My life in books

I managed to read a decent number of books in the last year, although my reading fell off quite markedly in the final few months, as my health issues got worse and worse. I haven’t read anything in at least a month now, probably longer. Too much pain and exhaustion.

There were a lot of excellent books on my list for this year. The ones that really stood out for me were, in no particular order:

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist
Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives
N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti - Home
Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy)
Maya Angelou, I Know why the Caged Bird Sings
Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

And now for the statistics.

In 2018, I read 227 books or novellas - 181 fiction and 46 non-fiction; 9 of these were re-reads.

A total of 11 of these were anthologies or edited non-fiction collections, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship, although I will note that among these works, 9 were edited or co-edited by women, and 5 were edited or co-edited by people of colour.

By gender:
Works written by women: 66 percent
Works written by men: 31 percent
Works written by non-binary people: three percent

By author's nationality:
American: 78 percent
British: 13 percent
Canadian: 12 percent
Other: 11 percent

"Other" nationalities included: Malaysian, German, Nigerian, Singaporean, Icelandic, Swedish, Finnish and Irish. .

Works by writers of colour: 31 percent

And another year has passed, one in which I started out with the best of intentions to read extensively and widely, but was thwarted by constant serious medical issues and a rather massive and on-going depression.

Most of my reading in the second half of the year was comfort reading, when I could summon the energy and will to read at all. And of course there was the obligatory Hugo reading.

My list of the best books I read this year:

Necessity, by Jo Walton
Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Overture
Naomi Novik, League of Dragons
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti
Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell (eds.), Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel Delany
Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce (eds.), Letters to Tiptree





On to the statistics:

In 2016, I read 108 books or novellas - 100 fiction and 8 non-fiction; 13 of these were re-reads. A total of 7 of these were anthologies or edited non-fiction works, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship.

By gender:
Works written by women: 68 percent
Works written by men: 32 percent
(One work written by collaborators of different genders)

By author's nationality:
American: 78 percent
British: 7 percent
Canadian: 10 percent
Other: 6 percent

"Other" nationalities included: French, Chinese, Israeli, Moroccan and Swedish.

Works by writers of colour: 11 percent

And, somewhat belated, here is my 2015 year-end summary. This is the first year that my reading selections were influenced by the Hugo Awards, and the Sadly Rabid Puppies in particular, in that I read a number of works by people I would not ordinarily read, simply because they were nominated for the 2015 Hugos. The practical reflection of that is that i read more work from Americans, white people and men than I otherwise might have.

My favourite books of this year were:

Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows
Ann Leckie, The Imperial Radch Trilogy
Chesya Burke, Let's Play White
N. K. Jemisin, Fifth Season
Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix
Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown
Naomi Novik, Uprooted
Jo Walton, The Just City
Jo Walton, The Philosopher Kings
Jo Walton, My Real Children
Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water
Usman Malik, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings



On to the statistics:

In 2015, I read 164 books or novellas - 141 fiction and 23 non-fiction; 37 of these were re-reads (I had a miserable year health-wise and needed much comfort reading). A total of 15 of these were anthologies or edited non-fiction works, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship.

By gender:
Works written by women: 76.5 percent
Works written by men: 23.5 percent

By author's nationality:
American: 73.2 percent
British: 10.7 percent
Canadian: 8.1 percent
Other: 8.1 percent

"Other" nationalities included: Iranian, Palestinian, German, French, Malaysian, Chinese, Peruvian, Nigerian, Pakistani, Icelander, Barbadian.

Works by writers of colour: 21.5 percent

Here it is, late New Year's Eve (or, to be more accurate, very early in the morning on New Year's Day), and I have actually posted about every book I read in 2014, and have the year's end statistics calculated and ready to go. I think this is the first time I've done this, and it feels good. I credit this to the fact that I'm now on Goodreads as well as keeping up my book journal here. Goodreads kind of forces me to write at least a few notes as soon as I record a book as finished, and once I've done that.... Well, it's a simple matter to take those notes and expand on them here - or just copy them over if it turns out I have no more to say. We'll see if I can continue keeping up this journal in a tinely fashion this year.

And now, on to the main event, my favourite reads of 2014, and the 2014 statistics.

Best Works I Read in 2014

Carl Freedman (ed.), Conversations with Ursula K. Leguin
Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-Time Indian
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Fabio Fernandes (ed.), We See a Different Frontier
Christie Yant (ed), Women Destroy Science Fiction - Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49
Margaret Atwood, The Maddaddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Maddaddam)
Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger



In 2014, I read 124 books or novellas - 102 fiction and 22 non-fiction; 10 of these were re-reads. A total of 12 of these were anthologies or edited non-fiction works, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship.

By gender:
Works written by women: 68.i percent
Works written by men: 27.6 percent
Four works were written by multiple authors, male and female.

By author's nationality:
American: 59.8 percent
British: 10.7 percent
Canadian: 15.2 percent
Other: 12.5 percent

Works by writers of colour: 26.8 percent

This post is inspired by a book I will not be reading, Christine Elaine Black's A Rose for Lancaster, set in the first year of the reign of Henry VII.

The reason I will not be reading this book is because it it is just too historically inaccurate to be endured. Now, readers may ask how I know it is too historically inaccurate to be endured if I haven't even cracked its cover. Easy, I answer. The sample provided on the author's website identifies the male protagonist as Giles Beaufort, heir to the recently deceased Baron of Somerset.

What's wrong with that, readers may ask. Well, the Beaufort family - the children of John of Gaunt and his mistress (later wife) Katherine Swynford and their descendants - played a crucial part in the wars between Lancaster and York, not the least because it was through the Beaufort line that Henry Tudor could trace his descent from the house of Plantagenet along with all the other Lancasters and York in the conflict.

The members of the house of Beaufort are very well known. There was no Giles Beaufort. Maybe the author's referring to another Beaufort family, readers may postulate. A minor house not very important, that wasn't chronicled. Maybe there was such a house. But if that's the author's intent, why make her hero heir to the title of Somerset, when the royal Beaufort line were in fact first Earls, then Dukes of Somerset (but never Barons)?

Not only was there no Giles Beaufort, but at the time of Henry VII's ascent in 1485, he himself was the senior surviving legitimately born male of the House of Beaufort. The third duke of Somerset had died in 1471 leaving an illegitimate son, Charles Somerset, who was later legitimised and made Earl of Worchester. So, no male Beauforts, no earls, dukes or barons of Somerset.

Now, I would like to be clear - I have no objection to historical novels that create new characters and use them to tell stories, as long as those invented characters aren't glaring. Invent a character who could have been, not a character who can be documented as never existing. Heaven knows there's enough holes in the documentation of most historical periods to drive a convoy of trucks through. Use those holes, don't mangle the parts of history that we do actually have plenty of information on.

That's all I ask of writers of historical fiction - that what they're writing could have happened.

And at last, I am up to date. It's early January 2012 and I have at least mentioned all the books I read during my hiatus. So, here are my favourite reads of 2011, and the 2011 statistics, and then we are off to a new start (I hope) for 2012.

Best Books I Read in 2011

Jo Walton, Among Others
Ursula LeGuin, The Wild Girls
Eleanor Arnason, Mammoths of the Great Plains
Lyda Morehouse, Resurrection Code
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
Margaret Atwood, Good Bones
Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism
Sarah Schulman, The Child


In 2011, I read 79 books, 70 fiction and nine non-fiction; 15 of these were re-reads (20%). A total of three of these were anthologies, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship.

By gender:
Books written by women: 68.4%
Books written by men: 30.3%
One book was co-written by a man and a woman

By nationality:
American: 78.3%
British: 5.3%
Canadian: 11.8%
Other: 3.9%

Book by writers of colour: 5.3%

I have two goals for the coming year:

1. Eliminate a significant proportion of my TBR file, while, including e-books, stands at over 300 books

2. Focus more on diversity in reading, something that had quite gone by the wayside in the past two years, as I was reading a lot of comfort books, including re-reads - which, the older they are, the more likely they are to be written by white American men.

In 2009, I read 104 books, 93 fiction and 11 non-fiction; 12 of these were re-reads (11.5%). A total of seven of these were anthologies, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship.

By gender:
Books written by women: 64.9%
Books written by men: 34.0%

By nationality:
American: 70.1%
British: 3.1%
Canadian: 17.5%
Other: 9.3%

Book by writers of colour: 26.8%

I am pleased to see that the percentage of books written by writers of colour and the percentage of books written by writers from countries other than the U.S./Britain & Ireland/Canada/Australia and New Zealand increased from 2008.

And now, for my list of the best books I read in 2009:

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King
The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill
Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
Unquenchable Fire, Rachel Pollack
De Secretis Mulierum, L. Timmel Duchamp
Distances, Vandana Singh
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Gameplayers of Zan, M. A. Foster
How to Rent a Negro, damali ayo
The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Unsecure America, Susan Faludi

In which the writer rambles on at length about her method of selecting books for purchase, and invites similar ruminations from her gentle readers, should they be so inclined.

I used to just drop into bookstores whenever I had some money that I didn’t need for rent or food, and buy all the books I saw that looked interesting. But for the past five or six years now, my disabilities have prevented me from actually going out to stores and buying books in such a spontaneous fashion. Now I buy mostly online. Sometimes, in-store special coupons arrive, or our local independent science fiction bookstore is having a sale because they’re overstocked on used books, or whatever, and my partner goes and looks for books for me, but about 80 percent of my current bookbuying is done on line.

Because of this change in the manner of my bookbuying, there have slowly evolved some changes in the manner in which I select the books I buy. Because it’s not a spontaneous act anymore, I first started keeping a list of books I wanted to read, so I’d remember what I wanted when it came time to sit down and place a book order. The list started to grow, and I began to realise that this list could be more than a simple reminder of things I wanted to order. It could actually be a way of shaping my reading. I could go in search of books that catered to my interests rather than just reading books I’d heard about somewhere or books by my favourite authors.

Over time, then, I have assigned myself a number of “projects” with respect to reading – they’re not quite so closely held as to be goals, nor are they, precisely, guidelines, but they are things I want to take into account when I decide what books to buy in any given book order.

You see, I buy on a budget. Digression: I didn’t always do this. For a very large part of my life, I was poor (by choice, to some extent – I was very resistant about going into the corporate world where the money is) and bought books whenever I had extra money. Then I did find a corporate job I could cope with, and started having more disposable income as a result, and found myself buying a lot of books. Now not so poor, I slowly began to realise that if I continued spending all of my extra money on books, I would never have any money for other things I had also realised I wanted or needed. And then I went and bought this money-eating black hole known as a house. Hence, the budget, because otherwise, I could spend every cent I have to spare on books, which would seriously interfere with my ability to, say, pay for the new air conditioner or insulation in the basement or all the other things the house demands. End of digression.

So. I allow myself a certain amount of money to spend each month on books for my own reading pleasure. (Twice a year, I sort of get to cheat, because that’s when I buy birthday and Christmas presents for my partner, and our tastes are similar enough that at least half of the books I buy for him are also books I’d like to read. I am so evil. ) I allow myself some leeway to exceed my budget on special occasions – for instance, when a small press with a backlist full of books I want has a clearance sale, or something similar – because it’s always a good thing to have more books.

But for my regular monthly book shopping – which I do in one shot, usually, from my online bookseller of choice – here’s how I go about it. First. I look to see which of my several dozen “favourite writers ever” have something new out that month; that normally takes up about half of my monthly budget. Then I order one or two recently published books by authors new to me that have been highly recommended, or well-reviewed or otherwise generated enough of a buzz that I’ve heard about them and want to read them (recent Tiptree, Brandon or Lambda award winners, for example). Sometimes I’ll add a book or two that I’ve just run into somewhere that sounds interesting, often because it’s been mentioned on a blog I read or it’s a new release from one of the small presses that I often order from (and hence check up on their websites for new releases every once in a while) or pick a couple of books at random from my 34-page (in 9 point type with quarter-inch margins top and bottom) list of books I’d like to read some day.

With whatever money is left in my budget, I pick a couple of books based on the various projects I’ve adopted. These projects are:

* To read more books by writers from countries other than Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain
* To read more books by writers of colour
* To read more books by queer writers (that is to say, writers who are gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, or who otherwise identify as a member of a gender or sexual minority)
* To collect and re-read many of my favourite books from the past that have wandered away from my libraries over the years
* To finally read all the books that people have been recommending to me over the years but somehow I never got around to, or could find a copy (it’s so much easier to find out-of-print books now that there are so many places to order from online)
* To fill in some notable gaps in my “special interest” collections, such as Arthurian and Arthurian-inspired literature, utopic and dystopic fiction, the complete works of certain adored authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, and the like.

Following this method certainly insures that I have a wide variety of new books to read each month, something to suit almost every mood. Which is a good thing, because unlike many readers, I can't just suddenly decide to go buy a book if I look around and don't happen to see anything I want to just just now already on my shelves somewhere.

Yes, this is very late. In fact, I haven't even finished writing comments for all the books I read in 2007 - life has this horrible habit of getting in the way of my blogging.

I'm not going to limit myself to 10, and I'm going to count series as one entry on my list. And I'm not going to count re-reads, because this year I re-read some of my favourite books of all time, such as The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, The Maerlande Chronicles by Elisabeth Vonarburg, King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett, and Woman on the Edge of time by Marge Piercy, so that would just make the list very long indeed.

So here's my selection of the best books and series I read in 2007, in alphabetical order by author or editor:

Carnival, Elizabeth Bear

The Jenny Casey trilogy: Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired, Elizabeth Bear

The Marq'ssan Cycle: Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, L. Timmel Duchamp

Drag King Dreams, Leslie Feinberg

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, Angélica Gorodischer, trans. Ursula K. LeGuin

So Long Been Dreaming: Post Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, (eds.) Nalo Hopkinson, Uppinder Mehan

The Isles of Glory trilogy: The Aware, Gilfeather, The Tainted, Glenda Larke

Warchild, Burndive, Cagebird, Karin Lowachee

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles Mann

Glorifying Terrorism, (ed.) Farah Mendlesohn

His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik

James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips

The Wess'har Wars series: Crossing the Line, City of Pearl, The World Before, Matriarch, Ally, Karen Traviss

The Orphan’s Tales: In The Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente

Farthing, Jo Walton

I've seen this meme in a couple of different versions, in the journals of oursin, yhlee and frightened.

The books listed below are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of whenever this meme started circulating, I presume).

The instructions that came with the meme said: As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The version from frightened adds: Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read, underlined the ones on my to-read list, and added an asterisk to those I’ve read more than once (in whole or in part). I rarely stop reading a book, and none of the ones I’ve read here were among the few that I’ve been unable to finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion *
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses *
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey *
Pride and Prejudice *
Jane Eyre *
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad *
Emma *
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales *
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World *
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King *
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984 *
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility *
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park *
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Gulliver's Travels
Les misérables [Some parts in French, the whole in English.]
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune *
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present [actually, I’m reading this now, but I will finish it, so…]
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon *
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion *
Northanger Abbey *
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values *
The Aeneid *
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers