putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999
Here was the Mastodon thread of what I read last year. This is the thread of the books I am reading this year. My plan was to read LESS this year than last year and I did a good job. One hundred and fourteen books. I was busier, happier. I think I stubbornly finished every book I started in 2023 although some of them maybe I shouldn’t have. I did lower my “books by men” percentage an amount that felt good. I’ve been actively seeking out non-binary authors and trying to read print a little more.
Here was the twitter thread of what I read last year. I’ll be posting on Mastodon this year instead.Find me there at https://glammr.us/@jessamyn. I read a lot of books this year but in many ways it wasn’t a great year for me (it’s improving) so I have mixed feelings about the sheer length of this list and am hoping to read LESS this year. I started to read 144 books and finished 142 but kept up with a few I maybe shouldn’t have. Here are stats for the books that I finished. Of note is that I’m lumping female and non-binary authors together only because I’m trying to read fewer books by men. I’m also retiring my “people of color/non-Western” category only because it relies too much on surface impressions/names. Continue reading “2022 reading list and commentary”
Here was the twitter thread of what I read last year but I should note, it has two 46es on it. I read about the same this year. I started and finished 115 books. Not bad. One more book got added to my best in show category: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, though I felt like I read a lot of good books this year.
Here are stats for the books that I finished. Continue reading “2021 reading list and commentary”
I’m on a mailing list where we discuss book issues. There are authors, publishers, industry people, and librarians on this list. Recently we’ve been discussing the Internet Archive’s ongoing legal dispute with the AAP (Association of American Publishers). If you recall the Archive made many copyrighted books available on their website via the National Emergency Library (NEL) during COVID. Publishers did not appreciate this and sued them. There has been a lot of paperwork and blog posts going back and forth. Most recently the Archive requested “comps” or sales data for not only the 127 books that the Archive made available that are the core of this suit, but also similar books to get an idea of what sort of market effect the NEL had on these publishers. The publishers pushed back on this claiming “… since books are not fungible widgets [the request] rests on a false premise…. There is no such thing as a ‘comparable book’—even if ‘comparable’ is defined as some undefined period of sales data. Should Catcher in the Rye have similar sales to a bestselling cookbook, no one could plausibly contend the two works were ‘comparable.” I decided to push back a little on this idea, from a librarian perspective and talk about whether books are fungible….
Here was the twitter thread of what I read last year. It was, as you might expect, a weird year. And I read LESS than the year before. Not sure if this is because I had less access to graphic novels, or because I had less time on airplanes, or something else. I started 110 books and finished 109 of them.
Here are stats for the books I finished and I’m adding one more: ebook vs. print book. Obviously they’re both books, but I think it would be nice to track how much I am reading digitally versus in print.
Here are stats for the books that I finished.
average read per month: 9.1
average read per week: 2.1
number read in worst month: 6 (October)
number read in best month: 15 (September)
number unfinished: 1
percentage by male authors: 52%
percentage by female authors: 48%
percentage of authors of color/non-Western: 14%
fiction as percentage of total: 64%
non-fiction as percentage of total: 36%
(many comics compilations in there which are a mix of both)
percentage of total liked: 89%
percentage of total ambivalent: 11%
percentage of total disliked: less than 1%
ebook to book ratio: 1:1
Previous librarian.net summaries: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. The always-updated booklist, going back to 1997, lives at jessamyn.info/booklist and it has its own RSS feed.