{"id":20773,"date":"2022-07-01T14:05:39","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T19:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20773"},"modified":"2022-07-01T14:05:39","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T19:05:39","slug":"half-a-year-in-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2022\/07\/01\/half-a-year-in-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Half a year in books"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I no longer post Book Reports to this Tohu Bohu, but I have been listing my Books Read list, on the half-year, along with some demographic information about the writers. So, it being halfway through the year, here are the 35 books I have read in 2022 (not counting re-reads).\r\n

16 Speculative fiction books, 9 of which would probably be classified as Young Adult; 4 Mysteries; 2 Historicals (one of which is kind of a fantasy book); 9 Plays and theater-related books, 2 Memoirs, one Horror novel, one Romance novel. My favorites were probably Hold Fast Through the Fire<\/i>, by K.B. Wagers (a space opera, part of a series about a Space version of the Coast Guard), the plays Doctor Voynich and Her Children<\/i> by Leanna Keyes and The Welkin<\/i> by Lucy Kirkwood, and perhaps Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George<\/i>, by James Lapine.\r\n

There were 22 new-to-me authors: 13 women; 8 men; and one non-binary person. Another way of looking at those authors: seventeen are white and five are not. Or, perhaps: 8 are white men, 8 are white women, 5 are women who aren\u2019t white, and one is white and non-binary. I could, obviously, be misrepresenting those genders or races! Gender and race are both socially imposed, and I am using social cues, and may well be using them incorrectly.\r\n

Of the books by white male authors who I read for the first time this year, two were memoirs, four were plays and one was a book about a play. The memoirs, now that I think about it were both by people who have written for and performed in the theater, so really, seven out of the eight were theater books, of a sort. My general practice for the last several years is to only pick up a book by a white male writer I have not previously read if there is some particular recommendation or reason for it\u2014but I am also trying to read more playscripts and theater books (which I enjoy) and, you know, there are a lot of white dudes there. On the other hand, there are only wound up reading 2 books by white dudes that I already knew, as opposed to six white women writers, two non-white women, and one writer who I think I previously had identified as a woman but who identifies as non-binary.\r\n

It\u2019s always interesting to me that after spending years deliberately avoiding adding white male authors to my reading lists, I still read a lot of books by white male authors. Which is kinda the point, of course\u2014I don\u2019t want to never read another book by a white dude (although, you know, sometimes I do feel like that) but the world being what it is, putting the thumb on the scale as hard as I can only brings the numbers back to reasonable percentages.\r\n

Anyway, here\u2019s the list:\r\n