2017 + 2018 book years in review

Turns out having a baby/toddler isn't very conducive to finding time to write blog posts, hence the 19 month absence since giving birth. I don't think I'll be writing much more frequently for the foreseeable future, but I want to at least hold myself accountable to continuing to monitor the diversity of my reading habits. While I read 94 books in the year before I had a kid, I've only read 66 in the two years since :/  Here's the raw breakdown of the books I read the past two years:

	Female	Male	Multiple authors	Trans Man	Trans Woman	Grand Total
Asian American	2	1				3
Black	17	6	1			24
Latin@	2	1				3
Middle Eastern		2				2
Multiracial	2	1			1	4
Native		1				1
White	16	9		1	3	29
Grand Total	39	21	1	1	4	66

I've basically held steady by gender, although I've also started tracking if authors are trans or cis so I can do better about increasing representation along that axis as well.

Time period	Authors that aren’t cis males
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to 2016	41%
2016	69%
2017 and 2018	68%
Overall	55%

In terms of race, my share of white authors went up a bit - I think that's mostly because I read a bunch of parenting books, and had a hard time finding ones written by people of color. I also started tracking authors that identify as multiracial, instead of assigning only one race to them - I'm sure I've read multiracial authors in past years too, but I'm not going to go back through all those old records to update them, at least not right now.

Time period	Asian & Asian- American	Black	Latin@	Middle Eastern	Native	Multi- racial	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	-	97%
High School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	-	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	-	80%
Post-College to 2016	2.1%	22.4%	2.8%	4.2%	0%	-	65%
2016	8.5%	22.3%	11.7%	11.7%	4.3%	-	33%
2017 and 2018	4.5%	36.4%	4.5%	3.0%	1.5%	6.1%	43.9%
Overall	1.9%	10.9%	2.6%	3.3%	0.7%	0.6%	78.3%

In terms of my favorite books of the last two years, my top three are:

• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I don't usually like short stories, but holy crap these are awesome. His stories pack more ideas and excitement than many novels that I've read.
• The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin (and the following two books in the trilogy). Hands down the best fantasy I've read in ages. I kept staying up late to read it, even knowing the baby would get me up multiple times in the night, because I couldn't put it down. The world she creates is practically as detailed as our own, which led me to a fascinating interview she did on her world building techniques. It's hard to describe without giving stuff away, but seriously everyone should read these books.
• The Power by Naomi Alderman. Speculative fiction about a future where women become physically dominant to men, and how that would affect (or not) societal power structures around the world. It's framed as "historical fiction" written several thousand years in the future, which is distracting at a few points, but otherwise it's riveting.

My two favorite nonfiction books were Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, which honestly if it was fiction I would have thought it was too wild to be believable, and Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, which perfectly dissects a lot of what I've been experiencing since moving to the Bay, and also caused some serious introspection on my own role in the issues he documents. 

Anyway, I probably won't post again until the 2019 book year in review next January, so happy new year's all!