Two more Best of 2009 lists and associated problems

Read two more year-end posts.  The first, an expansion of an earlier list posted over at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, is...well...

I guess the word for it is "defensive."

While I can understand to some extent why he'd be defensive in his opening comments, with each passing year in his Hotties posts, he has come across to me as taking criticism a bit too much to heart in all the wrong ways. Yes, I'm not one who's gone easy on him in the past, but nothing personal was ever meant and yet...all the references to "wankers" is a bit much, I suppose, in a yearly post that purportedly is designed to celebrate what he enjoys most about the year that is now passing.  For someone who seems to bristle at times when chided by a few vocal critics, he sure seems to be inviting accusations of hypocrisy in his comments about Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  Perhaps a laissez-faire approach would have been more wise than preemptively attacking the tastes of those (and in this case, my own would be involved, since I thought it was one of the better 2009 novels that I read this year) who did find more enjoyment out of it.  Even ignoring this, it is rather bemusing to see all those "I", "you", "your", "my," and "mine" comments peppered throughout his post.  Certainly not a post that shies away from trumpeting the reviewer's personal tastes and views on the industry, perhaps.

Compared to the sometimes-bombastic post by the apparent "most influential SFF book-reviewing blogger on the web" (I wonder where one gets one's influence rated, so I can know who ranks ahead of whom these days), the Wertzone Awards for Best SF&F Novels in 2009 is much more informative and certainly less centered around the presumed virtues and deficiencies of the poster.  Although my tastes don't align all that much with Adam's (nor did they with Pat's, as I don't believe I had more than a single book from both lists make my 25 Favorite Fictions list to be posted Thursday, despite having read around a half-dozen each of the books the two laud in their posts), I have found his list to be much more useful because a rationale is given and the focus centers around the stories themselves and not so much around the person who read/reviewed the books.  Certainly some of the unread books will be (re)considered, based on the original reviews and the summations given in the Awards post.

However, reading the comments to Adam's post raised an interesting problem that I've noticed in quite a few online lists (my own isn't totally excluded from this, I'll admit, as 4 out of my 25 Favorite Fictions are by female authors, with only two being SF stories, with several others referenced in other categories).  Oftentimes, female writers appear to be underrepresented in such year-end posts, especially when said posts are written by males.  While I'm not a bean counter at heart, I have noticed that since I began keeping closer tabs on what I read, that the percentage of stories written by or edited by women have steadily increased to near a quarter of my overall reads.  Of course, if I were to count anthologies edited by males but containing female writers, the number would increase significantly (it seems several of my favorite short fiction writers are women, which might make for something interesting in the coming months in regards to my reading), but the fact remains that if the majority of readers are women and there are a growing number of female writers, then why are female writers being underrepresented on several year-end lists?

Perhaps it's much ado about nothing and the sobering rays of the morning sun will make me reconsider my points in a few hours.  But maybe others here have things to share in regards to list-making and the related issues I raised above?