The Sword and Laser discussion

http://www.themarysue.com/goodreads-p...

The super short version is that in a Goodreads poll of 40,000 British citizens, 90% of the most-read books by men are written by men, and 90% of the most-read books by women are written by women.

This does not match my experience, although I'd have to do statistics on my Goodreads data to be sure. I think I probably read 70% male authors and 30% female authors. To be fair, that's mostly because my favorite genres are scifi and fantasy, still largely male dominated.

Thoughts?

I did a very quick survey of my own reading and I'm probably 70% women and 30% men. I've read a bunch of long mystery series by women, and quite a lot of fantasy/scifi series by women also, plus some romances all by women. I'm kind of surprised - I thought I'd read more male writers than that.

My count is 89% male and 11% female. The only females with more than one or two books on my list are Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Weis, and J. K. Rowling.
As far as I know it's not due to any conscious bias on my part but because the vast majority of my list is pre-1990 science fiction.

It's an interesting concept, but I feel the pollsters are trying to make more out of this than is worth. I'm not sure what the definition of "most-read" is, it seems to me that demographics of sales would be more instructive.

From my own experience, I've read more male authors than female. In part that is a function of interest and age. There were few female SF/F authors when I was young, and almost the entire back catalog had been written by men. But of contemporary authors then, I read plenty of McCaffrey along with the Niven. I met my wife while wearing a Pernese dragonrider costume at a convention, so I'm hardly hostile to female authors. And it seems that's what the poll intends to imply.

More recently I found a self-published author Kate Danley and happily plowed through her books. After that, I got on a historical bent and read a bunch of Dumas works, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo and the like. Now it's Alastair Reynolds. So that's two men to one woman, I suppose. But I'm not excluding female authors. The divide is not near as big as the poll makes it out to be.

According to my spreadsheet, I'm 69% men/31% women since June 2007. Usually my numbers go up a lot when I read some manga series--InuYasha and Fullmetal Alchemist are both written by women and are both long series.

I did a reread of the Dresden Files and I'm about to start a reread of Asimov's Foundation universe, so I'm getting a lot of men in a row.

It is something I pay attention, too, though, and I really want to try to get some more women into my reading list--I've got Mary Gentle and Kameron Hurley planned for my Asimov breaks these new few weeks.

Not read a huge amount this year but if I put to one side anthologies, graphic novels and books written by multiple authors I am almost exactly 50/50.

I have however noticed a bias in the past not so much in the books I have read but in my to read list - I think this is probably because male writers tend to get more reviews and buzz but not 100% sure.

Did amuse me in the Good Reads account of everything that Robert Galbraith was one of the most read (by women) "male" authors.

I do proactively try to read different voices (gender, sexual orientation, nationality etc) though not really surprised by the findings.

I'm not surprised, since we tend to stick to our gender roles, no matter how much we fight it or deny it.

As I look over the "real" books I've read this year (discounting graphic novels), most of them are written, co-written or co-edited by women. Last year it was the opposite. I think this reflects my reading habits generally throughout my life. I've probably read more men than women, but that's because SF/F is dominated by men.

What I can't figure out is why that article claims we find women authors "less substantial." I followed the links and don't see anyone else saying that, so it's probably the bias of the article's writer.

Edit:

10 by men
21 by women
3 by both

Ben wrote: "Did amuse me in the Good Reads account of everything that Robert Galbraith was one of the most read (by women) "male" authors."

Going back a few decades, "James Tiptree Jr." was actually Alice Sheldon. And, Andre Norton was the deliberately androgynous pen name for Alice Mary Norton.

I suspect some of the other genres to be more gender-bound, especially romance and techno-thrillers. The methodology of this poll is vague--did everyone list their top 50, or did GR take 20K men and pull out the 50 most common books? Or the most recent book?

Here in S&L, often in recommendation threads I notice that some people only seem to read or recommend male authors. (see this thread most recently for example)

My personal library is currently 57% male, 43% female. And I'm a female.

I couldn't find a link to the poll they are referencing anywhere, maybe they are talking about the post that was up during the recent voting on best of 2014? Neither this article nor the one it links are providing a link to the original results which makes it hard to evaluate the poll rather than the interpretation of the poll.

My overall status:
60% Female
38% Male
2% Multiple Authors

2014 only is also approximately a 60/40 split.

The stat doesn't seem to jive with my reading experience, though in Science Fiction and Fantasy, it can be skewed. As kvon pointed out above, some genres skew heavily one way or the other with respect to author gender...and some genres seem to attract certain genders preferentially (it seems), like romance...

Genre definitely plays a role, especially as pseudonyms were ignored. More women read romance than men, and romance tends to be written either by women or by men using female pseudonyms. If they grouped the data by genre, I doubt there would be much of a difference. I can't imagine men who read romance would bother seeking out romance novels written by men. I don't know anyone who has the slightest interest in the gender of the author.

Hmm, although perhaps the gender of the protagonist is also a factor because, sticking with romance as an example, I cannot think of any romance novels featuring male protagonists. Would they be classed as romance if they did? Would such a book appeal more to men or women?

To me, there are far more interesting areas related to the subject of gender and literature than trying to make a statement by linking the genders of readers with the genders of authors, which seems to me to be far more coincidental than the article makes out.

Also, the article suggests readers 'branch out and identify with more foreign points of view', as if reading a book by a different gender will be a dramatically different experience. Most of the time, I am not even aware of the gender of the author of the book I am reading, and I do not think anyone could successful tell the difference in a blind test.

I'm currently at 59% women, 41% men for 2014. I would have skewed much more heavily to men if I hadn't started reading all the Vaginal Fantasy picks though...

I am apparently reading more books by men them by women later. Thing is,I don't really pay much attention to who is writting the book as long as the plot gets to me...

I looked at my stats at the end of last year and I read almost exactly 50/50.

Looks like so far this year I've read approximately 64% books by male authors and 36% by female authors. Female authors is actually higher than I expected.

I'd be interested to know at what age people actually start paying attention to who wrote the book. Teens?

I definitely paid attention to who wrote the book when I was a teen because if I found one I liked, I could use the name to find more. I know I started chasing Tolkein and C S Lewis at around 12ish. I'm not sure about earlier than that. I remember knowing K A Applegate's name in grade school, but I only read one series by her.

I guess I was aware of the big 4 as a young'un, but I was about twelve when I discovered Niven and chased every book he wrote. Similar for McCaffrey, although only the Pern books were first tier for her. I read a lot of books by authors I didn't know, just selecting them out of the store based on blurb. That continued through my teen years.

These days I'll generally go by author, especially recommended ones.

People may find this story funny...the first SF book I read, at the age of 8, was Alexei Panshin's "Rite of Passage." His protagonist was a 14 year old spaceship-dwelling girl who had to do a month on a planet as part of, well, a rite of passage. I thought those teens were terribly advanced in age and wondered what life would be like when I finally reached such a mature time of my life.

I'm male.

I have 163 books on my primary to-read list at the moment.

The breakdown is 67/1/95 (m/m+f/f).

If I remove romantic fiction, which does skew heavily towards female writers, the breakdown becomes 67/1/73 (m/m+f/f).

I think I'm relatively unusual as a male that reads romance, but after removing that genre I'm fairly happy with that gender breakdown.

I loved the Pern series back in high school in the 80s. I read Shikasta too (although that was way over my head). male authors too: Asimov, Niven, Saberhagen, Haldeman. The librarians must've done a good job on the SF&F collection.

I think I've focused on the SF&F sub-genre and recommendations rather than gender of the author. This year I started getting back into military sci-fi and Bujold's Vorkosigan series has some of that sub-genre's characteristics.

About %11 of my read shelf is Female... Hopefully that will even out a bit as I explore more genres.

Rereading that article makes me wonder if they meant the popular books? For example, maybe the 10 most popular books among women are the ones that are 90% women? I could see then that you could have any mix of authors personally, but if the top ten most read were 50 Shades of Grey and Harry Potter, then the "most read books" by women all were written by women.

Caitlin wrote: "Rereading that article makes me wonder if they meant the popular books? For example, maybe the 10 most popular books among women are the ones that are 90% women? I could see then that you could hav..."

I suspect that you might be right, Caitlin.

to the OP,

This isn't my experience. I don't care what the author's gender is, and some pen-names make it hard to figure out in the first place.

If a story sounds interesting, I'll read it. Gender has little impact on my choices.

I suspect Caitlin is right on the money.

Thane wrote: "I'd be interested to know at what age people actually start paying attention to who wrote the book. Teens?"

I've always paid attention to it. I clearly recall having a discussion on comic books with one of my friends when we were about 10-11 years old and he was making fun of me for jumping around from book to book following specific writers and artists whereas he stuck with the characters.

I had a similar discussion recently with a friend who had been burned by her favorite actress a couple times in a row, and I said she should follow writers and directors instead.

I'm wondering, is everyone manually counting the gender distribution of the books they read or is there a tool that summarizes the stats for you?

The only time I even look to see who the author is (assuming I didn't get the book BECAUSE of the author) is if some gendered moment seems weird. I don't know of a way to explain the following without putting an unfair burden on the writer, but here's my best attempt at explanation. If I read a male or female character that seems to be either acting in a stereotypical way or completely alien to anyone I've even known, I check the author and try to guess gender based on the name and use that as an authenticity check.

The best example I can think of without sticking my foot too far up my mouth is a dating scene. If one of the two characters (in a hetero scene) seems strangely written, I check the author and try to figure out gender. If it's the same gender, then I figure perhaps this is that author's hangups or the way they would perhaps truly act. If it's opposite gender then perhaps they're yielding to stereotypes.

The only other think I can think of is the literary equivalent of male gaze or female gaze. Are the characters focused on what we wish they'd focus on or what the other gender would wish they'd focus on.

I don't count, I just sort of ignore gender as an influencing factor. Whether your UK LeGuin or Gene Wolfe, if your story is good, I'll read it. I'm not trying to artificially control the gender balance in my book selection.

Kenneth wrote: "I don't count, I just sort of ignore gender as an influencing factor. Whether your UK LeGuin or Gene Wolfe, if your story is good, I'll read it. I'm not trying to artificially control the gender ba..."

But this survey was attempting to look at subconscious bias, and not conscious decisions.

It complicates things that women authors often get classified as "romance writers" if there's even one relationship in the book. Kushiel's Dart was in the romance section of my bookstore and it definitely doesn't feel like the romance was the central part of the story. It feels more like a fantasy epic. And if people predominately avoid that genre because they believe it's defined by certain elements they avoid a lot of books by female authors that are more like thrillers/fantasy epics than romance novels but that got stuck there. One of the things I've learned from Vaginal Fantasy is that there's this whole world of amazing female protagonist driven stories that I just didn't know about because I was so fervent in avoiding the romance section of my bookstore. Which means that may lead to them reading less female authors by sheer random chance because a fantasy book by a woman may get shelved under romance versus under fantasy. Similarly for male writers with the shoe on the other foot, they may not get shelved under romance even if that's what they were writing.

With ambiguous genre books, they often get shelved in the section by which they think it can reach the highest target audience. If it's a Regency era mystery novel and the character has a crush, even if the focus is mystery, it gets shelved under romance. This is because they think women interested in the romance genre will be more interested in it, then those who are used crime noire pulp mystery fiction.

I think it's confusing and messy and there are a lot of confounding factors. So many confounding factors that it's hard to say anything concrete from this survey and from our personal experiences without getting more specific. E.g. What's the gender distribution of who people are reading within sci fi? What about in age groups? Are 15 year old girls reading more female authors? Are 15 year old boys? What about 60 year old men, who are they reading? If you predominately read thrillers or romance novels, is your gender distribution different? What about if you solely read non-genre fiction?

What about when you bring covers into the picture? Twilight was a symbol of an atypical cover for a female YA author to get. Some (small portion of) success of John Green's The Fault in our Stars was attributed to the fact that as a male YA author, he got a more "artistic cover". (Not saying he didn't earn a ton of success through his own hard work or merit. This is something he himself has talked about. YA covers are a contentious topic and Twilight's popularity has lead to female authors getting more "artistic covers".)Compare Kushiel's Dart and Gentlemen Bastards. Both fantasy series, compare the covers.

I don't know, I think this is a super fun question but I don't think the experimental design is addressing all the confounding factors properly and so this is more a "fun answer" than one that I really find interesting.

If women are predominately reading female writers and men are predominately reading male writers: why is that? I think that can lead us to more interesting answers and should be the question being asked. If for most people they say they don't care about gender and their gender ratios are still skewed, I'm curious as to why it's so skewed.

I'm with Kenneth. I don't even pay attention to who the author is unless it's someone who's work I already know. Gender never enters the equation for me as far as reading goes.

If anything, though, I read more women than men, mostly because I tend to veer towards the YA sections a lot, and more women tend to be writing those books(or at least it seems, judging by the ones I read).

I go by the book summary not by author but tend to like males authors more judging by my shelves.

On the flip side a friend's father refuses to read books by female authors. He says he doesn't like the style.

Not defending that for a second ... He's clearly being outrageously sexist, but I just wanted to add a datapoint to the discussion. In terms of personal preference in a relatively private area bigoted attitudes like that can play a much more significant part then in areas that you might have to justify to someone.

I guess I don't fit the survey data Anja, I am an outlier.

is it really a foregone conclusion that SF&F is male-dominated?

Here's a dissenting authorial voice on the fantasy side:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

And for good measure, here's one on Sci-Fi:

http://m.theatlantic.com/entertainmen...

Tangent: Historically, the big publishers have been the gate keeper's of cultural literacy--and the popular consensus is that has been male-dominated--but w/self-publishing that's no longer the case.

Anja wrote: "But this survey was attempting to look at subconscious bias, and not conscious decisions.

It complicates things that women authors often get classified as "romance writers" if there's even one relationship in the book. Kushiel's Dart was in the romance section of my bookstore and it definitely doesn't feel like the romance wa...

Even though I seem to be an anomaly(male who reads mostly female authors(by pure chance)) I'm curious how many great books I've missed out on due to my complete lack of interest in romance novels.

Also, as to why people read their own gender: Just a guess, but I would think a lot of people want to read something they can relate to and just assume that the more "like them" an author is, the more they can relate. I don't think that's necessarily accurate, but it's an offered answer that doesn't throw sexism in the mix.
Of course what you were saying about women authors being pigeonholed into romance probably plays a part, as does, in some cases, sexism.

Tommy wrote: "Anja wrote: "But this survey was attempting to look at subconscious bias, and not conscious decisions.

It complicates things that women authors often get classified as "romance writers" if there'..."

No, I totally see where you're going at with respect to Mary/Marty Sue/Power Fantasy/wish fulfillment books. You want the power fantasy to match up with what yours would be. A heterosexual female's power fantasy wouldn't be to get all the ladies. A heterosexual male's power fantasy wouldn't be having all the dudes fawning over them. With that, I can definitely understand the gender segregation between thrillers and romance because in some ways those genres have a lot of books that fall into the wish fulfillment category. It sucks when we miss out on books that don't because unless we read the greats in a genre, we don't understand all the promise of that genre. : (

I do also think that when it comes to more thoughtful literature, people don't really care who the protagonist is that much.

I guess my question is if the gender of the author doesn't change your mind about reading a book what are all the roadblocks on the way to you reaching these books that lead to people predominately reading their own gender? Associating wish fulfillment books with a genre is one theory. Classic Sci Fi having mostly "fathers" is another that I saw here. I'm wondering if there are others and if we can verify them. It'd be cool if there were open source projects dedicated to these analyses. : ) Maybe it could give us more information about getting people into books not in their usual comfort zone in the future.

If the end goal is reaching representative parity for writers of all gender groups, ignoring the gender of the author is not enough. A system biased toward male authors--which is what we have (male authors are more likely to get published, more likely to get seriously reviewed, etc.)--will result in a a reader who is "blind" to gender getting an unbalanced mix of the talent that's out there.

In a biased system, an "unbiased" member inherits the bias of said system.

Just thought I would throw some rough numbers out here.
Of the Hugo nominees for best novel between 1959 and 1990 only 13% were by female authors. Before that they just list winners and they were all male as have been all the nominees for the retro-Hugos so far.
In 1997 Inquest Magazine printed a list of "The one hundred science fiction, fantasy and horror books you must read before you die." Only 8 were by female authors. This is a pretty typical reading list of the time.
On the Sword and Laser bookshelf, of the 78 books we've read 16 (20%) were by women.
I guess my point is if you're primarily a reader of SF&F and you've been doing it a long time like me, you're most likely going to have way more books by males in your library than females.
As a side note, according to a survey that was attached to a podcast about 6 months ago, 80% of the respondents were male and 20% female, at least at the time I did it.

Phil wrote: "Just thought I would throw some rough numbers out here.
Of the Hugo nominees for best novel between 1959 and 1990 only 13% were by female authors. Before that they just list winners and they were a..."

Allow me to be the bearer of mildly good news.

In the most recent 5 years (2010-2014), 2/6, 4/5, 2/5, 2/5 and 2/5 of the Best Novel Hugo nominees were women. That's 46%. I think it likely that if we plotted a ten-year moving average since 1963 we'd get a rising fraction of women nominees.

***

There is a certain lag when it comes to 'one hundred must-read'-type lists, but I think one created in 2047 will be very different from the one in 1997 that was mentioned.

One reason men tend to predominate these all-time lists is that comparing the pool of female-authored fantasy versus male-authored fantasy is comparing a set of works that is some decades old to one that goes back roughly two centuries.

There were women fantasy authors equally as far back, but if they didn't achieve visibility in their own lifetimes then it's hard for them to become prominent now. I can’t think of many writers who didn’t get far in their own lifetimes and became very well-known later. (Melville, I suppose.) So you either make it to the twenty-year mark and you can then try your luck for two hundred, or you fade out of the public view rapidly and are not heard from again except as a curiosity.

The pool of male-authored works being considered for this list includes works that have survived for two hundred years because they were given oxygen in those first few crucial years of their lives. Of course these works are good quality works, and of course these are better known. They would not have made it so far without being quite good, and they have had longer to build and solidify mind share.

This is going to be not as one-sided as the infant mortality rate of female-authored works also falls and they start getting past those early hurdles more and more often.

This probably also has implications for race, as well. That's probably harder to control for, though.

Personally I don't think about the gender of the Author when choosing a book to read. Looking at my selves Men out way Women in the books I read. This doesn't deter me from selecting a female writer over a male one, if I find her writing to be interesting.

Trike wrote: "This probably also has implications for race, as well. That's probably harder to control for, though."

Race is going to be a little harder to tell from author names then gender, though you will sometimes have author pics in the back.

However, somewhat along the lines of the bookstore sections discussion above, some African-American SF/F authors' works are automatically placed in "urban fiction" or some kind of African-American lit, despite better categories for them. Unfortunately I can't remember off the top of my head an author whose SF/F books were in "urban fiction"; I think it was either Jemisin, Durham, or some other black author. So despite a fantasy book having nothing to do with African-American people besides the author's race, it was placed in an African-American section of a store or library. What the heck?

I find it really hard to believe most novels can make their way onto a bestseller list without a significant female readership, even if they're not the majority. There's Ian McEwan's infamous personal experiment where he concluded "Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

Yeah, it was anecdotal, but an online voluntary survey isn't really much more scientific. And more rigorous surveys support McEwan's observations. My own anecdotal experience, based on both the reading habits of my friends and associates, and library patrons at the reference desk, is that women overall read novels in much greater numbers than men overall. (I'm sure non-fiction breaks down differently.) Men might not be reading books written by women, but women are definitely reading books written by men.

Ruth wrote: "Hmm, although perhaps the gender of the protagonist is also a factor because, sticking with romance as an example, I cannot think of any romance novels featuring male protagonists."

A lot of modern romance novels have male and female co-protagonists. I suspect as the perceived audience has shifted from housewives reading escapist fantasies about idealized shipping tycoons, Highland lairds, and oil sheikhs to educated, professional women wanting to read a good, character-driven story about a clash of strong personalities eventually resolving into a mutually satisfying state of intimacy, it's become essential for romance authors to develop their male leads as much as their female leads.

Anja wrote: "What about when you bring covers into the picture?"

While it's difficult to quantify their effect, I'd be surprised if they didn't have one. There's a reason all the covers in a particular subgenre tend to have a similar look, and it's called marketing: "Did you like space opera A with a picture of a slightly dinged-up spaceship on the cover? Well, look, space opera B here has a similar-looking dinged-up spaceship on the cover!"

Apparently some male readers told Maureen Johnson they wished her books had "non-girly covers" so they could read them. She challenged her Twitter followers to make up new covers for popular books as if the author was the opposite sex and got some amusing results.

Joe Informatico wrote: "I find it really hard to believe most novels can make their way onto a bestseller list without a significant female readership, even if they're not the majority. There's Ian McEwan's infamous perso..."

If we're trading anecdotes - almost none of the women in my life read and almost all the men do. But that's neither here nor there - anecdotes lead to pseudoscientific beliefs.

But I can definitely understand the Cover issue. It's one of the things I love most about ebooks. No one has any idea what I'm reading (well if I post on Goodreads, then potentially lots of people do - but they're on the net, not sitting there judging me). And most of the time I don't give a crap. But sometimes I don't feel like explaining myself - like when I'm trapped next to someone on an airplane for many hours.

Joe Informatico wrote: "There's a reason all the covers in a particular subgenre tend to have a similar look, and it's called marketing: 'Did you like space opera A with a picture of a slightly dinged-up spaceship on the cover? Well, look, space opera B here has a similar-looking dinged-up spaceship on the cover!'"

Guilty as charged! The glint of battlecruisers bristling with cannon barrels always catches my eye. ; )

Hmm.. Most of the books I own were written by women. The books written by men are either history, fantasy, or classics.

Since I do enjoy reading more 'action type' historical fiction, a good portion of library books have male authors. Mainly the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell.

Joe Informatico wrote: "Ruth wrote: "Hmm, although perhaps the gender of the protagonist is also a factor because, sticking with romance as an example, I cannot think of any romance novels featuring male protagonists."

A lot of modern romance novels have male and female co-protagonists. I suspect as the perceived audience has shifted from housewives reading escapist fantasies about idealized shipping tycoons, Highland lairds, and oil sheikhs to educated, professional women wanting to read a good, character-driven story about a clash of strong personalities eventually resolving into a mutually satisfying state of intimacy, it's become essential for romance authors to develop their male leads as much as their female leads. "

Interesting. Apologies if I derail the thread a little, but could you give me examples?

This hasn't been my experience, but then, I don't read many romance novels. I'll read the odd one now and then, but I tend to prefer books a little further away from real life, and doing a literature degree limits my time for reading by choice.

Incidentally, if I go by the books I've read this year, my reading is predominantly male, though I did work my way through the Dresden books. Other years, it may be different.

Ruth wrote: "Joe Informatico wrote: "A lot of modern romance novels have male and female co-protagonists."Interesting. Apologies if I derail the thread a little, but could you give me examples?

OK, I'm currently absolutely tearing through Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories series which starts with Shades of Milk and Honey. It's historical fantasy with strong romance elements in the first book, and weaker romance elements in the increasingly action-packed series. Minor spoilers. In the first book, the heroine (view spoiler)[gets the guy. In the later books, she is still the point of view character, but they are a wonderful couple in team facing increasing peril. (hide spoiler)] In the Lady Julia series starting with Silent in the Grave, the books follow a similar path. (view spoiler)[After a first (and second, I can't remember) book courtship, the female main character and her husband are an investigation team (hide spoiler)] That series is historical mystery with strong romantic tendencies, stronger in the first book, weaker in the others.

A lot of romance/history/genre-flavor-that-best-suits-you series have a female main character in the first book who meets a mysterious and/or aggravating eligible man. The first book tends to cover their courtship and worldbuilding. Then they marry between books and are a husband and wife crimefighting/magicweaving/spelunking/Cthulhupunching/whathaveyou team in the rest of the series, although the point of view tends to stay with the woman because they are written by women with women in mind (not that men are not welcome to enjoy them also). I prefer a genre blend of this type to straight-up romance, which tends to have pretty predictable plots.

Hmmm, maybe it is wrong of me, but I tend to view romance novels in the most classic girl meets boy in current setting sense. If it has fantasy elements, I think of it as fantasy. Historical is iffy to me, as in, sometimes it seems like romance, but other times it seems like something else. The crux for me is if the romance is the dominating factor. If it isn't, I don't see it as romance. I mostly put romance in the 'chick lit' category, rightly or wrongly, which, for the record, I do not see as a bad thing, but I guess I expect female protagonists in a modern setting. Marian Keyes is an author who springs to mind.

(btw, Joanna those series' sound really good. I shall add them to my ever increasing mental list of books to look out for and eventually, when the time is right, read)