This is way past the time of year when I normally look back at my reading from the previous year. Maybe we can pretend this whole first quarter of 2020 didn’t happen? I’m still putting this up here, for my own feeling of completion and accountability if nothing else.
2019 Overview
I logged 235 books this year, finished 227, reviewed 58, and rated 15 9 or higher. All my numbers, especially books reviewed and rated 9 or higher, are significantly down from last year.
How I read
I read a little more in print, a lot more graphic novels, and listened to fewer audiobooks.
85% reading from the library is up 2% from last year. Exciting changes here, folks!
What I Read
Massive gains in realistic fiction here – up to 23% from 9% the previous year. Poor sci-fi is languishing far behind, tying with nonfiction.
Middle grade is down, adult is the same as last year, with gains in teen and of course early chapter books, because I did a presentation on them.
The Authors
35% of my reading by authors and illustrators of color! Even if this graph is still mostly white, this is a big personal accomplishment.
Last year I had a cool map of author nationality here. Google sheets made me the nice little map again, but saved it without the data. Figuring it out isn’t my top priority here, so I’ll just say that I read books by authors from 17 countries, with American authors followed unsurprisingly by those from the UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland, in that order.
This is reading more books with multiple authors of different genders – a lower percentage of just female, but the same of just male authors. I could do more work on reading trans and nonbinary.
The Characters
As I gravitate towards books with characters of color on the cover, my percentage of books about white people has drifted below 50% for the first time. “Mixed” includes both multiracial characters and stories where the POV alternates between characters of different ethnicities.
This started trying to track LGBTQ characters and has expanded to looking for any kind of diversity (or not) that isn’t covered by ethnicity. Lots of middle grade books don’t have any hint of sexual orientation, which is why “n/a” is so high. Muslim made the chart for the first time, and AI is holding on to a tiny share.
I’ve been doing these graphs for several years now – here they are from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. As always, if you know of any books that seem up my alley – specifically the middle grade and/or fantasy alley – that would help me round things out as far as LGBTQ, Native authors, and authors outside the US or UK, please do let me know! And I hope to be back with more book suggestions for those of you in quarantine soon!
alibrarymama 
It’s a nice change of pace to see a 2019 wrap up at this time of year, haha. I may have already recommended this to you but if not: The Ghost Collector by Allison Mills is an Indigenous (Cree) #ownvoices book about a girl and her grandmother who help ghosts move on.
Thank you, Jenna! That sounds excellent!
I am so impressed by your pie charts!
Thank you! They’re actually really easy to do with Google sheets – just highlight a column and tell it to make a graph out of it.
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