2016 book year in review

Towards the beginning of last year, I wrote about realizing my reading habits were startling homogeneous, and committing to be more intentional about reading authors from a greater diversity of backgrounds. Since 2016 is over, I wanted to step back and see how I did. Here's the raw breakdown of author demographics for every book I read in 2016:

	Female	Male	Multiple authors with different genders	Total
Asian and Asian-American	6	2		8
Black	18	3		21
Latin@	4	7		11
Middle Eastern	10	1		11
Multiple authors with different races	1		1	2
Multiracial	5	1		6
Native	4			4
White	17	14		31
Total	65	28	1	94

First, you can probably guess that I am mad about falling just short of reading 100 books. I was totally on track until I got pregnant, and had to slow down my reading pace since I was too nauseous to read during my daily train commute. Stupid baby ruining my life goals before it even gets here.

Second, I was struck by how white authors were still the largest group by far, despite all my efforts. Turns out its hard to not read a lot of white authors when the publishing industry is overwhelmingly white. That being said, I definitely improved on my historic averages:

Time period	Female authors
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to 2016	41%
2016	69%
Overall	42%

Time period	Asian & Asian-American	Black	Latin@	Middle Eastern	Native	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	97.0%
High School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	80.0%
Post-College to 2016	2.1%	22.4%	2.8%	4.2%	0%	65.0%
2016	8.5%	22.3%	11.7%	11.7%	4.3%	33.0%
Overall	2.2%	11.1%	3.0%	4.3%	0.8%	76.2%

All in all - definite progress! Best of all, as I had hoped, I ended up reading some really fantastic books that I probably wouldn't have ever heard about if I wasn't intentionally searching for more diverse authors. You can check out my spreadsheet with all the books and my thoughts on them, but in particular my top three were:

• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. I don't even have words to describe what this book did to me. Read it and prepare to be gutted by the most uniquely beautiful writing you've ever read, and also to need several days to recover afterwards. 
• Anything by Luís Alberto Urrea. I read "Into the Beautiful North" first and was so transfixed by his writing that I ended up inhaling everything he's written as quickly as I could. Even his nonfiction is mesmerizing.
• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Okay, I probably would have heard of this one regardless because it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year, but it still blew me away.

It was a great year for reading. Here's hoping 2017 is even better - at least, until the baby gets here and all reading goes out the window for a while. 

Update

I shared this last week on facebook, but realized that I should write it here too for completeness sake: The Afghan refugee family my group of friends is sponsoring made it to the US! While the executive order still has put the fate of tens of thousands of refugee families in limbo, "our" family was able to come because they have a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) granted to Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. Government in Afghanistan and subsequently became targets.

The second piece of good news is that we ended up having every large piece of furniture donated, which left us with more money than we needed from our fundraiser. We were planning on donating the excess funds directly to the IRC, but as our family was about to arrive, the IRC let us know of a second Afghan family arriving last week under the SIV program, who would be living in the same apartment building as our family, and didn't yet have a sponsor. One individual donor stepped up to cover the second family's rent subsidy, and then we were able to use the remaining fundraiser money, and extra furniture donations, to fully furnish an entire second apartment. In the end, not one but TWO families arrived in the Bay to find a new home and welcoming community waiting for them.

I'm trying to focus on maintaining the positive momentum and motivation from these developments, which is hard because at the same time that I am elated about these two families, there are thousands more refugee families who had been vetted and promised a home in the US and now seem unlikely to actually be admitted. But, not being able to fix everything doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix as much as we can. Onward.