I always seem to be running behind in January – this is where my Monday, Wednesday, Friday posting schedule really makes things challenging.  But I’m not willing to give up any of my New Year’s content, so here I am in the middle of January just getting ready to start my three-part 2018 reading retrospective.  These are some of my favorite posts to write.  I love looking back on the year in books, thinking about the things I read, and wondering what’s ahead of me.

Enough prelude – here’s my 2018 in books, by the numbers.

30,000 Foot View

According to my reading trackers, I read 113 books in 2018, for a total of 29,844 pages.  Considering I was hoping to read fewer books last year – I’d set a goal of 52 books, in hopes of getting to some of the dense or long classics I’ve been wanting to read – 2018 didn’t exactly go according to plan.

 

The longest book I read in 2018 was Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner, which clocked in at 569 pages.  (That’s a light one for me.  I usually have at least one 800+ page chunkster.)  The shortest book was Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, at a slim 63 pages – but what a punch those 63 pages packed.

Who Gets The Big Piece?

Pie chart time!  Please bear with me.  I love geeking out about my past year in reading, and making pie charts is the geekiest geeking out I can think of to do.

Fiction/Nonfiction

Starting with the simplest chart: in 2018, out of 113 books read – 59 were fiction, 49 were nonfiction, and five were poetry.  I don’t have too much to say about this chart, except that I apparently read a lot of nonfiction this year.  I enjoy well-written nonfiction, but I’m usually much more of a fiction reader, so I was a little surprised to see how close they were to even this year.  (I suspect that 2019 will be a reversion to my usual splits, and next year’s pie chart in this category will be a lot more lopsided towards fiction.  It’s just what I’m craving at the moment and I don’t anticipate that changing much.)  Also – five books of poetry, who dis?

 

Format

This one was less of a surprise: my reading was heavily weighted toward physical books this year.  I like my kindle, but I just don’t reach for it all that much, and I almost never read on my phone – it gives me terrible headaches.  This chart would be even more heavily weighted toward physical books if I hadn’t broken out journals and graphic novels, all of which were physical bound volumes as well.  Finally, only two audiobooks – I guess I was really more into podcasts this year.  That will probably change in 2019, because I’m going to have to drive to work when the metro closes down for several months this summer, and I predict several audiobooks during that time.

 

Source of Book

Here’s another one that surprised me with how even it was.  In 2018, apparently, I read 58 books from the library and 47 from my own shelves (and a handful of others that I sourced from Audible, kindle, and one lonely iPhone app book – which I believe was poetry, so I could dip in and out of it and not have to stare at the phone for long periods of time).  I’m normally a very heavy library user, so it is quite surprising – and gratifying – to discover just how much I read from my own shelves in 2018.

 

Fiction Genres

Always a busy chart!  I read a lot of different fiction genres this year, as usual.  And as usual, my heaviest categories are classics (my favorite) and literary fiction.  For good measure, I tossed in some gentle fiction, some general fiction, a few mysteries, some short stories and YA, some science fiction and fantasy, and one lonely historical fiction book.  (I’m always shocked at how small the historical fiction category is.  I think the explanation is that I read a lot of books set in the past, but most fit into another genre or category, and I always seem to lump them in the other genre.  There are very few pure historical fiction genre books in my reading in a given year.)

Nonfiction Genres

Another wide-ranging category.  I read some great nonfiction this year!  As usual, memoir was my biggest category, but I’m gratified to see books about books in second place!  I also read a lot of essays this year, it appears, and quite a few books about history and current events – not surprising, given how crazy the world is right now.  Next year I’d love to see the nature category grow – I really enjoy nature writing, and I would like to read more of it.

Settings

This chart looks pretty typical for me.  Every year, the USA and England are fighting it out for top billing on my settings chart – this year, the USA won, but England was a fairly close second.  Everything else is way behind, but I did range over a fairly wide swath of territory in my reading this year – all over Africa (I read books set in South Africa, Egypt, Rwanda, Nigeria and a collection of short stories with writers hailing from all over the continent), some in South America, some in the Middle East, some fictional words and – again – one lone book set in outer space.  (That would be Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente, which will be on my top ten list on Friday – spoiler!  I considered putting Rocket Men in the outer space category too, since part of the book does take place on Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, but since most of the action takes place in the United States, it’s in the USA slice of the pie.)

Sex of Author

As usual, I read mostly women – 70 women, compared with 33 men.  And you know what?  I’m A-Okay with that and 100% plan to keep it up.  (The third category is “various authors,” and comprised mostly of Slightly Foxed quarterlies, plus a couple of short story collections to which both men and women contributed.)

Diversity

For the third year in a row, I tracked diversity in my books.  Ever year, I am looking for 33% or more of my books to come from diverse or underrepresented groups or “own voices.”  This year I read 41 diverse books out of a total of 113 – so I squeaked past my goal with 36% diverse books.  Not quite as good as last year, but a decent effort.  It’s become second nature to me, after three years of tracking diversity in my reading, to seek out books by people of color, disabled people, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ authors, and I am so glad I have taken this effort on.  I’m actually not going to track diversity in 2019, because I want to just drift through my shelves and read whatever looks good in the moment without worrying about totals of any kind.  But I suspect that my reading will still be fairly diverse, because I’ve grown so used to seeking those voices out.

Diverse Groups

As usual, out of the diverse books I read, the majority were by African-American authors, with a large chunk that I’ve called “African Disapora” – meaning, people of African descent living elsewhere in the world, whether in African countries, in Europe, etc.  Those seem to be the voices I gravitate to the most.  A few other observations: I didn’t read any books by Native Americans or First Nations authors this year, which is disappointing.  And the LGBTQ+ category is bigger than it appears, since quite a few of the books in the “multiple” category are books in which either the author is both LGBTQ+ and a person of color, or they are collections of essays or short stories with authors from all different groups, including LGBTQ+ people.  I always pay attention to that community, because it’s really important to me to be a good ally – I want to be a good ally to everyone, of course, but I have a lot of friends in the LGBTQ+ community and I try extremely hard to support them.

There we have it!  A darn decent year of reading, if I do say so myself – even if I failed miserably in my attempt to read fewer books in 2018.  We all knew that was a pipe dream, didn’t we?  Coming up on Friday, my top ten books of 2018.  It’s going to be hard to choose, because I read so many good ones last year!

How did you do on your reading goals in 2018?