2019 in Review

In 2019, I finished and reviewed 40 books, the same as in 2018. Technically, I read two more books than 2018, since I've finished two books (one just before midnight) that I've not yet reviewed, but I'll stick with counting only those books for which I've published a review. I did a little bit better this year in spreading my reading out over the year instead of only reading on vacation. Finding time to write reviews was another matter; apologies for the flood of catch-up reviews in the last week of December.

I met both of my reading goals for last year — maintaining my current reading pace and catching up on award winners and nominees — but only barely in both cases. 2020 will bring schedule and life changes for me, and one of my goals is to carve out more room for daily reading.

I gave 10 out of 10 ratings to two books this year, one fiction and one non-fiction. The novel was Arkady Martine's exceptional debut A Memory Called Empire, which is one of the best science fiction novels I've read. It's populated with a fully imagined society, wonderful characters, political maneuvering, and a thoughtful portrayal of the cultural impact of empire and colonialism. I can hardly wait for the sequel.

The non-fiction book was On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger, a brilliant piece of investigative journalism that looks at the working conditions of the modern American working class through the lens of an Amazon warehouse job, a call center, and a McDonald's. If you want to understand how work and life feels to the people taking the brunt of the day-to-day work in the United States, I cannot recommend it highly enough. These jobs are not what they were ten or twenty years ago, and the differences may not be what you expect.

The novels that received 9 out of 10 ratins from me in 2019 were The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, and The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. Kowal's novel is the best fictional portrayal of anxiety that I've ever read (with bonus alternate history space programs!) and fully deserves its Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Pilcher's novel is outside of my normal genres, a generational saga with family drama and some romance. It was a very satisfying vacation book, a long, sprawling drama that one can settle into and be assured that the characters will find a way to do the right thing.

On the non-fiction side, I gave a 9 out of 10 rating to Bad Blood, John Carreyou's almost-unbelievable story of the rise and fall of Theranos, the blood testing company that reached a $10 billion valuation without ever having a working product. And, to close out the year, I gave a 9 out of 10 rating to Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English, a collection of advice on the English language from a copy editor. If you love reading books about punctuation trivia or grammatical geeking, seek this one out.

Below is some additional analysis plus personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

In 2019, I read and reviewed 40 books, the same number as in 2018. I'm happy with that total given how many distractions the year had for me. Page count was up considerably, so the books this year were longer. Average rating ticked very slightly higher yet again.

Overall statistics, with the change from last year:

Breakdown by genre:

Still no RPGs (and I still haven't finished reading the one I started last year). The balance between non-fiction and fiction shifted significantly back towards fiction, and I read three graphic novels, up two from last year. Mainstream fiction continues to be a small part of my reading.

Of the SF and fantasy novels, here's a rough breakdown of the books by reason for seeking them out. (As always, each book is only counted once, and reasons higher on the list override reasons lower on the list if both reasons apply.)

(Percentages do not add to 100% due to rounding.) Compared to last year, I significantly increased the amount of current SF&F I read. This was partly by reading all of the Hugo nominees, but also by reading several new 2019 releases that people were excited about. I also increased the number of award winners I read and dipped more into recommendations from others. This is more diverse than last year, which makes me happy.

I intended to read more award winners and award slates in 2019 and was only partly successful. I did read all the Hugo nominees and caught up on a few nominees from previous years, but I didn't make much forward progress in reading award winners from previous years. The one gap in my otherwise complete record of reading all Nebula winners continues to be Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which for some reason never feels like the book I want to read. The gap in my Locus best SF novel reading requires reading the rest of Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem series.

We'll see if I'll feel inspired to read more award winners in this upcoming year.