I’ve had a stellar reading year. 70 books read in 2019, some absolute gems among them. I always set my Goodreads challenge at 50 books and usually exceed it. But I only record the books I enjoy in my GR reading challenge, so I can recommend all of these. I include graphic novels, novellas and anything else that vaguely qualifies as a book! This year my son graduated to actual chapter books, so I’ve enjoyed a lot of kid’s stuff this year too. I didn’t include young kid’s books in previous years, but now we’re reading stuff like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Secret Seven, so I’ve started including them.
I thought I’d look at a few stats. I’m basing this purely on general knowledge and author name, so if I get anything wrong, I apologise. I wanted to read more books in translation this year, but I fell a bit short of that, only reading a few. I also try to make sure I get a relatively even split of men and women authors, and a good amount of PoC authors, in order to have the broadest reading experience I can. I don’t want to only read old white man stories. And the wider I read, the better an author I become. Hopefully!
So:
Total books read: 70
Male/female author split: ~40/30 (this is approximate as some are multi-author anthologies, etc.)
PoC author: 6 (that I know of)
LGBT author: 5 (that I know of)
Books translated from a language other than English: 2
Non-fiction: 1 (this is bizarre, because I’ve read loads, but I guess I only finished one this year and added it to the challenge. I’ve read lots of stuff for pleasure and research, but not in its entirety.)
Overall, not a bad split in terms of gender, but I really want to do better with non-white, non-English language books in 2020. And I need to finish some of the non-fiction books I have on the go.
My reading challenge page is here, for details. Or you can click on the images below to see all the covers of the stuff I’ve read this year. What about you? A good reading year?
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