Well, and this Tohu Bohu is pretty much defunct, innit? And yet, why not post the Year in Books 2023?\r\n
Stats, stats, stats.\r\n
The biggest category, as it is every year, was speculative fiction\u201421 books that I put in that category. I didn\u2019t break that out into Young Adult and not-YA, this year, but I would expect to find four or five of those SF books shelved in the teen room of the library. I tried to read more plays this year, but wound up only reading nine new scripts. I don\u2019t know how I lost momentum with that. Six Romance novels\u2014that includes a couple of historicals, a couple of books that had spec-fic elements, and one that I think might be YA. The rest\u2026 4 historical novels that I wouldn\u2019t call Romances, 4 memoirs, 2 thrillers, 2 collections of stories, one graphic work and one that I would call \u2018literary\u2019, not having any other genre to stick it in.\r\n
I also try to track the demographic breakdown of the writers, as I\u2019ve said every time I do this. It\u2019s interesting to me, if not to anyone else, but I\u2019ll put the numbers here anyway.\r\n
Of the 28 authors that were new to me this year, 22 were white. If I\u2019m going to read more stuff by people who aren\u2019t white, I\u2019m clearly going to have to put some effort into changing my browsing habits. The gender breakdown is more even\u201411 men, 13 women, and 4 who appear to have a gender identity that isn\u2019t \u2018man\u2019 or \u2018woman\u2019. When I add the categories, here\u2019s the breakdown: 10 white women, 8 white men, 3 nonwhite women, 3 nonwhite men, and 4 white writers who are NB (or whatever).\r\n
Expanding it to all 49 writers of the 50 books I read for the first time in 2023: 41 white, 8 non-white. Oof. 19 men, 25 women, 5 NB or whatever. 15 white men, 21 white women, 4 nonwhite men, 4 nonwhite women, and all 5 in the NB category were white. This is (as I mention every time I do this) despite my making a deliberate effort to read more demographically widely.\r\n
And I need to add: Gender is bunk! Race is bunk! I may well have misidentified every single author! Also, I\u2019m not very good at arithmetic, so the simple numbers may be wrong. And, finally, there may well be books (and therefore writers) who should be on the list who I simply forgot to note down.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger opens up the lid and blows the dust off.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21008"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21010,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21008\/revisions\/21010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}