2019 book year in review

I actually read a decent number of books last year - more than one per week on average! Still not back to my pre-baby peak, but much better than the last two years. Here's the author breakdown:

	Female	Male	Multiple authors	Grand Total
Asian	1			1
Asian American	6	2		8
Black	13	2		15
Latinx	6			6
Middle Eastern	4	2		6
Multiple authors			1	1
Native	3	1		4
White	15	6	1	22
Grand Total	48	13	2	63

It was my best year yet for gender diversity:

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%
2019	79%
Overall	58%

Racial diversity was up too - although I didn't realize until right now that I didn't read any multiracial authors :/  I'll have to try and remedy that next year.

Time period	Asian & Asian- American	Black	Latinx	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%
2019	14.2%	24%	9.5%	9.5&	6.3%	-	34.9%
Overall	2.6%	11.5%	3.1%	3.8%	1.1%	1.3%	75.8%

My two (and a half) favorite novels of the past year were:

• A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza. The story of an Indian American family as the three first-generation kids grow into adulthood. It's hard to describe how beautiful it is - I read it over the summer and I'm still thinking about certain scenes. It will have you in tears over seemingly mundane details of family life. The author is an incredibly keen observer of people and how they interact, and the various ways we can end up hurting the people we love most out of desire to protect them.
• Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. This is a modern retelling of Antigone, which I did not know when I picked it up, so I was completely shocked by the ending. It follows the story of a British Muslim teen who has run away to join ISIS and been killed. His family wants to bring his body home to the UK for burial, but the government won't let them. It's beautifully written and has you feeling like you personally know the characters by the end of it.
• The "half" is two books by authors I listed as favorites last year - Exhalation, which is Ted Chiang's new book of excellent short stories, and The Dreamblood Duology, which is a two-book series by the always amazing NK Jemisin. It feels like cheating to count them as new favorites though, since I already recommended them recently.

My favorite nonfiction books of the year were:

• On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Bliss. This book is hard to describe - it's part history, part ethnography, part philosophy, and part personal reflection about the role of vaccination in society, and more broadly how we think of risk and how we think of our bodies and their relation to the community and world we live in. She had lots of unexpected insights for what I thought was going to be just a straightforward recitation of facts, and her background is as a poet so her prose writing style is really lovely.
• Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold. The story of a family in Southwestern Pennsylvania as a fracking site opens up next to their farm and proceeds to destroy their land and their lives, and their desperate attempts to stop it or at least get compensation are basically completely fruitless after many years. I thought I knew about fracking, but it's so much worse than I realized - including how straight-up evil the oil companies are and how feckless the EPA is.
• Know My Name by Chanel Miller (aka Emily Doe). Her victim impact statement went viral in 2016 because of her powerful writing, and her book is just as well-written an impactful. It made me extra happy that I live in Santa Clara county and was able to vote to recall the judge that handed down such a short sentence to the rapist.

Lastly, I've started a fun project of reading as many diverse retellings of Pride and Prejudice as possible. So far I've read Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (set in contemporary Pakistan) and Pride by Ibi Zoboi (set in an Afro-Latinx family in Bushwick). It's really cool to see how the authors keep the same basic structure of the story, while changing many of the characters and details to fit into different settings (as a small example: in the original book the family's last name is Bennet, in the Pakistan version it's Binat, and in the Brooklyn version it's Benitez). I'm on the library waiting list for a third retelling, Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin, which is set in a Muslim community in modern Canada. If you know of any other good ones, let me know!