Books Read in 2016

So in the end, I finished 45 books in 2016:

1. Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
2. Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer
3. The Planet Mappers by E. Everett Evans
4. Adventures in Academic Cartography by Mark Monmonier
5. Arguably: Selected Essays by Christopher Hitchens
6. My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offutt
7. Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
8. Persona by Genevieve Valentine
9. China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps edited by Natasha Reichle
10. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
11. Snakes of the Southeast (revised edition) by Whit Gibbons and Mike Dorcas
12. Wings of Sorrow and Bone by Beth Cato
13. Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
14. The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
15. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
16. Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen
17. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
18. Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler
19. Company Town by Madeline Ashby
20. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
21. The Usual Path to Publication edited by Shannon Page
22. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
23. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
24. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente
25. The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente
26. Ventriloquism by Catherynne M. Valente
27. Necessity by Jo Walton
28. Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
29. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
30. Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
31. Not So Much, Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick
32. Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
33. The Man Who Made Models by R. A. Lafferty
34. Shoot the Moon by Nicolas Dupont-Bloch
35. Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente
36. Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling
37. Updraft by Fran Wilde
38. The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs by David Hone
39. Invisible Planets edited by Ken Liu
40. Bridging Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan
41. The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe
42. Treasures from the Map Room edited by Debbie Hall
43. The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel
44. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
45. The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain

(Links are to my reviews.)

I like to track what and how much I read. It amuses me to crunch the numbers, but most of you will be bored stiff by what follows.

Statistics

Figure 1: Books read, 2011-2016.

Forty-five books is roughly in line with how much I’ve read in previous years. (I don’t know how I managed to read so much in 2012 and 2013.)

Figure 2: Breakdown of books read, 2016.

Figure 3: My reading trends, 2011-2016.

I track things like format, subject, and gender of author, as well as whether I bought the book, took it out of the library, or got it as a review copy. As far as those things were concerned, there were three firsts in 2016:

1. A majority of the books I read were written or edited by women. (Over the past five years I averaged around 40 percent.)
2. A majority were ebooks rather than paper. (This is thanks in part to electronic review copies — mostly from NetGalley — which comprised just over half of the ebooks I read.)
3. Books I actually paid for made up less than half the books I read. (The rest were library and review copies; my library use was typical, but my review copies quadrupled — NetGalley again.)

Goals for 2017

I always aim to read more than I end up reading, but there are a couple of things I want to aim for, reading-wise, in 2017:

Read more for pleasure. I’m not by nature a close or careful reader, so reading a book I know I’ll be reviewing takes more time and effort. My reading for pleasure suffered as a result, though I could have easily tucked more of it in between reviews. So I’ll try to do more of that this year.

Read more nonfiction. Something like two thirds of what I read is science fiction or fantasy, but I enjoy nonfiction just as much. (It’s also less effort for the pleasure: for some reason nonfiction is easier for me to read.) I’m very much plugged into the sf scene and there’s real pressure for me to stay current, which tends to crowd out the other books on my to-read stack. Must fix that.