The 2023 reading log is here! It can help you track your reading stats and generate infographics to help you achieve your reading goals.
👀 This could be handy for tracking my reading.
Tag: diverse books
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2022 Year-End Reading Review
What I Read in 2022
I read 212 books in 2022, compared with 175 in 2021.
- All the books I read
- My 20 favorite books from the year
2022 Reads by Type
- 122 novels
- 32 novellas
- 39 non-fiction books
- 7 graphic non-fiction books
- 12 graphic novels and art books
2022 Fiction by Genre
Of the 154 novels and novellas I read, here’s the breakdown by genre:
- 141 romance
- 27 contemporary romance
- 53 sci-fi romance
- 23 fantasy + paranormal romance
- 38 historical romance
- 5 I missed when I counted and I’m not doing it again
- 2 sci-fi
- 6 fantasy
Fadwa (wordwoonders.com)Every single one of these posts is meant to be a masterlist of books that pertain to a certain identity. They are periodically updated as new books come out or are brought to my attention, so don’t hesitate to check back. Race & Ethnicity representation Books with Black main characters. Books with latinx main characters. Books with Native/Indigenous main characters. Books by South Asian authors.192 books Books by East and South East Asian authors. 432 books Books with north african and middle eastern representation. Books written by Pacific Islanders. LGBTQIAP+ representation Books with bisexual main characters. Books with pansexual main characters. Books with main f/f relationships.430 books Books with transgender and/or non-binary main characters. Books with aro-spec main characters. Books with ace-spectrum nain characters. Disability & Neurodiversity representation Books with anxiety representation. Books with depression representation. Other Books by Muslim authors.
There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”
And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/ straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.
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Why I track my reading
Like wellness before it, cultural consumption has become yet another opportunity for us to measure, analyse and optimise our lives using cold, hard data.
Yes, it’s possible to let tracking your reading become a performative thing, but showing off to others is not the only reason to track what you read. There are a lot of reasons I track what I’m reading:
- To keep track of what I’ve already read — I read a lot, and can’t keep track of what I’ve read and what I enjoyed
- To be thoughtful about what I’m reading — I try to read books with a wide range of representation and by diverse authors, and if I don’t track what I’m reading, it’s easy to fall into reading mostly white cis male authors because they are published more (and white cis women in the romance world) — I also like to try out new authors, not just read the same ones
- To diversify my reading — by tracking what I read, it’s easier to look back and see trends so I can switch it up if I’ve been reading the same thing for a while (or choose to continue with intentionality)
- To pay attention to my mental state — if I’m not reading, there might be something going on
- To prompt myself to reflect on what I got out of a book by writing a review, and to think more critically about a work — while I’m reading I can get sucked into a story and it’s only when I surface on the other end I start noticing the problems
- To keep myself honest — I can look back at what I’ve read, and use that to truth what I think I’ve been reading — for example, I say I read a lot of sci-fi, but in review I read as much or more fantasy, and my fantasy TBR is longer
- To get better at picking books to read — I can compare what I actually read (and what I DNF’d) with my “to read” list, and adjust future book selections based on what I liked or didn’t like
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Read Writing the Other
During the 1992 Clarion West Writers Workshop attended by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, one of the students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong, horribly, offensively wrong, and so it is better not even to try. This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual preference, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about ”getting it wrong.” Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with ”differences.”
This book had some interesting framing and specific writing advice on what and what not to do. A fair amount of the content was pretty basic level, so anyone who’s done any reading about writing people from other backgrounds will be familiar with many of the ideas. I didn’t do the exercises, which didn’t sound that helpful to me, but then I hate writing exercises 😉
ROAARS are the main categories that define and divide us:
- Race
- Orientation
- Ability
- Age
- Religion
- Sex
“The unmarked state” = without explicit markers, readers often envision a character to be white, male, cis, straight, young and able -bodied
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2021 Year-End Reading Review
What I Read
I read 175 books in 2021, compared with 146 in 2020.
2021 Reads by Type
- 86 novels
- 21 novellas
- 30 non-fiction books
- 38 graphic novels and art books
2021 Reads by Genre
Of the 107 novellas and novels I read, here’s the breakdown by genre:
- 86 romance
- 20 contemporary romance
- 22 sci-fi romance
- 7 fantasy romance
- 14 paranormal romance
- 29 historical romance
- 8 sci-fi
- 9 fantasy
- 4 general fiction
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Read All the Feels
Alexander Woodroe has it all. Charm. Sex appeal. Wealth. Fame. A starring role as Cupid on TV’s biggest show, God of the Gates. But the showrunners have wrecked his character, he’s dogged by old demons, and his post-show future remains uncertain. When all that reckless emotion explodes into a bar fight, the tabloids and public agree: his star is falling.
Enter Lauren Clegg, the former ER therapist hired to keep him in line. Compared to her previous work, watching over handsome but impulsive Alex shouldn’t be especially difficult. But the more time they spend together, the harder it gets to keep her professional remove and her heart intact, especially when she discovers the reasons behind his recklessness…not to mention his Cupid fanfiction habit.
When another scandal lands Alex in major hot water and costs Lauren her job, she’ll have to choose between protecting him and offering him what he really wants—her. But he’s determined to keep his improbably short, impossibly stubborn, and extremely endearing minder in his life any way he can. And on a road trip up the California coast together, he intends to show her exactly what a falling star will do to catch the woman he loves: anything at all.
This was a lot of fun. Read it in one sitting. It made sense how they grew to trust each other, but also that their feelings exacerbated their personal hangups. Alex was funny and over the top, but endearingly so.
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Read A Lot Like Adios
Hi Mich. It’s Gabe. After burning out in her corporate marketing career, Michelle Amato has built a thriving freelance business as a gra…
This was great! Really funny. A fair bit of Spanish, I was mostly able to figure out from context but had to look up a few words.