Monthly Archives: December 2015

Time for the year-end stats post. Here’s my reading from 2015:

• Books read: 88. I was hoping to get up to 90 — but in the end, who cares? 88 is a great number.
• Audiobooks: 15. Up from the 10 I listened to last year. Using Scribd has made the difference here (although now they give you only one audiobook a month, so my number for next year may be only 12).
• eBooks: 12. Down from the 18 I read last year. I’m discovering that I definitely prefer print, although I continue to read ebooks for various uninteresting reasons. I just read them more slowly than I used to.
• From library: 14. All print books. Because of Scribd, I’ve stopped borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from the library.
• Fiction: 60. About the same percentage of the whole as last year.
• Nonfiction: 26
• Poetry: 2. Same as last year.
• Essay collections: 6
• Biography/autobiography: 13
• Theory/criticism: 4
• Short story collections: 1 (that’s it?)
• Mysteries: 7
• Graphic Novels: 2
• Books in translation: 9 (up quite a bit — good!)
• Books by writers of color: 30 (doubled what I did last year and reached more than 1/3 of total reading)

Gender breakdown:

• Women: 57
• Men: 27
• Collections with men and women: 4

Nationalities:

• Americans: 56 (a lower percentage than last year — but still high)
• British: 13
• French: 3
• Australian: 2
• Indonesian: 2
• One each by authors from Canada, Ethiopia, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, and Portugal.

Year of publication:

• 19th century: 1 (although I’m currently in the middle of Emma)
• First half of 20th century: 1 (really??)
• Second half of 20th century: 7
• 2000-2009: 8
• 2010-2015: 71

The number of recent releases has gone up steadily in recent years, for a number of reasons. One is that I’m reviewing more, so of course I read new releases for those reviews. I also participated in a Booker long-list read through this year, which added 13 new releases to the list. And I’m also currently reading new books for a Goodreads group that is doing an “alternative Tournament of Books” that will take place in January, in anticipation of the real one coming up in March (it’s been super fun — check it out if you want to). All of this reading has been great and I don’t regret it. I just wish I could also read older works as well. But until I figure out how to fit more reading in, that may not happen.

All in all, it was a good reading year, with lots of good books (more on that later!) and, in particular, lots of great bookish company, here on this blog, on Twitter, and on Goodreads. Thanks to everyone who reads here and chats with me in various places online. Happy new year!

It’s year-end wrap-up time, and I’ll be back, probably in early January, to write about my 2015 reading. But I thought I’d post on my writing as well, of which I have done a fair amount this year. I published 17 reviews in various places that aren’t this blog. That includes some pieces that I wrote in 2014, but I can’t remember what I wrote when, so I’ll just go with publication date. I’m happy with that number, but particularly with the fact that several of those pieces appeared in new-to-me publications, including Bookslut, Open Letters Monthly, and The Seattle Review of Books. I’m also happy that of those 17 pieces, 15 were reviews of books written by women and 7 were of books written by people of color, 6 of those by women of color. Vida won’t be counting anything I wrote, but my own personal Vida count looks pretty good. You can see my entire list of reviews here, but here are some of my favorites from the year:

• “Intoxicating and irresistible and maybe untrue”: a review of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir in The Seattle Review of Books.
• “Border Reports”: a review of Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City in Open Letters Monthly.
• A review of The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura in The Quarterly Conversation.
• A review of Negroland by Margo Jefferson in Bookslut.

As for writing on this blog? I managed to write something here almost every month! Ah, well. That’s good enough.