2017 Reading Recap!!!

Happy New Year! Another year, another bunch of cold, hard numbers to try to corral my highly subjective and unpredictable reading. I know this annual summary is only of personal interest, so don't torture yourself if numbers aren't your jam. To start: I read 92 books this year, 45 of them novels. Some 40 were by female authors and 52 were by male writers, but if like Virginia Woolf and me, you too believe that Shakespeare's plays were written by his sister, then those numbers would be reversed. Seventeen of the books I read were translated and 18 (20%) were by writers of color. Reasonable numbers for me. Spreading my reading around, I read 19 works of nonfiction, though many were probably either biographies of writers or commentary on race relations in America. On the fiction front, I read about 30 classics (counting modern classics: Woolf, Beckett, Orwell, Toni Morrison, etc.), which is kind of a lot! There were 8 short story collections, 12 plays, but only 6 volumes of poetry, which was a bit disappointing. This really wasn't a good poetry stretch for me. I have to be in a certain mood to read poetry and that frame of mind was lacking this year. I'll try to redeem myself by saying that reading Shakespeare is a lot like reading poetry, and I did read 10 of his plays. Many more than I thought myself capable! For me, it seemed more of an intellectual reading year than an emotional reading year, and that's not really where I want to be. Hoping for more emotion in 2018, and obviously the surest way to do that is to start January reading about a small town of Brits in 1959. What could go wrong? Well, that's enough for the numbers. A list of my most interesting reads of 2017 is forthcoming. as well as a review of the aforementioned The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Hope 2018 is your best year ever!  🐢