Books Analysis: 2022 Update
Some Background
Since 2018 I have kept track of the books I've read. Last year I analyzed what I had read through 2021 and this page updates that analysis with 2022 data.
I will mostly focus on the changes, but if you want to look at the original, it's still here.
Last Year's Goals
In January 2022 I set several goals for my reading this past year. Read 40 books, read 40% women authors, reverse the trend of less fiction every year, and read five particular books. Let's see how I did.
Goal 1: Close but not quite. I read 38 books, instead of 40. But hey, if you hit every goal you're aiming too low. Here's a table. (Of course, raw number of books read isn't very useful because of length variance. I cracked books this year ranging from a dozen pages to over a thousand.)
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | 36 | 29 | 40 | 38 | 169 |
Goal 2: Achieved! I set out to intentionally increase the percentage of books I read that were written by women to >40% because of this Guardian article which essentially showed that "women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women."
I do think achieving this goal contributed to my old-book-fraction decrease. It's not an easy problem to solve but I have made a list of a lot of older (pre-20th c.) books with women authors that I intend to reference in 2023.
Goal 3: Achieved with borderline overkill. Because I value the way fiction changes my outlook on life, I was unhappy with the decrease in percent fiction over the years. On second thought, forget about the overkill thing. I'm happy with where I'm at and don't plan to think about it in 2023.
Goal 4: Not achieved and it wasn't close.
| Title | Author | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Several Dramas | Euripides | Didn't read |
| Devotions upon Emergent Occasions | John Donne | Didn't read |
| Silence | Shusaku Endo | Didn't read |
| The Violent Bear It Away | Flannery O'Conner | In progress |
| The Death of Ivan Ilyich | Leo Tolstoy | Read! |
I am very bad at reading books from even my priority to-read list. ~1.5/5 isn't great.
Other Findings
Last year I noticed and commented on a stark decline in my mean star rating. Having that finding in my head evidently influenced my 2022 ratings. Rating may or may not be interesting going forward.
Same story as mean rating. This suggests I read a lot more books I loved in 2022 than in any year since 2018 and *checks list* that's plausible.
This year's fiction revival was heavily driven by novels. Nonfiction in general took a hit as I already mentioned, with physical science books completely disappearing. To see the genre breakdowns from previous years please consult last year's analysis. My favorite book this year was the first one I read--The Supper of the Lamb (1969) by Fr. Robert Farrar Capon. It's a wide-ranging exploration of everything near the intersection of food and theology.
2023 Goals
Even though I'm planning to get married and start medical school in 2023, I'm going to set a goal of 40 books again. I would like to cut down on my screen time and spending time reading books I want to read will help. I'd like to get the percentage of books written by women up to >45%. I'd like to read at least two books from each time period on the chart above.
Let's try something new with a list of books I want to read. Here's a list of ten books from my reading list. My goal is to read five in 2023.
1. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
2. Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
4. Idylls of the King by Tennyson
5. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll
6. The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
7. Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich
8. Analects by Confucius
9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
10. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne