This year I read 73 books, which is a lot! Last year I read 58 and my average for the previous decade of reading was 52 books per year. This is the second-most books I’ve read in a year (the most is 90), beating out 2015’s 71 books.
- Page count: 23,510. Interestingly, this is only about 1,300 more pages than last year, so I read a lot more books this year but they were shorter.
- Library use: 30 of this year’s 73 books were from the library. I did start the year trying to read through books I already own, but the allure of the library is strong, especially because I have made it a weekly custom to ride my bike to the local branch.
- Female/male authors: 58 books by women authors, 3 books with multiple authors that included men and women, and 12 just men. That means about 80% of the books I read this year were written by women, even excluding the mixed-gender authors.
- Digital and analog: 42 ebooks, 31 paper books. ebooks are more convenient, especially when traveling or lounging in the bath, but I still enjoy paper books.
- Fiction and non-fiction: 42 fiction, 31 non-fiction. I read a lot more non-fiction this year. I’m preoccupied with the world and what’s happening in it. I’m reading for the revolution.
- Books in other languages: just one, though I started and abandoned several. 2020 may be more fruitful on this front.
- Favorites: This is a lot of favorites, but I have good taste so it makes sense that a lot of the books I read would be that good. Looking at my list, I want to recommend almost everything as a favorite but I kept it to just these 10.
- The novel that reminds you to be hopeful and fight for what’s important in these bullshit times: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
- The fascinating sci-fi read with a new concept: Semiosis by Sue Burke
- The academic version of talking about how shitty facebook is: Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan
- The one about how artificial intelligence and big tech companies could fuck everything up: The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb
- The one about how stupid AI is and how it won’t be taking over anytime soon: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane
- The gift of time-traveling lesbians writing letters to each other: This is How you Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- The story of magic gay men fighting the system: Witchmark by C. L. Polk
- The one with lesbian necromancers that you won’t be able to stop reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
- The data about how women are excluded from most research that impacts us that will piss you off: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
- The feminist manifesto that will make you want to burn it all down: The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy
And now for the list!
| Date Finished | Title | Author |
| 1/1/19 | Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism | Nadya Tolokonnikova |
| 1/8 | Cold Steel | Kate Elliott |
| 1/10 | Crow After Roe: How “Separate But Equal” Has Become the New Standard In Women’s Health And How We Can Change That | Robin Marty and Jessica Mason Pieklo |
| 1/15 | Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win | Clara Zetkin |
| 1/17 | She Would Be King | Weyétu Moore |
| 1/28 | Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession | Alice Bolin |
| 2/2 | The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption | Kathryn Joyce |
| 2/4 | My Sister, the Serial Killer | Oyinkan Braithwaite |
| 2/18 | The Mortal World | Genevieve Cogman |
| 2/19 | The Third Hotel | Laure Van den Berb |
| 2/21 | Roller Girl | Victoria Jamieson |
| 2/24 | Tomorrow’s Kin | Nancy Kress |
| 3/7 | If Tomorrow Comes | Nancy Kress |
| 3/18 | Terran Tomorrow | Nancy Kress |
| 3/21 | The Light Brigade | Kameron Hurley |
| 3/21 | Brillant Imperfection | Eli Clare |
| 4/2 | The Raven Tower | Ann Leckie |
| 4/9 | Semiosis | Sue Burke |
| 4/12 | Vox | Christina Dalcher |
| 4/26 | Lost Children Archive: A Novel | Valeria Luiselli |
| 4/29 | How Long ’til Black Future Month | N. K. Jemisin |
| 5/1 | Handbook for a Post-Roe America | Robin Marty |
| 5/8 | A Memory Called Empire | Arkady Martine |
| 5/13 | Wild Seed | Octavia Butler |
| 5/15 | The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy | Anna Clark |
| 5/24 | Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in your Car, and Food on Your Plate | Rose George |
| 5/26 | Mind of My Mind | Octavia Butler |
| 5/31 | I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life | Ed Yong |
| 6/1 | El Espejo Enterrado | Carlos Fuentes |
| 6/5 | Circe | Madeline Miller |
| 6/13 | The Collected Schizophrenias | Esmé Weijun Wang |
| 6/20 | The Night Tiger | Yangsze Choo |
| 6/22 | Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects us and Undermines Democracy | Siva Vaidhyanathan |
| 6/26 | Mother of Eden | Chris Beckett |
| 6/29 | Daughter of Eden | Chris Beckett |
| 7/4 | The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity | Amy Webb |
| 7/6 | The Water Cure | Sopihe Mackintosh |
| 7/13 | Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch | Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett |
| 7/16 | The Black God’s Drums | P. Djèlí Clark |
| 7/23 | Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Caroline Criado Perez |
| 7/24 | Storm of Locusts | Rebecca Roanhorse |
| 7/27 | This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal el-Mohtar, Max Gladstone |
| 8/1 | How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy | Jenny Odell |
| 8/10 | Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language | Gretchen McCulloch |
| 8/13 | Late in the Day: A Novel | Tessa Hadley |
| 8/15 | Witchmark | C.L. Polk |
| 8/23 | Confessions of the Fox | Jordy Rosenberg |
| 8/26 | Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard | Leah Hayes |
| 9/17 | House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia | Craig Unger |
| 9/17 | Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
| 9/20 | Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America | Kathleen Belew |
| 9/22 | The Testaments | Margaret Atwood |
| 9/27 | Inland | Téa Obreht |
| 10/4 | The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election | Malcolm Nance |
| 10/14 | The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls | Mona Eltahawy |
| 10/23 | New Suns: Original Speculative fiction by People of Color | Nisi Shawl (editor) |
| 10/29 | Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past | Sarah Parcak |
| 11/4 | Burial Rights: A Novel | Hannah Kent |
| 11/9 | Interference | Sue Burke |
| 11/11 | In the Dream House: A Memoir | Carmen Maria Machado |
| 11/16 | A Jewel Bright Sea | Claire O’Dell |
| 11/19 | Magic for Liars | Sarah Gailey |
| 11/23 | Silent Spring | Rachel Carson |
| 11/26 | The Ten Thousand Doors of January | Alix E. Harrow |
| 11/30 | Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have | Tatiana Schlossberg |
| 12/9 | Threads of Life: A History of the World through the Eye if a Needle | Clare Hunter |
| 12/10 | You Have the Right to Remain Fat: A Manifesto | Virgie Tovar |
| 12/16 | All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator | Barry Levine and Monique el-Faizy |
| 12/20 | You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place | Janelle Shane |
| 12/23 | How to Be an Antiracist | Ibram X. Kendi |
| 12/26 | Gideon the Ninth | Tamsyn Muir |
| 12/28 | ALL SYSTEMS RED | Martha Wells |
| 12/30 | Artificial Condition | Martha Wells |
