• he/him

Precision-seeking, but often ridiculous.


And there we go. In a twist ending, I finished eight novels in December, a bigger chunk than I had in any other month of 2022. That brings me up to 15 books for the past three months, and 52 for the year overall, which is still a little less than has been typical in recent years; I suspect some of that is that I've been starting more things without finishing them, and getting further in before I give them up, but since books I don't finish is not one of the things I keep a record of (I worry it would be dispiriting), it's hard to say for sure.

I'll post the full year's list immediately in the comments here (meaning cohost, but if you're seeing this mirrored on facebook, I'll put it there, too), and sometime later I'll follow up with another comment with statistics about author demographics and such.

October

Kathleen Jennings - Flyaway
Sarah Thankam Matthews - All This Could Be Different
Kelly Robson - High Times in the Low Parliament
Simon Jimenez - The Spear Cuts Through Water

November

Ruthanna Emrys - A Half-Built Garden
Nghi Vo - Siren Queen
Peng Shepherd - The Cartographers

December

Ashley Herring Blake - Delilah Green Doesn't Care
R. F. Kuang - Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence
Naseem Jamnia - The Bruising of Qilwa
Graydon Saunders - Safely You Deliver
K. Tempest Bradford - Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion
Robin McKinley - Chalice
Candas Jane Dorsey - A Paradigm of Earth
Isaac Fellman - The Two Doctors Górski


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in reply to @indeed-distract's post:

And here are all the books I finished in 2022.

January

  • T. Kingfisher - Paladin's Strength (reread)
  • Elizabeth Knox - The Absolute Book
  • Adrian Tchaikovsky - Elder Race*e
  • Darcie Little Badger - A Snake Falls to Earth

February

  • Anya Johanna DeNiro - City of a Thousand Feelings
  • T. Kingfisher - Paladin's Hope (reread)
  • Karen Osborne - Architects of Memory
  • Lauren Groff - Matrix
  • Cynthia Zhang - After the Dragons
  • Malinda Lo - Last Night at the Telegraph Club

March

  • Sam Farren - Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastellir
  • Silvia Moreno Garcia - The Return of the Sorceress
  • Jason Sanford - Plague Birds
  • Sarah Tolmie - All the Horses of Iceland
  • Elizabeth Wein - The Winter Prince

April

  • Isaac Fellman - Dead Collections
  • Octavia E. Butler - Wild Seed
  • A. K. Larkwood - The Thousand Eyes
  • K. J. Charles - The Magpie Lord

May

  • Rachel Hartman - Tess of the Road (reread)
  • Nicola Griffith - Spear
  • Ciara Smyth - The Falling in Love Montage
  • Naomi Novik - The Last Graduate
  • Zinzi Clemons - What We Lose

June

  • John M. Ford - Aspects
  • Freya Marske - A Marvellous Light

July

  • T. Kingfisher - Swordheart (reread)
  • Becky Chambers - The Galaxy and the Ground Within

August

  • Jane Pek - The Verifiers
  • Alix E. Harrow - A Spindle Splintered
  • A. J. Demas - Sword Dance
  • Chelsea Vowel - Buffalo is the New Buffalo

September

  • T. Kingfisher - Nettle and Bone
  • Katherine Addison - The Grief of Stones
  • Emily St. John Mandel - Sea of Tranquility
  • Maya Deane - Wrath Goddess Sing
  • C. L. Polk - Soulstar

October

  • Kathleen Jennings - Flyaway
  • Sarah Thankam Matthews - All This Could Be Different
  • Kelly Robson - High Times in the Low Parliament
  • Simon Jimenez - The Spear Cuts Through Water

November

  • Ruthanna Emrys - A Half-Built Garden
  • Nghi Vo - Siren Queen
  • Peng Shepherd - The Cartographers

December

  • Ashley Herring Blake - Delilah Green Doesn't Care
  • R . F. Kuang - Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence
  • Naseem Jamnia - The Bruising of Qilwa
  • Graydon Saunders - Safely You Deliver
  • K. Tempest Bradford - Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion
  • Robin McKinley - Chalice
  • Candas Jane Dorsey - A Paradigm of Earth
  • Isaac Fellman - The Two Doctors Górski

Okay, who wants some numbers? That's rhetorical!

In 2022, and according to my current best understanding, I read 7 books by men, including 6 by 5 white men (with Isaac Fellman twice) and one by a man of colour; 42 by women, including 29 by 26 white women (with T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon four times) and 13 by women of colour; and three by nonbinary authors, one white and two of colour. Of the binary gendered authors, I am aware that three were trans: a man and two women, all white. Overall, that's 36 by 32 white authors and 16 all by separate authors of colour, including one indigenous Canadian.

As I have since 2015, when I first became a nominator for the Hugo awards, I read mostly recent works. 22 of the books I read were published in 2022 and 14 more were from 2021, while only two were from the 20th century (of which one, 1980's Wild Seed, predated my own birth). 20 were by writers I'd never read before, while on the other end of the novelty vs familiarity spectrum, seven were sequels to or otherwise in series with other books I'd read, and four were outright rereads.

Genre is slippery and imprecise but according to the versions of me who wrote things down about it, I read 45 SFF books, 7 litfic (of which three were also on the SFF list), and 9 romance (of which seven were also SFF). That leaves one book unaccounted for, which was presumably the contemporary mystery.

What else? I borrowed 36 through the Ottawa Public Library, including three interlibrary loans (not counting all the books I borrowed and didn't finish, natch). I read 27 as ebooks, almost perfectly balanced with the 25 I read as physical volumes. I read seven out loud to my spouse. And on this list of books I chose to count as novels, the edge cases included 11 long novellas (which might, if one were to count them as half-books instead, adjust my total count to 46 or 47) and one linked short story collection.