I read 43 books last year. I’d initially set a goal of reading 26 books for 2016, so I’m pretty pleased with that!
Some highlights:
-
I read my first foreign-language novel (Alico en Mirlando, the Esperanto translation of Alice in Wonderland).
-
I read far more books by authors of color and women than last year. (Thank god.)
-
I read some volumes of poetry that I really enjoyed (Prelude to Bruise, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude). Plus I got to see Saeed Jones read from Prelude, live. I cried. It’s a beautiful book.
-
I had been in a rut regarding science fiction - it had been quite a while since I’d read scifi that I enjoyed, and I felt like I was retreading tired tropes. Last year I’d tried reading more of the canon and frankly had been frustrated by it. This year I read more from Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Margaret Atwood, and fell back in love with the genre.
-
I’ve been exploring more writing about disability; some of my favorites from 2016 included I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing and Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking.
There were some lowlights, too. Re-reading the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix was honestly a bit of a letdown. Octavia’s Brood, a collection of short stories, disappointed me. And I thought that Too Like the Lightning had been over-hyped. (Possibly my problem here is that I’m missing a lot of the references, and the prose style just wasn’t for me.)