2020 was Year 4 of this blog as a dedicated (mostly) book review blog, and year 5 really of my return to reading Science Fiction and Fantasy. It also was a year I spent 6 months at home on furlough from work in Quarantine, like so many other people, and thus had plenty of time for reading. Add in the fact that the number of books I obtained this year through pre-release review copies (ARCs) increased dramatically, and well, I read a LOT this year. So now it's time to recap what I read, where I did well with my reading, and where I could do better - and what has been the best stuff that I've read as a result.
As usual for these recap posts, this series will consist of three posts as follows:
Part 1 (This post) will be a quick summary of what I've read and how that worked out.
Part 2: Will go over my favorite works of the past year.
Part 3: Will go over the works I would recommend NOT reading or that I couldn't finish for various reasons.
So let's begin:
The last two years I've managed to read around 180 novels and about 20 novellas over the course of the year, and I went into 2020 not aiming to surpass that at all: in fact, I expected to hit 150 novels and 20 novellas, as I expended time into fulfilling other resolutions, such as learning Spanish and finding other things to do with my free time. Then well, 2020 happened, and suddenly time was not an issue anymore (although my libraries issuing tighter restrictions on number of holds on their elibraries was a problem).
And so I've now read 220 books this year - around 40 more than I've ever done before and over 30 novellas as well, a 50% increase there. I've done that while also managing to read plenty of books by new authors rather than simply diving into a number of longer series.
Moreover, I've done all that by continuing to find authors who aren't white males, the usual archetype that one thinks of for SF/F authors. I've managed to read a vast majority non-male author base for a few years now and that continues this year, with % of the novels I've read being written by women or non-male authors. Still, I haven't always been satisfied with the number of books I've read by People of Color, although I've improved in this department every year.
This year, I managed to have 44% of the books (97 books in total) I've read be written by POC authors, a ~5% and 27 book improvement on last year. I'm not sure I'll ever do much better than that without reading less books in general and then only focusing on POC authors, which I might do this year without a furlough to increase my reading time, but for now, I feel a little more content. Of course what this means is that anyone whose reading base IS mostly male and near entirely White is really missing out, because I've found some damn good stuff this year by searching out these books that I otherwise might have missed.
Of these books, and removing anthologies, I read 170 authors/combinations of authors this year*, of whom 81 (47.6%) were POC, and 135 were non-male (79.5%), so none of the above numbers came from me reading specific authors a significant amount to inflate the totals (the most of any author I read this year was 5 novels, and in both cases of that it was me binging a single series by an author).
*This count isn't exactly right, since it includes at least a few books cowritten by 2 authors, of whom I've read their works individually also in this year. But I'm not going to separate those out.*.
I also managed to read 31 novellas this year, up from 21 last year, which was a huge increase, but one I was glad of - I love the format and it's only getting more and more popular - and the quality of these novellas is still pretty incredible.
So yeah, I read a lot in 2020, far more than before, and more diverse than before. All in all a very successful year of reading and one I'm quite proud of.
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