It’s that time of year again. The time when I give thanks for my password manager because otherwise I would NEVER be able to log back in to this site. And, well, it’s the end of 2020.
There’s a Jewish liturgical poem that many of my friends have been quoting, which comes originally from the Talmud on the topic of when we read the verses with curses. We read the curses at the end of the year שתכלה שנה וקללותיה, that the year and its curses pass from us. So say we all.
But it’s still the end of the year and so it’s time for me to look back on what I’ve read. Despite the #flamingdumpsterfire that was 2020, I managed to read 137 books this year!
That’s two fewer than last year.
In my defense, not only was it 2020, I also had another kid. The last time that happened I went down by ~40 books, so a drop of 2 is a SIGNIFICANT improvement. I guess it’s true that kid 2 is way easier to get used to than kid 1.
But you aren’t here for pictures of babies, you’re here for graphs! (Or you put up with the graphs to get to the book recommendations, I don’t judge). So let’s take a look at what this year was like in reading. Let’s start, first and foremost, with the pie chart of ratings. How many stars would you give each slice of this pie?
So definitely fewer 5s than last year. *shakes fist at book list* Although, if memory serves, last year was something of an anomaly and so this might be a regression towards the mean. And 12 books isn’t bad at all. As usual, 4 stars is my biggest category. I also had a few more three stars than last year and fewer two stars. And fewer unrated books, which just means less theory. Not a bad year, overall.
Next, we have the books by year published chart. How new was my reading?
Again, this looks pretty similar to last year. Despite being cut off from the physical library for a significant amount of time *shakes fist again, just because*, I still managed to read 44 books published this year. Look, Bookshop.org has a LOT of my money at this point. And my kindle has been an invaluable companion. His name is Boromir. (Yes, of course I’m serious.) Alas, since I don’t usually track how I read my books, I don’t know if I actually read more on the kindle this year or not, but I will definitely add this to my “reasons having ebooks available is a good thing” list. Unlike last year, though, this is pretty 21st century. That long tail into the 30s you see was when I decided to reread Dorothy Sayers over Passover. Actually, most of the older books were rereads, which makes this chart *gasp* inaccurate.
Okay, spoiler alert, 137 is not actually the number of books I’ve read this year. Around June, when I was getting into my third trimester and the library hadn’t reopened for physical books yet, I found I was doing a lot of rereading. So I made a “No more rereads for the reading goal” rule that I faithfully stuck to. That didn’t stop me from rereading, especially after child the second was born and I didn’t have enough brain to read anything new while getting no sleep. (I still get a less than optimum quantity of sleep, but since the child is a champion sleeper, it’s all my fault.) But I did not count those towards the goal. You’d probably see some more stuff from the 80s and 90s there if I had. For what it’s worth, if I took out all the rereads from the beginning, I would be at 117. But I usually do count rereads and, when I’d read the ones in the beginning of the year, I had intended to count them and, as we all know, it’s your intention (the Hebrew word is כוונה) that determines whether a book counts towards the reading goal.
Moooooving on. Next up are the genre sections, including both definitions of genre. First, we’ll look at genre meaning kind of book and then we’ll look at genre meaning where it would be shelved in the bookstore.
Unsurprisingly, most of what I read was novel-length fiction. No children’s literature this year, although more YA than last year. Fewer short stories, but more non-academic nonfiction. But it still looks like a blue Pacman is about to pull a rainbow scarf out of his mouth.
Ugh, so I can never decide how to deal with the genre graph because arbitrarily saying that each book only has one genre is disingenuous and just counting books with multiple genres twice throws off the pie chart so we’re going to go with a bar chart this year, with the caveat that this chart tells you the number of books I read this year that could be classified, albeit not exclusively, in a specific genre. You’ll see historical is a genre and it’s one that almost never stands alone. It goes with mystery or romance or fantasy. But it’s helpful, e.g., to see how many books I read this year that were set, by the authors, in the past.
Tag yourself, I’m superhero theology.
“One of these things is not like the other”. Look, if the year ever comes when fantasy is not far and away the largest block on here, assume I’ve been kidnapped by aliens and I’m trying to send a distress code by doing something incredibly out of character. A few fewer sci-fi books this year, a few more fantasies and romances, mysteries have jumped on to the field after being entirely absent last year (and I believe this was due entirely to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels and Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock books. More on those later). And gothic is back because I love it so.
And, as always, accountability time. Aside from the fact that I really love writing this post, knowing that I will end the year with a graph of how many Authors of Color I read this year is really helpful motivation to make that graph into something I’m willing to stand behind.
One thing I will say, it’s getting easier to find books by People of Color (hence POC) just by reading “most anticipated” lists or “everything come out this month” posts. It takes some effort for me to get to my 33%, which I still feel like is such a low bar despite it taking work. But I’m more likely to just open my “to read” list and see a number of books by POCs and, when I started this project in…oh goodness, 2016, that was not the case.
I’ve achieved my goals, which is awesome. And, as usual, the numbers look slightly different when you count authors rather than books. That either means I seek out more POC authors, or that POC authors are less likely to have major back catalogs that I can get lost in…or that the bit where I reread everything Megan Whalen Turner wrote this year and all of of Tamora Pierce’s Emelan books is skewing the data. But I am, overall, pretty pleased both with the metrics themselves and with the books I discovered this year.
And, for comparison, let’s look at gender.
So, apparently men went from 33% of my reading last year to less than 20%. I imagine some of that came from not really doing that much academic reading this year. And some of it is that there are fewer male authors who move me to track down everything they’ve written. And I checked how many authors I read more than one book by this year. There were 22 authors total. 2 of them were men. 6 of them were POC.
Incidentally, if you like this number thing, my illustrious sister introduced me to The Storygraph, which does some of this kind of data crunching for you (but not all the stuff that I’m interested in and also I love fighting with Numbers when it’s 90 minutes to midnight and I’m begging it to please spit out a graph that makes sense). So if you want to see more of my reading collection there, feel free to check it out.
I will add, also, that their recommendation engine looks excellent and like it’s more likely to uncover hidden gems than Goodreads, but I’ll report back. The one thing they will not let you do is export all your data into a spreadsheet, which is unfortunate because that’s what lets me do this.
Okay, time for the countdown of the best books, but in no particular order. Imagine me standing here yelling random numbers during the ten seconds to midnight while the ball drops in Times Square, it’s like that.
Incidentally, did you see what Times Square looks like this year:
Anyway, here we go!
- A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas. This is the first in Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series, all five of which I read this year. I found them because I really like the voice of the audiobook narrator who reads them (Kate Reading) from other books, so I figured I would try them out. Look, I read fast. I don’t usually read audiobooks fast, but I think I finished each and every one of these in two days. Thomas doesn’t write “Sherlock, but a lady”. Instead, she imagines what kind of person and world would be necessary for a woman to do what Sherlock Holmes does and builds something really interesting out of that.
- The Return of the Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. The Queen’s Thief series was one of those that I missed as a kid and that a number of people raved about as being fabulous. I’m usually leery of such recommendations because sometimes books that we fall in love with as kids just don’t hold up for people who encounter them for the first time as adults. That’s not true in this case, I reread the whole series in preparation for this, the final book (and then discovered it had been pushed back to the end of the year) and it did not disappoint.
- Piranesi by Susannah Clarke. The first thing Clarke wrote was the monumental monstrosity Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. In some ways, people’s reaction to this book depended on how much they expected it to be like that book. It isn’t, although Clarke is still an extraordinary wordsmith and the atmosphere of the book is gorgeous and evocative. Come for the statuary, stay for the mystery.
- You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I periodically post about neural networks doing weird things and, when I do, it’s almost always the work of Janelle Shane. Her book on Artificial Intelligence is clever, informative, and laugh out loud funny, which I should have known it would be and yet still made the mistake of reading it while holding a sleeping baby. Baby was no longer asleep by the time I was able to stop giggling.
- The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley. I adored her first book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, and this book is a direct sequel. Definitely read that one first, but this book is basically everything I want out of my speculative fiction grounded in history.
- Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin. I read Austen retellings even though I usually grumpily nitpick them to pieces because of books like this. Jalaluddin knows that you don’t want to remake Pride and Prejudice, you want to take the ideas that shape it and bring those ideas to a new milieu and let the story unfold. In particular, her Darcy character is a brilliant adaptation.
- The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin. The greatest living author of speculative fiction wrote a love letter to New York City. What more can I say?
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Moreno-Garcia has written other books, but this was her breakout success and with good reason. It’s the book that got me back into reading creepy gothic stories. It’s perfectly done, managing to simultaneously embrace the gothic as a genre and critique it and its regressive elements at the same time. And Moreno-Garcia makes it look easy.
- The House by the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Clune. This book is basically like a warm hug for everyone who grew up reading British children’s literature. Sometimes it’s not about flights of genius, but about being a blanket in book form and Clune delivers with a story about finding families, finding yourself, and doing what is right.
- The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. This is, frankly, Hurley’s most readable book yet (and if this is the only book of hers you’ve ever read and you’re making a face like *you’re kidding me!?* at me right now, yep!) and she basically takes on the entire genre of military sf here. The more you know about the genre, the more you can can recognize the way she’s in conversation with a lot of simplistic attitudes about interstellar war and good and evil. This is sci-fi at it’s finest – reflecting back on itself and looking forward at the same time.
(And one runner-up because it was really hard to leave it off.)
- Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall. You might be forgiven for thinking that this book is, in fact, four fanfiction tropes stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat. It is, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s sweet and fun and funny and Hall is just hilarious when he’s writing romance. If you liked Red, White, and Royal Blue, I have a feeling this will delight you.
Alright, my friends, my foes, and my fellow citizens of the world. It’s 11:45, 2020 is drawing to a close and so I will end with words of wisdom from someone I greatly esteem.
Liz Shayne 