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!

2021 book year in review

While 2021 wasn't a great year for a lot of things, it was a pretty great year for reading for me. I spent the first four months funemployed during a pandemic, leaving me with little to do but sit at home and read all day. For the first time since I've been tracking, I broke 100 books in a year!

	Woman	Man	Trans Woman	Trans Man	Nonbinary	Multiple authors	Grand Total
Asian and Asian American	7	14					21
Black	17	4					21
Latinx	8	2					10
Middle Eastern	4	4					8
Multiracial	4	1			1		6
Native	5	1					6
White	19	15	1	1			36
Multiple authors						3	3
Grand Total	64	41	1	1	1	3	111

Gender diversity was pretty similar to last year:

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%
Overall	59%

Racial diversity was too, although I read more books by authors of Asian descent:

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%
Overall	6.6%	13.3%	4.1%	2.6%	1.7%	2.6%	68.3%

My favorite fiction books of the year were:

• Transcendent Kingdom byYaa Gyasi. I loved her earlier novel Homegoing so I had high expectations for this one, and I wasn't disappointed. The protagonist is a neuroscience student, which resonated with my undergrad experience in a fun way, and the writing and character development are fantastic. I particularly liked the meditations on the relation between science and religion.
• Everything by Kazuo Ishiguro, especially The Buried Giant, Never Let Me Go, and The Remains of the Day. I know I am several decades late on this one, but holy crap he is an amazing writer (there's a reason he won the Nobel Prize in Literature!). I had to just sit and think for several days after finishing each of his books. I especially liked his play on the fantasy genre in The Buried Giant.

My favorite nonfiction books of the year were:

• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. It's a memoir of her time at various startups and tech companies in Silicon Valley, and it is... uncanny... in how accurately it captures many of my experiences since moving here. It felt like she was spying on me and writing about my life, but in a more literary and insightful way than I ever could.
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. I've read a lot of books about race and racism in the US over the years, but this one approached the topic in a way that was new and eye-opening to me. She opens with the story of how most American towns used to have huge, well-maintained, and popular community pools, but when they were ordered to desegregate they drained the pools rather than integrate, thus making life worse for everyone - even the white people. She then goes on to show that this "drained pool politics" is basically the reason we can't have nice things that other Western countries have, and includes a ton of interesting policy history that I didn't know. She also includes lots of damning studies, like how more segregated cities are also more polluted - when there is a "Black part of town" to put all the factories, power plants, landfills, etc... there isn't much attention paid to mitigating their environmental impact, which results in worse air and water quality for everyone in the city.
• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman. This book is an oral history of an activist group working to end the AIDS epidemic as it was first starting to emerge and be understood. It is fascinating both as a window into a history that I knew very little about, and a manual about how successful social movements happen. ACT UP included everyone from rich white gay men who used their connections to lobby pharmaceutical companies about pricing and clinical trial practices, to poor queer women of color who organized community clinics, needle exchanges, and ad hoc hospice care for AIDS patients, to periodic mass convenings of people that convened on places like the CDC and Catholic churches to protest. Everyone had a role to play based on their skills, resources, and contributions, but the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is ultimately what led to the group's fracturing after several years. It was yet another book where every few pages I learned something new that I couldn't believe I had never been taught or heard of before, which is what makes great nonfiction. The theme of a previously unknown virus causing a pandemic with massive societal repercussions also strongly resonated given the past two years.

This year is off to a rough start with Omicron already having caused one preschool closure, so between that and me having a full-time job I'm not expecting to read as many books in 2022, but here's hoping I still have time for some great ones before the next variant emerges.