Reading in 2008: A Statistical Summary

[bibliogramma]

I get worse at this every year. I put off writing up my little summaries, and then of course, I feel that I can't start commenting on new books until I do post my summaries, so I get further and further behind, and so it goes.

This year, I read 198 books, 180 fiction and 18 non-fiction; 25 of these were re-reads (13.8%). A total of 17 of these were anthologies or collections of essays, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship. In addition to gender and nationality, I'm now also noting how many books I'm reading by writers of colour.

By gender:
Books written by women: 69.7%
Books written by men: 19.7%
Excluded: books written by persons who do not identify as gendered, and books written by collaborators of different genders

By nationality:
American: 58.3%
British: 18.2%
Canadian: 11.4%
Other: 3.5%

Writers of colour: 15.5%
Note: this includes anthologies or collections by multiple writers, all of whom are people of colour, and collaborations where at least one of the writers is of colour.

I have not been doing very well in terms of reading more books by writers who are not American, Canadian or British. Perhaps I should set myself some goals. I really should be able to hit 10 percent, despite being addicted to SFF, which is rarely translated from other languages.

Partway through last year, I decided that I also wanted to make my reading more diverse by reading more works by people of colour. I have managed to improve a little on that demographic: I calculating the percentages of books by POC I read in 2006 (6.7%) and 2007 (8.3%) and see that I have improved somewhat in this area. But I want to do much better.