I’m still here and that’s the most important thing honestly
It’s been a year since I started this little book documenting experience. (Ok, more like 13 months. Deal with it.) It’s been fun! I don’t know how much longer I will keep it up – until I get bored or run out of time to read again, probably. I started with Green Mars, which I will someday finish off when I finally get through Blue Mars, I swear. In any case here are some statistics on what I read this year. Some of them surprised me!
(Note: This list includes three books that I finished by April 2021 but haven’t reviewed yet. Twenty-one books with twenty-two authors are represented.)
First shocker: Only 8 of the 22 authors I read were female! That’s 36% percent, which 1) isn’t great, and 2) is very different from my perception of whose books I was reading. I may have fallen victim to the “enough women in the room and you get the false perception of parity” issue, not sure. My reading of non-white authors was also not great, 6/22 or 27%. (Note that I have assumed gender and race in a few of these cases, so it may not be perfect. Apologies for any errors.) What I know is that I should try to expand my horizons in the rest of 2021.
One of my favorite things about my reading this is how much I learned about indigenous and Native American issues this year. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, The Broken Heart of America, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Oak Flat were all really good takes on American Indian history and life, and 1493 provided a lot of “New World” historical perspective. Definitely topics that I want to read more about going forward. I was admittedly pretty ignorant on these subjects until recently, and I definitely feel that moving to Arizona has given me more impetus to learn about these parts of American history.
Sci fi and just plain weird fiction were also a highlight. Lincoln in the Bardo, Enter the Aardvark, and This is How You Lose the Time War all got high marks from me despite (or because of?) each being completely bonkers in some way. If I plugged those three into an algorithm, what kind of recs would I get?
As little as can be said about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Gilead (review forthcoming), the better. Let me allow the last book I finished to address them: Wow, No Thank You.
On to year two. We’ll see where it takes me.
