Books in 2020!
Jan. 16th, 2021 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarHow many books read in 2020?
97 books
...Yes, this is the first time since (*checks records*) 2015 that I read fewer than 100 books in a year. I don’t even know exactly why this year had a drop-off; yes, 2020 was hard, but for me 2019 was way, way, way harder. I think partly it may be that I’ve been working on being less obsessive about, well, everything, so that seems to have managed to spill over into not being quite as absurd about my MUST READ ALL THESE BOOKS impulses. That’s my plan for 2021, in fact – to try to hardly be obsessive about it at all. :-)
(BTW, it was ADORABLE looking back at my end-of-year books post from 2015 and seeing that I was impressed with myself for having read a whole 79 books that year, and that I thought reading 6–7 books a month was a lot. Ha ha ha, awww. *laughs indulgently at my naïve baby self who had not yet become obsessive about expanding and tracking my reading*)
How many fiction and nonfiction?
79 fiction, 18 nonfiction
How many male authors, female authors or books written by both?
IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS:
65 books by women, 26 books by men, 2 books by non-binary authors, 4 books co-written by authors of multiple genders
IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, EVEN IF I READ MULTIPLE OF THEIR BOOKS:
50 female authors, 21 male authors, 2 non-binary authors, 4 mixed-gender authorial teams
How many books by people of color?
41 books (42%) (a percentage that’s been increasing each year, which is exactly the aim)
Favorite books of 2020?
Oh whyyyyy must you make me choose? (And yes, I realize I’m basically talking to myself here, because no one forces me to do this.) Because I’m ridiculous and can’t narrow down things I love, here’s a top, uh, 14. Followed by an additional 14. Because I can’t not.
TOP FAVORITES:
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Land by Mildred D. Taylor
• The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (short stories)
• Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
• Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit (nonfiction)
• When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed (graphic memoir)
• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown (nonfiction)
• How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers by Toni Bernhard (nonfiction)
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (memoir)
• We the Animals by Justin Torres
• Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (nonfiction)
• Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
• Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram
MORE FAVORITES:
• If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth
• A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell (nonfiction)
• What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence edited by Michele Filgate (nonfiction)
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (graphic novel)
• The Secret Place by Tana French
• Harriet the Invincible by Ursula Vernon
• A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi
• The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
• Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
• How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon
• Almost American Girl by Robin Ha (graphic memoir)
• Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds
Oldest book read?
I suppose that would be Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, published in 1923. I didn’t realize until now that I hadn’t read anything properly old this year! (I don’t quite count the 1920s as old – not in the sense of, like, Jane Austen classic literature old. Even though 1923 is now almost a full century ago. Yikes!)
Although…there’s a case to be made that In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times, collected and edited by David Stromberg, is actually a bit older than the Sayers books. Because, although the book itself was published in 2018, it consists of modern-day translations of Yiddish-language stories “from the early and middle twentieth century.”
In fact, by that reckoning, perhaps the actual oldest book is Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith – published in 1998, but consisting of Emily Dickinson’s letters and writings starting from about 1850.
Longest and shortest book titles?
longest title:
Technically? Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life by Gretchen Rubin. …But it always feels like a sort of cheating to include subtitles in this calculation, because some authors go truly overboard on a lengthy, baroque subtitle! (As above.) So if we count just title titles, not subtitles, then it’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.
shortest title:
Bob by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead.
Longest books?
Looks like top honor here goes to The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (641 pages). Followed by Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore (608 pages).
Any translated books?
Yes! Last year I set a goal of reading 12 books in translation, one per month. But then Life Happened and that got derailed – though I did manage to read 9 translated books, from 9 different languages. This year’s goal was for more of the translated books to be from non-European languages. I somewhat succeeded! I read 5 books in translation: 1 from Yiddish, 1 from Japanese, 1 from Hebrew, 1 from Polish …and 1 book translated into Icelandic from English. (No, I can’t read a whole novel in Icelandic. But I can listen to an audiobook of a book I already know well, and be able to keep track of where I am in the narrative!)
I haaaaate how hard it is to come across translated books in the U.S., unless I actively seek them out. In Germany, translated works were part of the norm, especially books from our neighbors – French, Turkish, the Scandinavian languages, and so on. (And of course tons of British and American books as well.) Whereas the U.S. is such a behemoth, and so much more culturally separated from the rest of the world, and also we already speak the world’s dominant language so we don’t have to go looking for anything else… Yeah.
So, I will keep seeking out translated books, and from a wider variety of languages. And, perhaps, finally tackle a whole pile of German-language books I haven’t gotten to yet. (Some of which were going-away presents that friends gave me when I left Berlin…6 years ago. Whoops.) And, yes, I am going to try to read Harry Potter in Yiddish, or at least a bit of it. Harry Potter in Scots, too. :D
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?
Dorothy L. Sayers (7 books), because I was rereading the Peter Wimsey series along with the As My Wimsey Takes Me podcast; but the podcasters got completely derailed by the pandemic and are only now ramping back up to continue, so I haven’t read any more Sayers since June.
That’s followed by Mildred D. Taylor (3 books) – it would have been a lot more, except that this also got derailed by the pandemic! I want to read Taylor’s entire Logan family saga (i.e., the Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry series), but I want to read them in series-internal chronological order, and there’s only one library in my public library network that holds Song of the Trees – and that library is a small one that’s been closed since the start of the pandemic, with no change to that status in sight. So this project has been on hold for a bit.
Also Ursula Vernon (3 books), as I'm reading my way through her delightful Hamster Princess series.
Authors by whom I read 2 books this year: Seanan McGuire, Jason Reynolds, Tana French, Patrick Ness, Jerry Craft, Kate DiCamillo, Kristin Cashore, Nancy Springer
Any re-reads?
Graceling and Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, Seraphina by Rachel Hartman – rereading some favorites. All of the Sayers books were re-reads, in order to read along with the podcasters who are re-reading them! Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg are books I’d read at some point in my childhood, but long enough ago that I’d retained only a vague sense of them.
I read Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House at the start of the year…and then also listened to her read the audiobook of it.
And, if half-understanding an audiobook of a book I know translated into a language I barely speak counts as “re-reading,” then Harry Potter og viskusteininn by J.K. Rowling, translated from English into Icelandic by Helga Haraldsdóttir.
Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
As always, pretty much all of them! I keep a massive list of all the recommendations I pick up from friends, librarians, etc., and then am forever trying to keep up with that list.
Some “recommendations” came straight from the various American Library Association awards lists; many more came from teen librarians I follow on Twitter. Other recs came from friends, colleagues, people in my writers’ group, even my therapist! The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis was recommended by the amazing children’s author Kate DiCamillo, so I had to read it. Similarly, I re-read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg because Rachel Hartman (an author I adore and admire) spoke so highly of it! Several books (Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, Shirley and Jamila Save Their Summer by Gillian Goerz, the Enola Holmes books) were recced in one way or another by various Holmestice participants.
Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?
Oh yes. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, first and foremost. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang was a title that came up a lot when I was working in a high school, so I’ve been meaning to read it ever since. The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker gets recced a lot over at Captain Awkward, so it’s been on my list for years. Louise Erdrich, who I’ve been meaning to read forever. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. (I finally found a novel of Le Guin’s that I enjoyed! I’ve lamented here before that I’ve been staggered by her short fiction, and enjoyed her nonfiction, but I’ve struggled to connect with her novels. But this one engaged me, hurrah.)
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no subject
Date: 2021-01-16 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-18 07:36 pm (UTC)I HIGHLY recommend Octavia E. Butler, specifically Parable of the Sower, if you feel like you can handle reading science fiction that's ended up uncomfortably close to our present day, politically and socially speaking. (MORE than understandable if not! I've found myself okay with reading this sort of stuff during this past year, even though in the past I often wouldn't have been able to handle it.) That book is just so prescient, it blew my mind. And still blows my mind every time I think about it. I also highly, highly recommend the podcast about it, created by musicians and activists Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Octavia's Parables: https://anchor.fm/oparables They go deep, deep, deep into the relevance of Butler's writing to our present day.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-16 05:17 pm (UTC)What Erdrich did you read?
The Lathe of Heaven is fascinating if you know Portland-the-city; most all of the places she talks about are real, and some of her made-up features of her alternative-Portlands exist very close-to-described in our current Portland (which would have been future-Portland from her perspective).
no subject
Date: 2021-01-18 07:41 pm (UTC)I was actually thinking of you and grrlpup and other Portland folks when I read The Lathe of Heaven! Especially since I read Darius the Great Deserves Better around the same time, so there was a lot of Portland in my life just then.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-17 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-18 07:43 pm (UTC)