2014 in Books

I’ve been having a hard time keeping up with blogging lately, but it wouldn’t be the new year without my annual stats-about-books post! As I said two years ago,

I keep track because I enjoy making lists and graphs, and because it gives me something nerdy to do every New Year’s Eve. Sort of a tradition, I guess.  What I’m trying to say is, I’m not really competing with anyone, even myself — I just find it interesting to see what my reading does, and I like aiming for goals, especially when it comes to reading. This is kind of like the grown-up version of libraries’ summer reading programs for kids, only instead of earning prizes I earn… er… graphs!

(In honor of all of the thousands hundreds dozens absolutely zero readers who enjoy these posts, I thought I’d link to previous years. Sate yourself on 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. I also keep a complete list of all books read since I started keeping track here.)

As usual, I’ve only counted books that I completed — well, there are a couple of books in here that I almost completed, but they were nonfiction books with a chapter or two that I skipped due to irrelevance. I count picture books if they have plot, but they only count once, and a lot of times I forget to record them so that’s an inexact statistic.

So with no further ado: the 2014 book post!

Looking back at the books I read in 2014, I see some trends or themes emerge.

First, I returned to some friendly author-voices. I had paused in reading The Hollows series by Kim Harrison, and in the second half of this year I got caught up with all but the final book in the series. I also found another series by Elizabeth Moon and enjoyed them as well. I spent some time with guilty-pleasures Laurell Hamilton and J.R. Ward, too.

Second, there’s a fair amount of YA in there — shock and surprise, coming from a middle school librarian — including some series that I really liked (Jennifer Nielsen’s Ascendance trilogy, Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the beginning of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series, the continuance of Kiera Cass’s Selection series), some graphic novels, and some “older kid” picture books.

If I disregard series, my Best of 2014 were probably Styxx by Sherrilyn Kenyon (yes, technically part of a series, but works as a standalone), The Midnight Library by Kazuno Kohara, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

Something for everyone there: award-winning historical fiction, magic realism, R-rated paranormal fantasy, and a picture book.

In 2014, I read a grand total of 100 books (and to quote last year’s post, “not including unfinished books, plotless picture books, and a ridiculous amount of non-book online reading because let’s face it, an iPhone is easier to read than a novel when you’re nursing wrangling a toddler”). For the first time in a while, January wasn’t my best month; I read the most pages in June, which makes a heck of a lot more sense, really. I had a serious dip in the fall, which coincides with the start of school and a lot more stress than usual due to training a new staff (and, as previously stated, wrangling a toddler).

After skipping the genre breakdown last year because it was such a pain in the butt, I decided to beef up my Excel spreadsheet. Now it all but does the breakdown for me. Each book that I read could be categorized in up to three genres, allowing for a more accurate portrayal of what sort of things I was actually reading.

Yay pie charts!

Lots of kid stuff (picture books and MG/YA), lots of fantasy — especially when you consider I usually tried not to categorize a book as both fantasy and urban fantasy.

And because I really love my charts and graphs and data and other such nonsense, here is FIVE years of data for your viewing pleasure. I can tell how titillated you are from here.

 

 

In those last two — the line charts — 2014 is the blue line, so you can see that I ended up pretty much right in the middle. 2011 was a big year for reading but then again, 2011 was a long time before I had kids or a new line of work!

So what’s next? I have just picked up Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, which is a nonfiction book relating his efforts to build a simple reading and writing hut on his property. This is a major daydream of mine, and he has a pretty accessible reading style, so even though I’m usually a lightweight fantasy reader in the darker months I think I’m going to enjoy this. I also want to read two of the books my book club recently read (I’m on a book club hiatus): Eli Brown’s Cinnamon and Gunpowder and Graeme Simison’s The Rosie Project. Graeme is an awfully cool way to spell Graham. Apparently he’s a kiwi. Might explain it. (Shoot — is it okay to call people from New Zealand kiwis? That’s not derogative, is it?) I want to read John Scalzi’s Lock In but may want to save it for my Triumphant Return to book club. I also am looking forward to reading the next book in a few different series: The Witch with No Name (last book in The Hollows), Skin Game (book 15 in The Dresden Files) and Immortal (book 6 in the Fallen Angels series). I’d also like to read some of the books I nibbled at or sniffed around last year, like Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, 11/22/63, The Book of Deadly Animals, and Behind the Beautiful Forevers (another potential book club pick).  

And there are many, many more — especially the not-yet-published new additions to Kiera Cass’s and Sarah Maas’s series.

I initially set a goal of 52 books for 2013 and ended up surpassing it in May, then reset to 100 and almost didn’t make it in time. (I finished book #100 with only seven minutes to spare in 2014, and had to include two books that I only read because my homework forced me to read them!) I think I’m going to split the difference for this year and set a goal of 75 books. I can always add to it if things go well, right? 🙂 If you like books and stats well enough to have read this far, then you should definitely do the Goodreads challenge with me.

What did you read this year? Any great recommendations? What’s on your to-read list? I’d love to know!
   

Reading Update #20

 

Reading Update: Today is Wednesday, May 21. As of today, I have read 52 books and got myself one of these thingamajiggers:

Which, of course, is just patently silly. Obviously when I set this goal I wasn’t taking picture books into consideration! So I guess I’m going to go ahead and change my goal… hold that thought…

Okay. That’s better.

Since last week, I read the following books:

All of the above were fewer than fifty pages in length. (I’ve been reading a couple of big fat books, too, but just haven’t finished them.) With the exception of The Night Bookmobile, they’re all children’s picture books.

Listen to the Wind is a kid’s adaptation of the Three Cups of Tea story. I always kind of look askance at Greg Mortenson stuff, after all the scandal and whatnot, but the artwork in this picture book blew me away. Plus, if you take the discrepancies and financial indiscretions off the table, Mortenson’s story really is inspirational and has a great sort of message for young readers. This book is obviously a vast over-simplification of the whole tale, but worthwhile and a good adaptation.

Henry’s Heart is a densely assembled nonfiction-ish picture book about the human circulatory system. It’s awfully cute and would be a big hit with little kids with an interest in science and medicine. It’s not a great read-aloud book because of the non-linear writing (lots of sidebars) but a lot of children would get a kick out of poring over all the little details. I think it would also be a good supplemental text or something for a health class!

I quite liked Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated. It’s exactly the sort of storybook I would have adored as a child. Just a sweet little fairy tale, with endearing illustrations and the sort of less-than-perfect ending that appeals to me.

My Name is Sangoel is the story of a refugee boy who struggles to find a way to maintain his identity after moving to America. None of the people he meets in America can pronounce his name, until he comes up with a clever way to bridge the language gap. It is sweet and simple, and would be a terrific book to share with young students who have classmates from other countries.

I really loved the artwork and text design in Mermaid Queen: The Spectacular True Story Of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way To Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History! It’s another nonfiction picture book and tells an abbreviated version of Annette Kellerman’s life. I wish that it had gone into a little bit more detail about her early medical problems; I think most young readers will miss entirely the fact that she was (initially) disabled.

Then there’s The Night Bookmobile. Oomph. That’s the sound of being kicked in the stomach. On the one hand, this book was SO good. I loved the concept of the Bookmobile and the Library, and the protagonist’s yearning for the Bookmobile resonated deeply with me. I’m sure it would with any lover of stories. But the resolution? The protagonist’s choice? The way she let her desire for something unattainable ruin all of the many good things in her real life? Ugh. This book falls in the unhappy category of being one I would recommend to tons of people, except for the fact that I can’t, because it would feel too much like an endorsement of something reprehensible. Pooh.

Finally we have Extra Yarn, which was so very nice. I love Klassen’s artwork, obviously, but I also loved the story and its adaptable metaphor — for happiness, kindness, love, you pick ’em. Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Currently Reading: Here, let me just copy and paste exactly what I wrote last week for this section.

I have Possession (book 5 in the Fallen Angels series, a dreadful guilty pleasure of mine) for on-the-road, and a MASSIVE copy of the first volume of The Absolute Sandman at home. It stays safely at home because it’s the public library’s, and I don’t want anything to happen to it (as it’s rather wildly expensive) and it seems like it might be somewhat safer there.

Ta-da!

Looking Ahead: I don’t even know. Ha! I guess we’ll see what strikes my fancy next after I finally finish these other two behemoths.

 

2013 in Books

Last year I correctly predicted that 2013 wouldn’t exactly be a banner year in terms of reading, as I would have my hands full of BABY starting in late April (or, as it turned out, early May). Acknowledging that my page counts were going to take a hit, I said,

I keep track because I enjoy making lists and graphs, and because it gives me something nerdy to do every New Year’s Eve. Sort of a tradition, I guess.  What I’m trying to say is, I’m not really competing with anyone, even myself — I just find it interesting to see what my reading does, and I like aiming for goals, especially when it comes to reading. This is kind of like the grown-up version of libraries’ summer reading programs for kids, only instead of earning prizes I earn… er… graphs!

And despite having my hands full, I managed to meet my (more modest) reading goal and earned myself some graphs! Before we get to all that graphy goodness, though, a few things:

• I only count books that I completed (and this year was replete with abandoned books, often through no fault of their own)
• I count picture books if they have something akin to a plot, but am pretty sure I forgot to include a few that I read in the bleary early days of motherhood
• You can see the complete list of all 2013 books, with links to their Goodreads pages, for a few more days before I archive it
• You can see a complete list of all books read since I started keeping track, which will include 2013’s books by the end of the day, any time you’d like

Okay, with no further ado… my 2013 reading review!

This year’s reading was inspired by different aspects of my life. I read some birth/parenting books, although fewer than one might expect, some books motivated by my work as a high school English teacher, and some books motivated by my new work as a middle school librarian. I read seven books for book club (would have been more, but I’d already read some of them): Girl in Translation, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Bossypants, Jacob Have I Loved, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I read some books to and for my kidlet, several for the fun of it, and a couple out of stubbornness.

I think the best books I read this year were The Ocean at the End of the Lane and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. They head up a short list of favorites:

In 2013, I read a grand total of 68 books (not including unfinished books, plotless picture books, and a ridiculous amount of non-book online reading because let’s face it, an iPhone is easier to read than a novel when you’re nursing). While a significant drop from my 2012 reading, this does beat my goal of 52 books, so there’s that.

As usual, my reading peaked in January. I hit an unsurprising low in May, while trying to figure out if I would ever read again now that I had something so much more interesting to look at, but then started reading again that summer and had some healthy numbers boosted by some fun series (including a re-read of the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, which was cool to reexamine as an adult reader). Then I started a new job/career in September, and hit a remarkable low of only 2 books — one of which was a middle-level graphic novel — in November. Ouch!

Page totals weren’t that impressive, either, although this is a reflection of the fact that I have been reading more middle-level books in an attempt to become more familiar with literature appropriate to my new clientele (kiddos in that 10-15 year set).

I decided that I didn’t have the energy to do a full genre breakdown this year (this takes a surprising amount of work) so I just separated them into (adult) fiction, (adult) nonfiction, YA/middle-level, poetry, drama, and picture books. I didn’t separate out graphic novels this time but just lumped them in with the appropriate super-genre. I read a fair amount of science fiction and fantasy this year, which should come as a shock to absolutely no one.

Here’s the big picture — four years of data, huzzah:

 

 

So what’s next for the bibliovore’s table here at DYHJ? I’m about halfway through an urban fantasy/noir/paranormal offering by steampunk queen Cherie Priest and have the sequel waiting in the wings, plus another Priest book in a different series that I’d like to check out. I’ve got the next two books in The Hollows waiting for me; this time of year, I really gravitate toward paranormal romance/urban fantasy. I also have a lot of great YA/middle-level books that I need to read, both for myself and professionally. I probably ought to finish The Dark Tower but it got to a place where I was feeling a little squeamish (the whole impending birth of a baby demon thing) so that may be a few months off. I’m anxious to read The One (Cass), which comes out in May. I received The Night Circus as a gift from my book club friend Hannah, and am excited to read it once I purge this whole “canoodling with the undead” craving I get every midwinter. And of course, there will be many great book club books, random finds, and recommendations that come down the pipe throughout the year.

I’m setting a goal of 52 books again and hope that I’ll need to increase it, but we’ll see!

What did you read and love in 2013? What’s on your to-read list? Will you do the Goodreads challenge? You should!

  

2012 in Books

There are still about ten hours left in 2012 from where I sit, but my yearly reading is, at this point, a forgone conclusion. I will finish reading Ganymede shortly, and will not have time to read anything else unless I go and find some more children’s picture books, which puts me at a grand total of 105 books (not to mention an uncountable amount of online reading this year — more so than most years — and a great deal of other non-book readings) for the year.

If you’d like to see the complete list of 2012 books, with links to their Goodreads pages, look here; that page will be up for a few weeks, at which point I will add its contents to this page and start a new one for 2013.

Thus begins the nerdiest (and, depending on your interest in graphs and other peoples’ reading tastes, most boring) post of the year.

I think I’d like to start off with the most interesting bit: my favorite books of the year. It’s always kind of difficult to pick this selection; in fact, I think I may have never done so last year. But, through sheer stubbornness and a little bit of carelessness, I did narrow my 105 books down to the top 13. (NOTE: This doesn’t include the Dark Tower books, which very well may be deserving of this spot, but I won’t include a series until I’ve finished the entire thing.)

This year’s top picks include quite a bit of nonfiction; when I find good nonfiction, I really love it. The nonfiction selections include Baby Catcher (a midwife’s memoir), Panic in Level 4 (a collection of narrative science essays about a wide range of fascinating subjects), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (a memoir written by a man suffering from locked-in syndrome following a massive stroke), The Fiddler in the Subway (a collection of beautiful pieces by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist), American Nerd (a humorous sociological text about what it means to be a modern-day “nerd”), and Bring Back Beatrice (perhaps the most useful and interesting baby name book I’ve found).

It also includes some terrific fiction, much of which was in one way or another heartbreaking. I finally got around to Dracula (which was much better than I’d anticipated) and Brokeback Mountain (absolutely beautifully written). I also enjoyed American Wife (a “novel” that bordered perilously close to biography), The Language of Flowers (a book club selection that traces a former foster child’s struggle to find normalcy and a sense of family), and Winter’s Bone (an utterly chilling novella about an Ozark girl trying to find her father and save her family against enormous odds).  Both The Fault in Our Stars (a charming, often-funny romance centered on two teenage cancer patients) and Divergent (an adventuresome dystopian novel) were excellent YA offerings. I meant to read more YA this year, but got sidetracked; I have a stack of must-reads for the early part of 2013.

Okay — on to the stats!

As is to be expected in the life of a teacher, most of my reading takes place during school breaks. My peak months in terms of books were June and July, despite my participation in the rather taxing Boise State Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute — then again, the high workload of June and early July was partially reading, so that helped. My highest number of pages read (which is really the more accurate measurement) was in August, as I frantically finished reading multiple hefty literature anthologies in preparation for the upcoming school year.

In terms of what I was reading, 2012 seems to have been a big year for the mystery genre.  A lot of those books were urban fantasy/mystery (Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison) but there were also some straightforward mystery books (Andrew M. Greeley) and historical fiction mystery (Laurie R. King, Lauren Willig). Unsurprisingly, 2012 was also a big year for paranormal fiction (much of which was paranormal romance) and nonfiction.

I took a big interest in nonfiction science books this year, reading several great books (Richard Preston, Gene Weingarten) during the summer and then shifting into pregnancy books this fall/winter. I also finally started reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which I’d love to finish in 2013, and Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series.

Although it doesn’t show up in the graphs, 2012 was also the year of the re-read. As the weather began to cool, my brain decided that it wanted to read familiar things so I went back to an old staple (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books). I’d also had the opportunity to re-read several books for teaching new literature classes this school year. Finally, I returned to three favorite baby name books to re-absorb them and their many ideas for naming Kermie.

This wasn’t as big a year for reading as 2011 was, but I did meet my Goodreads challenge and I handily trumped 2010.

I am not sure what 2013 will bring in terms of reading. I am due to have my hands very full (and my brain very sleep-deprived) come late April/early May, and I know this will have a big impact on my page counts. This isn’t a big deal; I keep track because I enjoy making lists and graphs, and because it gives me something nerdy to do every New Year’s Eve. Sort of a tradition, I guess. 🙂 What I’m trying to say is, I’m not really competing with anyone, even myself — I just find it interesting to see what my reading does, and I like aiming for goals, especially when it comes to reading. This is kind of like the grown-up version of libraries’ summer reading programs for kids, only instead of earning prizes I earn… er… graphs!