starfishstar

I read...114 BOOKS THIS YEAR. One hundred and fourteen of them. That is a thing I did. I'm proud and terrified. But let's be honest: mostly proud. ;-) Let me tell you about them!

BOOKS MEME

How many books read in 2017?
114 books!!!

How many fiction and nonfiction?
97 fiction
17 nonfiction

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

IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS:
74 books by women, 39 books by men, 1 collection of both

IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, EVEN IF I READ MULTIPLE OF THEIR BOOKS:
67 women, 36 men, 1 collection of both

How many books by people of color?
31 books (27% of total) – still not amazing, but something I’m actively working on, and once again an improvement over last year.

Favorite books of 2017?

Can I just complain for a second about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to pick just a few favorites, when I do this much reading (and liking) of books?? It’s really, really impossible, is what it is.

So this is an incomplete sampling, and based on gut feeling – books that make me want to grin or swoon or clutch them to my chest when I think back on them, rather than maybe what’s “best” by some objective measure. (Whatever that would even mean.)

Here are 10 favorites:

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid   (adult)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker   (adult)
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas   (YA)
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli   (YA)
Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy (YA)
Uprooted by Naomi Novik   (YA)
Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón   (adult)
Forgive Me if I’ve Told You This Before by Karelia Stetz-Waters (YA)
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (nonfiction)
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle   (adult)

…and a few more because I can:

the “Hereville” graphic novels by Barry Deutsch   (children’s)
Radio Silence by Alice Oseman   (YA)
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire   (YA/adult)
The Power by Naomi Alderman   (adult)
The Best Man by Richard Peck   (middle grade)
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi   (adult)
The Real Boy by Anne Ursu   (middle grade)

For more detail, see my round-ups of my reading from each quarter of the year! (tagged “quarterly books”)

Oldest book read?
Wuthering Heights (1847). (Not a patch on last year’s Beowulf!)

Longest and shortest book titles?

longest: Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

shortest: Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Longest books?
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (533 pages – though that probably shouldn’t count, since the story is told half in pictures)
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (512 pages)
Crosstalk by Connie Willis (512 pages)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (488 pages)

Any translated books?
5 books: 2 from Swedish, 1 from Icelandic, 1 from Russian, 1 from French

I really do need to read more in translation; utter Anglocentrism is not where I want to be. I just have such a long list of “really should have read these by now” books that I’m trying to work my way through right now, and those tend to be from the modern English-language canon. Once I’ve tackled that, though, my next push should be to read lots more translated books!

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

Soooo, because I was dead-set on reading as many new authors as possible, there are very few from whom I read multiple books this year. Thus it turns out my answer to this question is: Barry Deutsch, because I did read all three of his (quick, meant-for-children, and totally wonderful) “Hereville” graphic novels: How Mirka Got Her Sword, How Mirka Met a Meteorite, and How Mirka Caught a Fish. They’re a delightful series about a spunky Orthodox Jewish girl getting up to adventures.

The runners-up would be any author I read two books by (turns out two counts as “a lot” in this year of pushing forward to new authors!) They are: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, Diana Wynne Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Susan Cooper, Oliver Sacks, Pema Chödrön, Carrie Fisher.

Any re-reads?

Wow, nope. None. I was so focused on reading as many as possible of the “books I haven’t gotten to yet” that I didn’t do any rereading. Maybe Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi counts, only in the sense that I’d seen the film years ago, so there were episodes that were still familiar now as I read the book.

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

Uh…nearly all of them?

Tons of these books I picked up because they were relevant to my then-current work in a high school library; I was especially proud when the recommendations came from my students themselves!

Additionally, over a dozen were recommendations specifically from my colleague in that library, oft referred to in these pages as the Awesome Librarian. Turns out he’s awesome at book recs, too! And another dozen or so were books I read for my various (3!) book clubs.

Friends recommended books, of course, and intriguing things were forever popping up during my perusing of book catalogues for work, which is why my want-to-read list was always growing… My list also still has on it a bunch of recommendations from a favorite-books thread that Captain Awkward ran, oh, probably years ago now. There was so much good stuff in there that I’m still working through the recommendations even now.

On the whole, probably only 10 or 15 books weren’t directly recommendations.

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

Oh, yeah! Like I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been really pushing to catch up on all these “how can I possibly not have read this person yet?” authors. So I finally read, for example, Maya Angelou. And Alice Munro, Octavia Butler, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor. A Zadie Smith novel (I’d only read her nonfiction before) and Wuthering Heights, because well, it’s a classic I suppose I ought to have read at some point. The Outsiders, because it’s basically the original young adult novel. Stuff like that.

Onward to great books in 2018!