Reading Recap 2018

Happy New Year! Hope you all had a good reading year in 2018 and have an even better year in 2019. Here's the usual caveat for this annual post -- this is all numbers and all mostly only interesting to me (me! me! me!), just so I can keep track of my year's reading and look back in the future. Please don't waste your time indulging my narcissism if you're not in the mood for digits. Rather than more apologies, off we go! I set a personal reading record this year, with 121 books read -- which included a couple of graphic novels and many, many novellas. Accordingly, I didn't set a record for pages read. I was feeling kind of beat up by big books this year and found my happiness in reading shorter books. May be just the right idea for you if you're in a reading slump or a book rut. Counting those novellas, I read 77 novels. Also 18 short story collections and four books of poetry. Good on the stories, bad on the poems. No plays, which is a bit disappointing. There were 18 books of nonfiction, which is fine but never one of my priorities. I read about 20 classics, maybe a few more or less depending on your definition of that hazy category. I think of myself as a "classics" reader, but maybe not so much, eh? Moving on to the authors, I read 75 books by women and 44 books by men, which is a disproportion I didn't expect. I guess I have much more catching up to do on female writers, which probably isn't that unusual. Twenty-nine books were by writers of color, which is about average for me, and 23 books were translated from languages other than English. All in all a good reading year, which I'm happy with, enjoyed, and am hoping to build on for an even better year in 2019. Happy Reading!  🐢