2018 Year in Review - SciFi/Fantasy Reading, Part 1: Basic Summary

This is the second year I've mainly run this blog as a book review site, and it's been a long and productive one.  As with last year, I'll be doing a recap in this first week of 2019 of the books I read and reviewed in 2018, with the recap split into three parts:

Part 1, which you're reading at this very moment, features a summary of what I've read and some basic facts.  Part 2, which will come out tonight, will go over some of my favorite novels from this year.  Part 3, coming out after that, will go over briefly my least favorite works - the novels I completed and didn't like and the ones that I began but failed to complete.  The good news is that the # of books I didn't like was more or less equal to last year...except that I read over 30 more books in total!  So 2018 was pretty damn good.

More in depth basic summary information of what I read after the jump:




Last year I managed to read 149 books over the calendar year, and I had set a goal of hitting 150 for this year.  I managed to hit that goal in November, and managed to total 182 books by the end of December 31 - as well as 20 Novellas.  A lot of this was due to me practically dropping most of the podcasts I listened to last year in favor of just going full on into audiobooks.  The result is that I managed to finish about 3/4 audiobooks per month instead of 1-2, which is a full 10-20 more books right there.  Still, I was also a bit more productive in November and December than ever before at reading books, in large part due to feeling sick - something that kept me from doing much other than reading.  So I'm not sure I'll sustain this pace in 2019, but even if I drop back to around 160-170 books read next year, I'll be pretty happy with that.

Again for the second year in a row I managed to read far more books by authors who as far as I can tell identify as women* or at least as not-male than by male authors.   The overall numbers seem to be as follows:

*It's possible I am accidentally misgendering an author here or there in my accounting and for that I apologize, as it's not an author's job or responsibility to gender themselves to a reader and so I have to make some assumptions for certain authors.  

133 Books written solely by women (73%)
6 Books written by a mix of women and men (3%)
43 Books written solely by men (24%)

In terms of reading books from Non-White viewpoints, I wasn't as successful last year, and this year I did a little better.*  Last year 20% (30/149) of books I read were from Non-White authors, and this year I managed to up that percentage to 28%, reading 51 books written solely by People of Color.  It's still not good enough to make me satisfied, but it's an improvement, and I managed to do this by reading more authors as well - whereas last year, a bunch of the books I read by POC were attributable to the same couple of authors, this year I managed to genuinely hit a greater # of authors, some of whom were very pleasant surprises indeed.

*For those who think it doesn't matter, or that doing so is simply an exercise in PC, you're very definitely wrong.  Works written by people of different viewpoints - and WOC have a different view of the world from White writers - are often very different in substance.  This doesn't make them by default BETTER, but it does make them at worst a change of pace and often very interesting, and sometimes amazing.  It kind of defeats the purpose of reading lots of works if you're always reading the same thing, and reading diverse viewpoints allows you to be frequently reading things that feel fresh and more unique.  

Overall, the breakdown of books as far as I can tell - and it's possible I'm misclassifying a book or two, as I know I did at least one book last year - is as follows:

126 Books by White Authors
20 Books by Asian Authors
20 Books by Black Authors
4 Books by Hispanic/Latin Authors
4 Books by Middle Eastern/Indian Authors
3 Books by Native Authors
(5 Books were by a mix of authors of various backgrounds)

If you were wondering whether reading a more diverse group of books affected my enjoyment in a significant way, the answer appears to be: not really on a micro level - last year I averaged a 7.65 score on the books I reviewed, and this year I averaged a 7.70, a marginal improvement.  That said, I found a lot of books that were different than other books that I'd read in the past in this way, and I derived a good deal of satisfaction from that personally - these books aren't necessarily better or worse, just different, and I'm happy to have experienced that.  I also only failed to finish five books, which is slightly above last year's rate but not by much (incidentally all 5 were by White authors), so it was a pretty successful year.

Next Post will deal with the books I liked the most of the past year and some of my favorite characters of the year.