Wrapping Up

As the year nears its close, I thought I'd get a head start on the posts one tends to see in bookish and library-related circles detailing the books that were read over the year. (My last year's note is here.)

I'm not going to list all the titles, because that would be a lot of copying and pasting, but I can say that so far I have read 106 books in the course of 2011. This is precisely twice as many as in 2010!

I can't really say why that is, since I haven't been working extra hard to double up on my reading, nor have I intentionally cut back on my consumption of other media such as blogs, magazines, newspapers and video games.

I think I have watched somewhat fewer movies recently than in the past, since I don't seem to be in the free screenings loop quite as often, and we switched to the streaming-only package from Netflix, meaning that we don't get regular DVDs in the mail that then sit around all brightly in their red wrappers waiting for us to play them. Still, most of my reading is done on the train during my commute, so I'm not sure how huge an impact that has.

Anyway, of these 106 books, 56 were fiction, and 50 were non-fiction, so I'm keeping things fairly balanced in that department.

Of the total, 38 were by male writers, 65 were by female writers, and three were collections featuring both male and female writers (all three with female editors).

I went on a pretty serious Brontë/Austen kick over the summer, catching up on some classics I hadn't gotten around to reading before, and that increases the count for both women and fiction. This is clearly reflected in the numbers when I break it down by fiction/nonfiction and male/female: 41 fiction books by women (or with a woman editor in two cases), compared to only 15 by men.

In nonfiction, 27 books were authored (or edited in one case) by women, and 23 by men, so apparently this year I prefer tall tales from women, but am willing to accept my facts more or less equally from writers of either gender.

I would like to thank my iPod Touch, on which I read a number of these as ebooks (tiny screen is a bit squint-inducing, but super convenient for travel), and of course my local public library, from which I checked out the majority of the remainder.

In conclusion...mmm...I dunno. I read a fair amount, I guess, and moderately broadly. I'm not sure there's anything of broad interest to be discovered here.

In conclusion, write better fiction, guys!

Ha, just kidding. It's not your fault you're not a Brontë or Jane Austen. Maybe 2012 will be all Mark Twain.