Following up on what I've done for the past several years, this is my "year in review" blog post. As I've written in the past, I enjoy looking back at what I've read; reading is my most significant leisure time activity. Also, I'm a book nerd, and tracking my reading, setting goals, is something I really enjoy. For the glossy, general overview, my Goodreads summary is here.
My primary goals this year were to continue to be more intentional in my reading choices, increasing the diversity of authors that I read, as well as increasing the the genres I pick up and read. Last year in this space, I wrote that my goals was 84 books, with those other goals in mind.
Generally, I think I did well in pursing these goals. I finished the year reading 88 books (and just under 30,000 pages), both the most since I left college/law school and started keeping track. Of these 88 books, 54 were fiction and 34 were non-fiction; 44 books were written by men, 44 by women (I always want balance on the gender front, but hitting exactly 50/50 was not planned). In attempting to read a more diverse group of authors, over 40% of books I read this year were by men and women of color, increasing my percentage for the second straight year. This is something I will continue to track simply to keep me focused on gaining those variety of perspectives that I value.
As to genre, this was challenging to track - many books land across different genres, and I didn't want to become so specific to lose some sort of meaning from my groups (for example, placing both fantasy fiction and science-fiction into a speculative fiction category, or placing a lot of non-fiction into a general politics-society category of books). I discovered and read many books in the middle-grade fiction category (some with my daughter, some on my own), with 19 books. Other categories of note included Politics-Society nonfiction reads (18), History (11), General Fiction (10), Speculative Fiction (7), Historical Fiction (6), and Literary Fiction (5). Overall, I had 10 different category of books that I read 3 or more from; while I don't have any specific goals for this, I like the idea of having a diversity of at least 10 or more "genres" that I read.
Of the 88 books I read this year, based on Goodreads' rating system, I gave 18 books a 5 star rating, 28 books a 4 star rating, 38 books a 3 star rating, and 4 books a 2 star rating. As I found out last year, the advantage of being very intentional is finding more and more books that I really enjoy.
All of the 18 5 star review books I read were great, but forced to choose, I would say the following were my top three fiction books this year, in no particular order - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Deacon King Kong by James McBride (McBride's The Good Lord Bird was also fantastic). As for non-fiction, my top 3 of the year would be The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, and Antisocial by Andrew Marantz.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I enjoy looking back at my reading year, and I enjoy setting goals for the coming year. I'm somewhat hesitant to keep increasing my goal of books read, simply because I don't want a high number to impact my book selection process (choosing more "easier" reads). That said, I like goals because they reflect values and focus my attention on how I want to spend my time. With all that in mind, I'm leaning towards challenging myself to 90 books (7.5 per month, 0.5 more per month than last year's goal), with perhaps a real goal of continuing to seek diverse authors and reaching 30,000 pages.
Goals are supposed to push us forward, I think this year's goals will do just that.
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