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.