Books in 2016!
Jan. 4th, 2017 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarAs mentioned....I read 107 books in the calendar year that just ended. Let's do a little nerding out about them!
BOOKS MEME
How many books read in 2016?
107 books
How many fiction and nonfiction?
91 fiction, 16 nonfiction
How many male authors, female authors or books written by both?
IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS: 71 books by women, 35 books by men, 1 collection of stories by both
IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, NO MATTER HOW MANY OF THEIR BOOKS I READ: 57 female authors, 29 male authors, 1 collection of stories by both
How many books by people of color?
21 books (21/107 = ~20% – definitely still want to keep focusing on and improving this, but this is indeed up from last year (which was 14%))
Favorite books of 2016?
How can I answer this impossible question! Oh, I love all the books! Here’s an attempt at picking just a top ten (not precisely in any order):
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro (YA)
On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (YA)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (adult)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (nonfiction)
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (nonfiction)
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (nonfiction)
Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead (middle grade)
Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo (middle grade)
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older (YA)
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (graphic novel/short stories)
For more detail, see my round-ups of my reading from each quarter of the year!
Oldest book read?
Beowulf, by an enormous margin! (“c. 700–1000 AD”)
Followed, though at great distance, by Sense and Sensibility (1811), Frankenstein (1818), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and lots of 1920s fun (Woolf, Forster, Sayers, Christie, etc.)
Longest and shortest book titles?
longest: The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente
shortest: Ash by Malinda Lo
Longest books?
Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman – 608 pages
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore – 608 pages
Independent People by Halldór Laxness – 512 pages
Any translated books?
8 books: 3 from Icelandic, 1 from Swedish, 1 from Dutch, 1 from French into English, 1 from French into German, 1 from Old English into modern English
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?
To my surprise and somewhat chagrin (only because I thought I’d already done my big burst of “okay, need to see why everyone’s so into this author so I’ll read a whole bunch of his books in a row”) it turns out it’s Neil Gaiman, with 4 books.
Followed by several authors with 3 books: Laurie R. King (finally caught up on the latest in the Mary Russell series, which I’d grown pretty tired of, but I liked the most recent one okay), Katie Alender (surprisingly fun YA light-horror series (and I don’t even like horror!)), Douglas Adams (completing my reading of literally all his books ever), Agatha Christie (because of the online_bookclub!)
Any re-reads?
Hardly any, because I was so focused on reading as much as possible off my "recommended" list, which by definition are books I haven't read yet! Only 6 or so were rereads, and usually for the reason of "Oh, hey, I see there's an audiobook of this, that seems like a fun way to revisit something I already know." Also, I reread The Little Prince in German instead of English, because, why not, if it's translated anyway? :-)
Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
Pretty much all of them – as above, I've been working my way hard through my "recommended books" list, which is drawn from suggestions of all sorts (friends' recs, authors I've heard good things about, books that piqued my interest while reading book catalogs for work, etc.) So while not all of them are literally a recommendation from one specific person, many of them are!
Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?
Ditto again – a ton of these books have been on my "want to read" list for ages, and lately I’ve been really attacking that list!
But for example, I was really psyched to find E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel randomly in the (quite small) library where I work, since I’d had trouble tracking that down. And working in a school library where I have access to an inter-library loan system has been amazing, allowing me to find less readily available books I’d long been looking for, like So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ. And I finally read Independent People by Halldór Laxness this year – famous (in my mind) as the book an Icelandic friend of mine said "you have to read to understand Icelandic people." So this year, my third time in Iceland, I made a point of reading it at last. :-)
~ . ~ . ~
Also, my colleague at the library came across Book Riot's "read harder" challenge and pointed it out to me (because I need more reasons to read more, right?) This is actually meant to be next year's challenge (and you're meant to set out to deliberately read a book for each category, not just see afterwards if you happened to hit all of them by chance). But I was curious how the reading I'd already done in 2016 would measure up, so I started looking at the 24 categories...and ended up kinda accidentally writing out my extensive "answers" for each category. So here are my 2016 "read harder" results. Pretty fun, and a neat way to expand one's reading in lots of different ways.
"READ HARDER" CHALLENGE:
1. Read a book about sports – a bit of a stretch, but let’s say: The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
2. Read a debut novel – Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, If You Could by Mine by Sara Farizan, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, Ash by Malinda Lo, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat… apparently, I could go on!
3. Read a book about books – Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
4. Read a book set in Central or South America, written by a Central or South American author – Stretching this to include the Caribbean: Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
5. Read a book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative – Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
6. Read an all-ages comic – Giant Days by John Allison & Lissa Treiman, Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
7. Read a book published between 1900 and 1950 – Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Independent People by Halldór Laxness, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
8. Read a travel memoir – Couchsurfing im Iran by Stephan Orth (in German)
9. Read a book you’ve read before – Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (read it twice this year!)
10. Read a book that is set within 100 miles of your location – having to guess a bit here, but I think it’s plausible that the fictional town in Ask the Passengers by A. S. King might fall within my radius; the stories in Through the Woods by Emily Carroll might be within 100 miles, too
11. Read a book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location – leaving aside fantasy and SF books set in other worlds and realities (because that would just get silly), we have… Senegal: So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ; Iran: If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Couchsurfing im Iran by Stephan Orth; Sri Lanka: Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai; Nigeria: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Greece: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood; somewhere in the Sahara: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry; Japan: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; Australia: On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty; Mars(!): The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
12. Read a fantasy novel – HA HA HA, what a challenge! Oh, wait, I mean: The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older, Sabriel by Garth Nix, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Wishing Day by Lauren Myracle, The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset, The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne Valente, Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, Ash by Malinda Lo, Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
13. Read a nonfiction book about technology – okay, this is reeeally a stretch, but here I’m going to claim both Being Mortal by Atul Gawande and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan – they’re not about technology, per se, but they’re both about how modern society has moved us out of touch with healthier, more balanced ways of living, so maybe that kind of counts?
14. Read a book about war – These books are all set during wars in different ways: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney); also Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez is about life under a brutal dictatorship
15. Read a YA or middle grade novel by an author who identifies as LGBTQ+ – The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki, Ash by Malinda Lo
16. Read a book that as been banned or frequently challenged in your country – I never really know what counts as “frequently” banned; probably To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, Woman Hollering Creek, Speak, and surely some of the LGBTQ+ themed books
17. Read a classic by an author of color – Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; also, sorry if it seems hasty, but I’m going to go right ahead and call both Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine contemporary classics
18. Read a superhero comic with a female lead – Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
19. Read a book in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey – Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older; also, I’m not sure whether Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would count (since it does have religious belief as a core component of the story) or perhaps even Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu (though it’s more a standard fairy tale quest than a spiritual journey)
20. Read an LGBTQ+ romance novel – Ask the Passengers by A. S. King, The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Ash by Malinda Lo, Affinity by Sarah Waters, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Sarah Waters only if you can count unhappy endings as being “romance”!), and maybe also Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai (though it’s more LGBTQ coming-of-age than directly about romance)
21. Read a book published by a micropress – I’m not sure if there’s one precise definition of a micropress (aside from very small), and I’m sure these don’t actually fit the definition, but I’m going to count Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books) and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press) because these publishers are non-profit, and they sound radical and awesome and promote social change
22. Read a collection of stories by a woman – Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
23. Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love – okay, this is the only one out of all 24 categories that I can’t wiggle my way into. I didn’t read ANY collections of poetry this year (except Claudia Rankine’s prose poetry/nonfiction collection), and I definitely didn’t read any in translation. Next year perhaps.
24. Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color – Beloved by Toni Morrison, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, The First Part Last by Angela Johnson, Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (though that’s nonfiction), Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
.
BOOKS MEME
How many books read in 2016?
107 books
How many fiction and nonfiction?
91 fiction, 16 nonfiction
How many male authors, female authors or books written by both?
IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS: 71 books by women, 35 books by men, 1 collection of stories by both
IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, NO MATTER HOW MANY OF THEIR BOOKS I READ: 57 female authors, 29 male authors, 1 collection of stories by both
How many books by people of color?
21 books (21/107 = ~20% – definitely still want to keep focusing on and improving this, but this is indeed up from last year (which was 14%))
Favorite books of 2016?
How can I answer this impossible question! Oh, I love all the books! Here’s an attempt at picking just a top ten (not precisely in any order):
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro (YA)
On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (YA)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (adult)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (nonfiction)
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (nonfiction)
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (nonfiction)
Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead (middle grade)
Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo (middle grade)
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older (YA)
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (graphic novel/short stories)
For more detail, see my round-ups of my reading from each quarter of the year!
Oldest book read?
Beowulf, by an enormous margin! (“c. 700–1000 AD”)
Followed, though at great distance, by Sense and Sensibility (1811), Frankenstein (1818), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and lots of 1920s fun (Woolf, Forster, Sayers, Christie, etc.)
Longest and shortest book titles?
longest: The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente
shortest: Ash by Malinda Lo
Longest books?
Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman – 608 pages
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore – 608 pages
Independent People by Halldór Laxness – 512 pages
Any translated books?
8 books: 3 from Icelandic, 1 from Swedish, 1 from Dutch, 1 from French into English, 1 from French into German, 1 from Old English into modern English
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?
To my surprise and somewhat chagrin (only because I thought I’d already done my big burst of “okay, need to see why everyone’s so into this author so I’ll read a whole bunch of his books in a row”) it turns out it’s Neil Gaiman, with 4 books.
Followed by several authors with 3 books: Laurie R. King (finally caught up on the latest in the Mary Russell series, which I’d grown pretty tired of, but I liked the most recent one okay), Katie Alender (surprisingly fun YA light-horror series (and I don’t even like horror!)), Douglas Adams (completing my reading of literally all his books ever), Agatha Christie (because of the online_bookclub!)
Any re-reads?
Hardly any, because I was so focused on reading as much as possible off my "recommended" list, which by definition are books I haven't read yet! Only 6 or so were rereads, and usually for the reason of "Oh, hey, I see there's an audiobook of this, that seems like a fun way to revisit something I already know." Also, I reread The Little Prince in German instead of English, because, why not, if it's translated anyway? :-)
Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
Pretty much all of them – as above, I've been working my way hard through my "recommended books" list, which is drawn from suggestions of all sorts (friends' recs, authors I've heard good things about, books that piqued my interest while reading book catalogs for work, etc.) So while not all of them are literally a recommendation from one specific person, many of them are!
Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?
Ditto again – a ton of these books have been on my "want to read" list for ages, and lately I’ve been really attacking that list!
But for example, I was really psyched to find E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel randomly in the (quite small) library where I work, since I’d had trouble tracking that down. And working in a school library where I have access to an inter-library loan system has been amazing, allowing me to find less readily available books I’d long been looking for, like So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ. And I finally read Independent People by Halldór Laxness this year – famous (in my mind) as the book an Icelandic friend of mine said "you have to read to understand Icelandic people." So this year, my third time in Iceland, I made a point of reading it at last. :-)
~ . ~ . ~
Also, my colleague at the library came across Book Riot's "read harder" challenge and pointed it out to me (because I need more reasons to read more, right?) This is actually meant to be next year's challenge (and you're meant to set out to deliberately read a book for each category, not just see afterwards if you happened to hit all of them by chance). But I was curious how the reading I'd already done in 2016 would measure up, so I started looking at the 24 categories...and ended up kinda accidentally writing out my extensive "answers" for each category. So here are my 2016 "read harder" results. Pretty fun, and a neat way to expand one's reading in lots of different ways.
"READ HARDER" CHALLENGE:
1. Read a book about sports – a bit of a stretch, but let’s say: The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
2. Read a debut novel – Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, If You Could by Mine by Sara Farizan, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, Ash by Malinda Lo, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat… apparently, I could go on!
3. Read a book about books – Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
4. Read a book set in Central or South America, written by a Central or South American author – Stretching this to include the Caribbean: Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
5. Read a book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative – Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
6. Read an all-ages comic – Giant Days by John Allison & Lissa Treiman, Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
7. Read a book published between 1900 and 1950 – Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Independent People by Halldór Laxness, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
8. Read a travel memoir – Couchsurfing im Iran by Stephan Orth (in German)
9. Read a book you’ve read before – Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (read it twice this year!)
10. Read a book that is set within 100 miles of your location – having to guess a bit here, but I think it’s plausible that the fictional town in Ask the Passengers by A. S. King might fall within my radius; the stories in Through the Woods by Emily Carroll might be within 100 miles, too
11. Read a book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location – leaving aside fantasy and SF books set in other worlds and realities (because that would just get silly), we have… Senegal: So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ; Iran: If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Couchsurfing im Iran by Stephan Orth; Sri Lanka: Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai; Nigeria: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Greece: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood; somewhere in the Sahara: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry; Japan: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; Australia: On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty; Mars(!): The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
12. Read a fantasy novel – HA HA HA, what a challenge! Oh, wait, I mean: The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older, Sabriel by Garth Nix, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Wishing Day by Lauren Myracle, The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset, The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne Valente, Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, Ash by Malinda Lo, Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
13. Read a nonfiction book about technology – okay, this is reeeally a stretch, but here I’m going to claim both Being Mortal by Atul Gawande and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan – they’re not about technology, per se, but they’re both about how modern society has moved us out of touch with healthier, more balanced ways of living, so maybe that kind of counts?
14. Read a book about war – These books are all set during wars in different ways: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney); also Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez is about life under a brutal dictatorship
15. Read a YA or middle grade novel by an author who identifies as LGBTQ+ – The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki, Ash by Malinda Lo
16. Read a book that as been banned or frequently challenged in your country – I never really know what counts as “frequently” banned; probably To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, Woman Hollering Creek, Speak, and surely some of the LGBTQ+ themed books
17. Read a classic by an author of color – Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; also, sorry if it seems hasty, but I’m going to go right ahead and call both Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine contemporary classics
18. Read a superhero comic with a female lead – Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
19. Read a book in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey – Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older; also, I’m not sure whether Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would count (since it does have religious belief as a core component of the story) or perhaps even Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu (though it’s more a standard fairy tale quest than a spiritual journey)
20. Read an LGBTQ+ romance novel – Ask the Passengers by A. S. King, The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, Ash by Malinda Lo, Affinity by Sarah Waters, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Sarah Waters only if you can count unhappy endings as being “romance”!), and maybe also Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai (though it’s more LGBTQ coming-of-age than directly about romance)
21. Read a book published by a micropress – I’m not sure if there’s one precise definition of a micropress (aside from very small), and I’m sure these don’t actually fit the definition, but I’m going to count Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books) and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press) because these publishers are non-profit, and they sound radical and awesome and promote social change
22. Read a collection of stories by a woman – Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
23. Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love – okay, this is the only one out of all 24 categories that I can’t wiggle my way into. I didn’t read ANY collections of poetry this year (except Claudia Rankine’s prose poetry/nonfiction collection), and I definitely didn’t read any in translation. Next year perhaps.
24. Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color – Beloved by Toni Morrison, Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, The First Part Last by Angela Johnson, Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (though that’s nonfiction), Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-07 05:38 am (UTC)I went and checked out the Book Riot site and the Read Harder Challenge sounds like a really good idea. I have over a hundred books I have bought over the last four years, mostly from charity shops because you never know what you're going to find there and I've picked up some really interesting things.
I have designated this the year that I finally get stuck into reading them. So I'll probably wait till about halfway through this year, sit down and see how many of them I can slot into the Read Harder list, and then work on filling the empty slots by the end of the year. It'll be like having two challenges in one :)
no subject
Date: 2017-01-08 05:05 pm (UTC)I have much the same situation – I have sooo many books I've bought from our local Friends of the Library Book Sale specifically because they're books I want to/need to/should read, but then I come across things in the library or wherever else that I also want to/need to/should read, so I never get to the ones I own, because they feel less urgent, since I own them so they're always there...
I'd love to hear how your two-in-one reading challenge goes!