2022 book year in review

Being pregnant and having a baby in 2022 set me back a bit in my reading (and moving on December 31 set me back in doing my year-end reading analysis), but I still managed to read 64 books! I'm hoping that in 2023 I'll get back up to 100 or closer to it.

	Woman	Man	Grand Total
Asian, Asian American, and Asian British	9	7	16
Black	7	4	11
Latine	1	1	2
Middle Eastern	1	1	2
Multiracial	4		4
Native	1		1
White	16	11	27
Multiple authors	1		1
Grand Total	40	24	64

The most striking thing to me is that I got a bit lazy about sourcing diverse authors, and more often than not just grabbed whatever looked interesting and was available for kindle from the library website, and you can see in the data that trans and nonbinary authors disappeared and the share of white authors shot up. Lesson learned - don't be lazy!

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%
2020	66%
2021	63%
2022	63%
Overall	59%

Time period	Asian & Asian- American	Black	Latinx	Middle Eastern	Native	Mult- iracial	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%
2020	8.6%	28.6%	7.1%	10%	2.9%	11.4%	31.4%
2021	18.9%	18.9%	9.0%	7.2%	5.4%	5.4%	32.4%
2022	25%	17.2%	3.1%	3.1%	1.6%	6/3%	42.2%
Overall	7.6%	13.4%	4.0%	2.6%	1.7%	2.8%	66.8%

My favorite fiction books of the year were:

• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. It's sort of a sci-fi time-travel novel, but it's also a novel about motherhood and parenting during a global respiratory pandemic (albeit from a lunar outpost in the future). The writing is beautiful and the story is clever and intriguing, I read it in a day because I couldn't put it down.
• Severance by Ling Ma. Also a sci-fi novel about a pandemic, but here the pregnant protagonist is making her way across the US looking for safety after a virus has caused most humans to repeat their most common routines over and over again until they die. Lots of interesting meditations on the routines that make up our lives, and the writing is engrossing. It was written in 2018 and it's interesting to see what she got right about what a global pandemic would look like, and what she got wrong (one thing that stuck out to me is that all the characters call it an "epidemic" and not a "pandemic.")

I only just now realized that both my favorite novels are about young mothers in global pandemics... do you think I'm processing anything??

My favorite nonfiction books of the year were:

• Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad. Memoir of being diagnosed with cancer right after graduating college at 22, then spending 3.5 years in hospitals trying to stay alive, then suddenly being in remission and back in the world and having to figure out how to live her life. Absolutely gripping, and lots of insightful reflections on life, family, friendship, and relationships, without being trite or sappy.
• The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. A facsinating story that I knew basically nothing about. I didn't fully appreciate that the Egyptian empire lasted 3000 years (!!), or that its language was completely lost for nearly another 2000 years after that. It was really interesting to learn how much of decoding hieroglyphics relied on dumb luck (e.g. one of Napoleon's troops finding the Rossetta stone in a pile of rubble while invading Egypt), and a hybrid of linguistics and codebreaking.
• Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. This book would be boring to anyone not currently raising a little kid, but for us it was a lifesaver. It gave us a ton of useful strategies to use with Sophie, and unlike every other parenting book I've read they were actually effective. I wish I'd read it two years earlier, but am glad to have it under my belt in time for Nora's toddlerhood!

Here's to a calm and uneventful 2023 with lots of great books in it!