Syllabus and stats

[deborah]

I've updated the online reading list for my Fantasy and Science Fiction class at the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College.

Some random statistics might be interesting. I kept track of them for my own purposes, and then I had too much fun with pivot tables, so I'm sharing some of my results. Keep in mind these are often guesses on my part, because I only needed rough numbers, and I could be wrong.

• 42 books assigned to be read by all the students
• 33 white authors, 9 authors of color, 2 authors who are native or indigenous
• 2 disabled authors, but I only noted that where it's relevant for the work; there may well be more
• 1 Muslim and 2 Jewish authors, but same as above vis-à-vis relevance

The total number of protagonists adds up to more than 42 because some books have more than one, and most of these are done from memory so I could be remembering some wrong, but I have, for main or point-of-view characters:

• 21 white
• 15 characters of color, though one of them is in a pretty racist story
• 2 native or indigenous
• 4 without human protagonists
• 1 Muslim, 2 Jewish
• 2 disabled protagonists
• Out of 24 books where sexuality is a thing, 21 protagonists exhibit opposite sex sexuality / straight-appearing, and 3 are queer. Two books had queer secondary characters. All main characters are presumed cisgender; one secondary character is trans. Bisexuality appears multiple times.

Other random stats:

• The earliest book is from 1953, and the most recent is from 2016; the mean year of publication is 1998.
• The most frequent publisher is Harper (in various incarnations) with 7 books, followed by 4 books from Atheneum. I'm rather pleased by the two books from, ahem, Tu Books; since Tu's entire list is only 25 books (including several sequels), having 2/42 books on my list from them is a sign of how quickly they've become important. Other publishers that interested me were the one each from Jump at the Sun, First Second, and Marvel.
• There are 4 graphic novels.
• There are 7 books that have movie adaptations, counting one where the movie's not yet in production. (I only counted theater versions, though the picture books often have short straight-to-video recordings.)
• The book for the youngest readers contains only five words. The books for oldest readers are still clearly YA; there's books with a reasonable crossover audience but nothing that would be marketed as "New Adult." The arguable exception is the sole superhero comic; the marketing of those is complicated.

I'm not going to do a breakdown of fantasy vs. science fiction, because that's one of the points of the class.