Courtesy: clker.com, by OCAL
As all of you who contribute reviews for the challenge know, one of the mandatory pieces of information our Link Your Review form asks you to enter is genre. This provides us with a broad level of categorisation for the books listed in our database, and is the main method by which our contributors determine which reviews they will count and check for inclusion in their round-ups.
The genres (and we use this term a little loosely) have been, to date:
- General fiction (set after 1980)
- Historical fiction (set before 1980)
- Crime fiction (mystery, detective, thriller, suspense, true crime)
- Romance, erotica or romantic suspense
- Speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, paranormal)
- History, memoir or biography (non-fiction)
- Non-fiction – Other
- Classic
- Mixed/don’t know/prefer not to say
- Interview
- Poetry
Courtesy: clker.com, by OCAL
However, in the last couple of years, reviews have started appearing for some works that don’t fit easily under any of the above: these are published plays and screenplays. Consequently, we have created a new genre option, which you will now see in the dropdown list when you link your next review:
- Plays and screenplays
This won’t affect most of you, as published plays and screenplays aren’t exactly top of the pops here. However, they are part of our literature, and Aussie women do write them, so it is good to now be able to identify them. If you would like see what’s been reviewed to date:
- click/tap on the Books Reviewed link on our Menu Bar
- select Plays and Screenplays from the All Genres dropdown
- click/tap on Search
You might like to check one out!
Thanks so much for instigating this addition Sue. And for taking the category on board for rounding up!
Thanks Theresa. I’ll let you know if they become overwhelming!!
Wonderful news….Australian female playwrights! I have read some amazing plays by award winning ladies: M. Butler, P. Cornelius, M. Lee, L. Purcell and K. Feaver. Reading time: 2 hours tops…and such a delight to see how these writers develop a theme that reflects our times.
Oh. I was hoping it was going to be audiobook – I do realise that’s more format than genre, but still… (Not that I’m unhappy with plays/screenplays)
We are continuing to look at the categorisation Louise, and are currently looking at tidying up the Forms/Sub-genre area, which is where people put Audiobook now. I think that’s the best place for it because Audiobooks can be applied to every Genre – General fiction, Historical fiction, History etc, and so on.
That’s definitely beyond the scope of managing. We don’t separate ebooks from print, and this is really along those lines.
Yes, good point Theresa …
It’s all very complex isn’t it, and we do have a bit of a mix-up in our system because it’s grown a bit like Topsy from the original focus on novels and their genres.
I always think about how organised things could be with the benefit of hindsight!
Haha, know the feeling Theresa.
I was hoping it would be dual timeline, as I never know where to put them, and end up in both historical and general.
Hi Claire, I really love that people have an interest in this issue. I don’t think Dual Timeline is a “genre” and I think it is perfectly OK to put Historical and General in the Genre field. Mostly, we’d expect Reviews to have one Genre but they can have more than one Form/Sub-genre (eg Literary + Indigenous author). However, these truly dual timeline books do cross both genres so using two Genres in those circumstances is perfectly fine. I’ve done it myself. Does this make sense to you? (Then there was Storyland, which had multiple timelines – past, present and future!)
My historical round up would be pretty bare without duals!
Wonderful news….Australian female playwrights! I have read some amazing plays by award winning ladies: M. Butler, P. Cornelius, M. Lee, L. Purcell and K. Feaver. Reading time: 2 hours tops…and such a delight to see how these writers develop a theme that reflects our times.
This you n@ncy? If so you spurred me on to suggest this genre category.
Yes, this is me…I accidentally uploaded a comment twice!
Haha N@ncy … yes, I see the other one now, but this was the one that came through on my notifications, for some reason.
Yes, and add Anguli Ma: a gothic tale by Chi Vu to that list! https://www.darkmatterzine.com/anguli-ma/
I understand you adding this genre but what about adding more tags? You have separate tags for Feminism, Indigenous, LGBTQI, YA and more, and yet every other minority group is lumped under ‘diversity’. How about providing the option for disability, People of Colour, Women of Colour etc?
People with disabilities are usually overlooked, discounted and dismissed; it would be really good to have a website like this acknowledge writers with disabilities (like Jo Spurrier) and books that feature characters with disabilities (like Peeling the Onion and The Stars At Oktober Bend).
Hi Nalini. Nice to hear from you again. Thanks so much for this comment which raises a couple of important issues.
One is that the “Tags” list in the side-bar is not comprehensive. My understanding is that WordPress displays there the most used tags (up to a certain number). Disability has in fact been applied as a tag – you will find them if you type “Disability” into the Keyword field on our Book Search form on our Menu Bar. (This search is on our book review database)
Another is that, we have in fact paid a lot of attention to Disability over the years. If you type “Disability” into the Search field in the right sidebar, you will retrieve all the blog posts we have on the site dealing with Disability, most of them written (or organised) by our Disability round-up volunteer, Jessica White. You will find quite a lot of Guest Posts by writers with a disability there. (This search is on our blog posts)
Finally, if you click on Diversity in our Menu Bar, there is a drop down list, with one option being Women Writers with a Disability. Jo Spurrier is there. There is a form at the bottom of that list which you can use to add more names. (I’m not sure how recently this list has been updated.)
Does this help? If you have any more questions, or ideas for us, please reply here.
Glad to see the inclusion of plays and screenplays here.
Thanks Naomi!
Fantastic idea! There’s a lot of great work being done by wonderful AWWs at the moment, and I think audiences are more interested now than ever in reading plays as well as seeing them.
Thanks Sheree – and the ABC’s RN has a dedicated Stage Show program now which is great to see too, isn’t it.