Monday, January 4, 2021

2020 book year in review

 Well, 2020 was... a year. I will leave it at that.

Despite everything, I still managed to read 70 books, which was actually slightly up from 2019. Here's the author breakdown:


Female

Male

Trans Man

Grand Total

Asian American

3

3


6

Black

14

6


20

Latinx

2

3


5

Middle Eastern

5

2


7

Multiracial

7

1


8

Native

2



2

White

12

9

1

22

Grand Total

45

24

1

70


I slipped a bit in 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%

2020

66%

Overall

57%


But I improved a bit in racial diversity, and definitely made up for not reading any multiracial authors in 2019:

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%

Overall

3.1%

12.7%

3.4%

4.2%

1.2%

2.3%

72.4%


My favorite novels of the past year were:
  • Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It follows the life stories of many different Black British women who are connected to each other in various ways (e.g. best friends, mothers and daughters, former classmates, etc...). Each story is beautiful in itself, and the way they fit together in increasingly complex patterns is really impressive. I really loved it, and stayed up late reading it because it was hard to put down. It was also interesting to get stories of what it's like to be Black in the UK, since mostly when I read Black authors they are American.
  • Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby. This was the funny, smart but not self-serious book I needed over the summer. I then went out and read everything else by Samantha Irby, who is a national treasure.
My favorite nonfiction books of the year were:
  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. I consider myself fairly well-read about things like the history of segregation in the US, and this book still blew my mind with tons of info I had no idea about. For example, I didn't know that the government often created segregation where it didn't previously exist - there were many meticulously documented examples of government housing projects destroying successfully integrated working-class communities to build either all-white suburbs or all-Black slums, and legally preventing people of the other race from returning to their former home. His central argument is that federal, state, and local governments played an active role in creating and deepening residential segregation for most of the 20th century in violation of the 14th amendment, and so the government has a constitutional requirement to rectify the segregation that exists today as a direct result of their actions. Now if only we lived in a world where that was actually likely to happen...
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book since I'm not usually an outdoors person, but the rapturous way she writes about nature and ecology made me want to go live on a farm. Her writing is beautiful and she weaves lessons about life into the lessons from the plants. Her writing about motherhood resonated a lot too.
  • Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. This was another fun read for my pandemic-addled mind. There were lots of random insights that crystallized things I'd noticed but never quite put together - e.g. emojis serve the same role in written communication that gestures do in verbal communication. I also learned the term "familect" for the unique dialect spoken within a family, which as a family with a newly-verbal toddler we have a lot of.
I am trying to have no expectations or predictions about 2021, but hopefully a year from now I will at least have read some more good books to report back on.

1 comment:

  1. Hi,
    I stumbled upon your blog through a bookmark and love your book recommendations. I like the focus on reading diverse authors and it made me introspect my reading habits. I would love if you could share the list of books you read in 2020. I am currently reading, Wow, No Thank You.

    ReplyDelete