely put a hold on a library book because I'm usually unprepared when it does come in.
My "wish list" contains many books that I will never get without an actual hold.
There are many classic books with many copies that never have any available.
For instance, John Steinbeck.

[nana77]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Being poor and backward is not synonymous with not real, nor does it necessarily imply so.

There are plenty of poor and/or backward people and institutions in the world. Are they less real than rich and/or forward-looking ones? Of course not. And I didn't get the impression from your example that the author thinks so, either.

Nope (lol)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleason%27s_Gym

There is a book called White Collar Boxing: One Man's Journey from the Office to the Ring, in which John E. Oden describes Gleason's Gym in Chapter

[nana77]

Originally Posted by DNSB

At one time, I spent too much time dredging through the Internet looking for sourdough bread recipes. The best I can say is that many looked like they were copied from each other and a good chunk of the rest read as if they were written by someone who never actually made the recipe.

The major agreement from most of them plus friends who were into baking was that rising depended on your starter, room temperature (or fridge temperature if you were into cold rising and proofing) and on what one baker's blog described as using all their senses. Pretty much everything else seemed to be a matter of personal opinion. So pretty much what @Renate said.

In my defence, at least I never named my starter, it gave me something I enjoyed doing while almost everything was shutdown during COVID and it reinforced my belief that unlike cooking, baking is a science where exact measurements are important.

Science might be exact, but different brands' flour may have different characteristics, also the same brand can differ during the year, because the flour humidity changes, or because the harvest was from another place. That's why what's matters in there is also observation (times in fridge leavening can change just because the fridge is more packed, or less).
Chefs often relies to some variations when buying the products, but if you look at it from a farmer perspective, there are hundreds, if not thousand of variations when choosing thyme seeds, or mint, tomatoes, etcetera.
I've made a course for organic agriculture years ago, for precision the chef was doing the orders writing the plant's seeds names in latin.

[DNSB]

Hmmm... When I am cooking, I tend to measure seasonings by such accurate measurements as a pinch of salt, a dash of smoked paprika, a knob of butter, etc. A lot of the seasoning is done by nose based on experience.

When I am baking, I tend to go for the digital scale for more exact measurements. For sourdough bread, that is 500g bread flour using my usual brand, 150g active (bubbly) sourdough starter, 250g warm water (28°), 25g olive oil, 10g fine salt (I use sea salt but have used regular and kosher). This gives me a very repeatable result.

Admittedly, the last birthday cake I baked involved 2 eggs, 100g peanut butter, a chopped pear and 5g baking powder. The birthday puppy loved it.

[Sirtel]

Maybe consider taking the cooking discussion to Lounge?

[DNSB]

Perhaps I should add a rant about the number of recipes with inaccurate measurements.