Books in 2019!

[starfishstar]

How many books read in 2019?

 

101 books

How many fiction and nonfiction?

90 fiction, 11 nonfiction (with nonfiction including memoir, and also poetry since I’m not sure where else to put it!)

 
How many male authors, female authors or books written by both?

IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS:

67 books by women, 31 books by men, 1 book by a nonbinary author, 2 books by both female and male authors/editors

IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, EVEN IF I READ MULTIPLE OF THEIR BOOKS:

53 female authors, 30 male authors, 1 nonbinary author, 2 books that had multiple editors
 

How many books by people of color?

38 books (which in this case also means 38% of the total – a percentage that’s increasing each year, which is exactly the aim!)

Favorite books of 2019?

The hardest question! Let’s say, very roughly and not necessarily in order:

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
The Raven Cycle (as a whole) by Maggie Stiefvater
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Followed by:

Far from the Tree by Robin Benway
We Are the Perfect Girl by Ariel Kaplan
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous
On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) by Lev Rosen
Driving by Starlight by Anat Deracine
Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
A Properly Unhaunted Place by William Alexander
Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater

That’s, uh, a “top 20” list, if you count all four Raven Cycle books separately! I’m bad at narrowing down. It’s also about 3/4 YA…I guess I read a lot of YA this year.

Oldest book read?

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814), followed by Behind a Mask by Louisa May Alcott (1866). After that: Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (1923), Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1931), Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935), and etc. into the 1940s and 1950s so on.
 

Longest and shortest book titles?

longest: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous (or, if you count titles that are heading, colon, subheading: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg)

shortest: Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Longest books?

It looks like Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers and The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman are tied at 544 pages. Though, actually, I “read” both of those as audiobooks. So perhaps it’s more accurate to say Gaudy Night is longest at 15:39, compared to The View from the Cheap Seats at 15:30! Speaking of which… The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: even though it’s smaller in page numbers, the audiobook somehow is 18:05(!) And I did listen to that mostly as an audiobook. (That was a long 18 hours of my life.) So, in that case, that was the longest.

Any translated books?

Yes! For the first time, I made this a goal for the year. My aim was to read 12 books in translation, an average of one per month. I was perfectly on track the first half of the year, but then serious life stuff happened and I got derailed. So in the end, I only read 9 translated books. But, very pleasingly and mostly accidentally, they ended up being each from a different language: one each of Swedish, French, Turkish, Chinese, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish…and German. Yes, it seems absurd to have read something translated from German, when I speak German! But it was a bilingual edition of poetry, so I read it in both languages to make sure I was catching all the nuances.

…Next year’s goal is to have more of the languages be non-European ones.

 
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?

Ha ha ha ha ha, yeah, that was Maggie Stiefvater with NINE BOOKS. Because I read the Raven Cycle at the beginning of the year, then reread the Raven Cycle at the end of the year, and also read her new book Call Down the Hawk.

Other than that, the distant runners-up are various authors of whom I read two books each (Elizabeth Acevedo, S.K. Ali, Tana French, Dorothy L. Sayers, William Alexander, Seanan McGuire, Nancy Springer).

Any re-reads?

Yup, a few – often it’s because I’ll come across the audiobook of something I read years ago, and audiobook seems like a fun way to revisit it.

 
Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?

Hm, most of them were recommendations in one way or another. I keep a big list of recommended books that I add to whenever something new is mentioned (so the list never gets any shorter…) Some books are mentioned by friends, or over at Captain Awkward; especially in the case of new YA, often it’s from librarian spaces I frequent (great teen librarians on Twitter!)

Darius the Great Is Not Okay was thanks to grrlpup! The Enola Holmes series came on my radar mainly from sanguinity; the Watson and Holmes comic likewise came from Holmestice enthusiasm. Greensleeves was thanks to an RL friend. Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit was also the rec of an RL friend. My Name Is Red was a recommendation from someone I knew in Germany literally 12 or 13 years ago, and I’d always meant to get to it.

 
Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?

Angela Carter! She’s been recommended to me for ages. Also other authors I’d been meaning to finally read something by, like Pamuk and Saramago. Some classics like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and I Capture the Castle. And of course finally delving into the Raven Cycle. And I’m pleased I finally found a Le Guin book I really enjoyed! (It was a book of her nonfiction, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. I’ve read fantastic short stories of hers, but somehow still haven’t really gotten into her novels…and feel guilty about it. So I was really glad to read and be delighted by a book of her nonfiction.)

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Comments

[rachelindeed]

It's always so fun to hear about the books you've loved! My reading is pretty much entirely fics these days, and I'm perfectly happy with that, but I do enjoy getting some vicarious book joy from book bloggers like you and skygiants and oldshrewsburyian :)

The only books on your lists that I've read myself were Gaudy Night and Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke used to be a go-to poet for me back when I was writing Battlestar Galactica fic - he's a wonderful poet for doomed romance, or any character quietly facing impending loss. I tend to get lost in his longer poems (and sometimes his shorter ones too, as vagueness was in vogue), but there's always some stunning turn of phrase that speaks to me in there. And some of his short poems are old favorites, I used to read them back and forth out loud with my mother. Our favorite translator of his work is Stephen Mitchell, I've never come across any other versions I liked half as well. I have his "The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke" on my shelf, and it includes all the Sonnets to Orpheus as well as a lot of other pieces.

When it comes to YA books, an author who was dear to me in my teenager-hood was Elizabeth Marie Pope. She only wrote two novels (her 'real job' was teaching as an English professor), and I'd recommend them both if you're ever in the mood for light, bantering romance in fun historical settings. "The Perilous Gard" (1974) is her better-known novel, set in Elizabethan England and playing on the Tam Lin ballad/legend. The one I loved best growing up, though, was "The Sherwood Ring" (1958), in which chatty ghosts of the American Revolutionary era comfort a lonely girl with stories of their adventures and romances. Both of them have a wry sense of humor that shaped my sensibilities for certain :)

[starfishstar]

Hee, am I a book blogger? ;-) I've never felt official enough to be that, but thank you!

I'm realizing belatedly that I should have made clear in this post that some things aren't reflected on the year's favorites list only because they're rereads, so it felt unfair to give them a spot on my favorites list again – like Gaudy Night! Definite favorite!

And perhaps Rilke should have been on the favorites too... Goodness, Rilke is so thorny and difficult (especially to translate, oh my goodness) but it was fun to try to delve into some of his work again. I read him in college; more specifically, I did a translation theory project where I compared a few different translators of his work. (Though Mitchell wasn't one of the ones I looked at specifically; maybe I should look him up.) And the funny thing is that I too picked up Rilke again because of fic... I came across a Rilke quote in a Kate DiCamillo children's book, and incorporated the quote into a fic in Miss Fisher fandom, so I ended up looking at different Rilke translations again, in part to look for more that would relate to what I was writing, and decided while I was at it to read all of Sonnets to Orpheus, which I don't think I'd read in its entirety before.

And thank you for the rec! I'll look up Elizabeth Marie Pope.

[rabbitica]

Oh man, I just need to read the Raven Cycle already!

I am surprised that you liked Jack of Hearts so much... I thought the mystery/stalking thing built suspense and I wanted to know what was going to happen, but in terms of his advice column I thought it was too "perfect". Like it was obvious that it was being written by an adult saying all the right things, not an actual teenager.

[starfishstar]

Raven Cycle: doooo it! (I will have so many thoughts to discuss, while or after you read it, if you want.) Don't listen to the audiobook, though, at least when reading it the first time – I think that was part of why I wasn't able to get into the series the first time I tried. And also know that you might have to stick it out past the first book to really get into the series. The first book is perfectly good, but it didn't get me hooked like the rest of the series did.

Jack of Hearts: You're right, the advice is unmistakably written from an adult's perspective, not realistic as the words of a teen. That's a good question, why I liked it so much despite that. I think I was just so happy to see such a sex-positive book for teenagers. (Despite huge advances in other ways, YA has remained pretty prudish about actually depicting sex. It's something the librarians in Sweden complained about, when I did my research there – so much of the YA that's available to them is translated American books, and American books leave the sex out!)

YA has so many books about romance and falling in love, and so many books now about being gay and coming out, but the one thing most kids are probably really curious about, the sex, is almost always fade to black. So I appreciated how frank this book was, and that the character is gay, and likes sex, but doesn't want a relationship, and all of that is fine.

I also liked how the author straight-up called out straight women who fetishize gay men. As someone who spends a lot of time in fanfic circles, and has ended up writing slash despite initial hesitance for exactly that reason, it's something I think about a lot!

[rabbitica]

That makes sense! One book I appreciated that the author said she intentionally included sex in was "Our Own Private Universe" by Robin Talley (not sure if you've read it). But you're right that it's often very skimmed over or the chapter just ends. Haha yeah I bet the Swedes didn't appreciate that!

[starfishstar]

I do have Robin Talley on my want-to-read list, because you recommended her, but I still haven't gotten to her. Maybe having this rec of a specific book will help, and I'll look for Our Own Private Universe.

I've heard Jenn Bennett is also good for writing realistic YA romances that include sex, but I haven't read her.

[rabbitica]

I haven't read Jenn Bennett either, but give Robin Talley a try! I've read a couple of her other books too, and they were good.