pagesofjulia

Here comes my traditional year’s-end wrap-up post; you can see past years in review here. In case you missed it, check out as well my best of the year post from Monday. Welcome to 2021! Let’s hope it’s a better one.

In 2020, I read 103 books, and I cannot remember them all now – this year has been years long, hasn’t it? (Say it again.) My blog turned ten years old in October – that is certainly a milestone. In 2019, I read 88 books, so I’ve managed to go a little further this year, although it’s not my old average of 150!

Of the books I read this year:

• Only 36% were nonfiction (last year I read 55% nonfiction). 6% were poetry, though, which is a small but significant (new) piece of the pie. I think my need for escape accounts for the unusually large proportion of fiction that I read in this extraordinary year.
• 46% were written by female authors (41% last year); 51% were by men (59% last year), with the remainder being collections by multiple authors, or variously unidentifiable, or other. I’m getting closer to evening out that number…
• Of the fiction I read, I labeled 23% as contemporary, 23% historical, 18% mystery, and 10% thriller; I used that silly “misc fiction” genre for 23%. I also labeled a handful as alternative history, fantasy, horror, mythology, noir, romance, scifi, short stories, western, YA and/or LBGTQ. (I sometimes put a single book in multiple genres.) Last year, 25% were contemporary, 22% historical, 18% mysteries, and a whopping 23% were sci fi. (That was all The Expanse, which I did not indulge in so much this year – mostly because I’ve read most of them already.)
• In 2020, 17% of the books I “read” were audiobooks. This is perhaps the most surprising number, because I spent nine months of 2019 in my van, and commute times have been infinitesimal in 2020 – I thought the audiobooks would have dropped off, but 2019’s number was just shy of 20%, so there’s been little change. I did drive to Texas and back this summer…
• In perhaps the greatest victory, this year 58% of my reading was for pleasure! and just 40% for paid reviews. Last year it was 36% pleasure and 51% reviews. This is the first time since I started tracking reasons that ‘pleasure’ has made a majority of my reading – the largest chunk has always been either reviews or school. (And I do have a good deal of control, in both those cases. But *pure* pleasure is a different question.)
• I checked out 13% of the books I read from the library (not much of that in 2019 – again, see vanlife). I purchased 45%, and 40% were sent to me for reviews. (Last year I was sent 54% for reviews, and purchased 24%.)
• I reread three books this year – same number as last.
• A new feature of 2020 was my foray into e-books, forced by the pandemic, which saw publishers all but cease sending out print galleys and ARCs. I bought a Kindle. This year, 37% of the books I read were e-books – a shocking and entirely new number. (Those were virtually all my reviews, plus a couple of library books. I haven’t purchased an e-book yet, and I hope not to.) There are some convenience factors (I like an e-book for reading in bed), but I really miss print ARCs, which I fear are gone for good.

Also new for this year I tracked authors’ race, because I hope to make an effort to not read all white dudes, and when they are (known to be) queer. These are imperfect measures (like the gender question), because I don’t always know, or it requires that I judge somebody’s race (which is a social construct), but it’s an effort that I can keep tweaking. So –

• This year, 17% of the books I read were authored by Black writers; 9% I marked other or unknown, and fully 75% were white. I’ll have to work on this one.
• And 10% of the books I read were authored by people who identify publicly as queer. Obviously I could be (probably am) missing some, but I chose not to go poking in their lives; instead I took the easily accessed public persona (generally involving back-of-book blurbs and/or related to the subject matter of their books).

How to track these things? Should we? (Clearly I am answering yes at present. Should we ever get to a place where access to the publishing world is completely independent of author identity, maybe we’ll stop.)

So, 2020 was a weird one, right? From my last year-in-review: “Heading into 2020, I can just imagine that we’ll have another drastically different year, with teaching a literature course – surely this will suck up much of my reading time? – and the at-present-total-unknown second half of that year… All I can say is stick around and we’ll all find out together what the heck I’m doing. Thanks for bearing with me through all the surprises!!” Ha ha ha… what a wild ride it’s been. I’m just glad we’ve made it this far.

Even I am a little overwhelmed by all these numbers; I wonder how many of my readers care! Thanks for sticking around, if you have. I find it useful and instructive to watch these figures change over the years, even if I write this yearly post just for myself. Monday we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Thanks so much for being here, folks. I wish you a safe, healthy, and rewarding 2021, in your reading and beyond.

Filed under: musings | Tagged: lists, year in review |