Here today is the summary of my reading month in March, as well as a look forward to April. I prefer to do these big discussions with lots of books on YouTube: so much easier! The videos are below, but here's a summary:
I read 22 books in March.
6 were murder mysteries, three of them re-reads.
6 were works of non-fiction, encompassing journalistic work as well as memoir.
4 were books of poetry.
4 were speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy)
and only 2 (sad!) were literary fiction.
I think the reason I read so much was that I read so little literary fiction! Those naturally take me a bit longer to get through.
So far as format goes, I read 8 ebooks; the rest were physical copies (though I did read 2 ebooks of books I own in physical form).
Re: diversity, I decided to stop aiming for 30% authors of color across the board; I decided instead to just try and read at least 50 books by authors of color in 2015. If I read more than 150 books this year that will work out to less than 30%, but if I read more than 150 books this year . . . God help me.
This is to avoid book guilt. I have had the problem two months in a row where I plan to read (say) 12 books in a month, 4 by authors of color. Then, towards the end of the month, I have finished the planned list, am at my 30%, and want to do some re-reading of old favorites, often by a white author. Then I am in an upsetting situation where I feel like I'm Not Allowed to read whoever it is because it will mess up my percentages. So . . .that isn't going to work for me. 50 books it is.
Anyway, I read four books by authors of color this month so that will keep me on track for the 50 in a year goal, so yay!
As far as gender diversity, I read 11 books by women and 10 by men. One book was co-authored by a mixed-gender team. I know I read one book by someone who identified as LGBTQ but I didn't go looking up bios, either.
I list all 22 books in my video below, but I will say here that the three books I most enjoyed reading this month were (not in order):
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (this was a re-read for me and it was so much better the second time around!)
Transformations, by Anne Sexton
and
The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham.
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