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indeed_distractThe impact of climate change on Ontario winters hasn't been so much that they don't get cold as that the cold is inconsistent; the skating on the canal in Ottawa hasn't been open much the past few years because you never know if the ice is going to stay. This year it was very cold for a couple weeks around Christmas, and then there was a week when everything melted. Today it has snowed steadily and impressively, starting again.
This is a novel-reading post! This time I had no December burst of industrious book-completion, so I coast in to the end of the month and year with a final 10 novels to report. That makes 40 total in 2024, my sparsest year since 2016 (huh). As usual (and/or to initiate this new blog into an ongoing tradition), I will include the year's full book list in the comments, and then go into detail about statistics and author demographics and such in another, later comment.
October
Emily Zhou - Girlfriends
Joanna Lowell - A Shore Thing
Martha Wells - System Collapse
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi (reread)
November
Daniel M. Ford - The Warden
Rivers Solomon - Model Home
Suzan Palumbo - Countess
December
T. Kingfisher - A Sorceress Comes to Call
Rainbow Rowell - Slow Dance
Ursula Whitcher - North Continent Ribbon
This is a novel-reading post! This time I had no December burst of industrious book-completion, so I coast in to the end of the month and year with a final 10 novels to report. That makes 40 total in 2024, my sparsest year since 2016 (huh). As usual (and/or to initiate this new blog into an ongoing tradition), I will include the year's full book list in the comments, and then go into detail about statistics and author demographics and such in another, later comment.
October
Emily Zhou - Girlfriends
Joanna Lowell - A Shore Thing
Martha Wells - System Collapse
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi (reread)
November
Daniel M. Ford - The Warden
Rivers Solomon - Model Home
Suzan Palumbo - Countess
December
T. Kingfisher - A Sorceress Comes to Call
Rainbow Rowell - Slow Dance
Ursula Whitcher - North Continent Ribbon
no subject
Date: 2025-01-02 03:11 am (UTC)January
Valerie Valdes - Where Peace is Lost
Indra Das - The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
Peter S. Beagle - Tamsin (reread)
Arkady Martine - Rose/House
Shelley Parker-Chan - He Who Drowned the World
February
Em X. Liu - The Death I Gave Him
Nghi Vo - Mammoths at the Gates
Fonda Lee - Untethered Sky
March
Cat Sebastian - We Could Be So Good
Naomi Kritzer - Liberty's Daughter
Rebecca Fraimow - The Iron Children
April
Nicole Kimberling - Happy Snak
John Scalzi - Starter Villain
T. Kingfisher - What Feasts at Night
Graydon Sanders - Under One Banner
May
K. J. Charles - Death in the Spires
Sofia Samatar - The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Phyllis Ann Karr - At Amberleaf Fair
June
Kelly Link - The Book of Love
Malka Older - The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
K. J. Charles - The Sugared Game
Nicola Dinan - Bellies
July
Shannon Chakraborty - The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi
Carys Davies - Clear
August
Jo Walton - Lifelode (reread)
R. B. Lemberg - Yoke of Stars
September
Premee Mohamed - The Apple-Tree Throne
Aliette de Bodard - Navigational Entanglements
S. T. Gibson - Evocation
Samantha Mills - The Wings Upon Her Back
October
Emily Zhou - Girlfriends
Joanna Lowell - A Shore Thing
Martha Wells - System Collapse
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi (reread)
November
Daniel M. Ford - The Warden
Rivers Solomon - Model Home
Suzan Palumbo - Countess
December
T. Kingfisher - A Sorceress Comes to Call
Rainbow Rowell - Slow Dance
Ursula Whitcher - North Continent Ribbon
no subject
Date: 2025-01-02 03:39 pm (UTC)With similar conviction in my fallibility but going roughly off the best public information I was aware of at the time I wrote things down, five of the books I read were written by men, including four white men and one man of colour; 31 were by 29 women, including 21 by 19 white women (with two each by K. J. Charles and T. Kingfisher) and 10 by women of colour; and four were by nonbinary writers, one white and three of colour. At least two of the writers I did not mark as nonbinary were trans, both women of colour. Overall, that's 26 novels by 24 white writers and 14 by writers of colour.
I continued to read mostly new books, with 14 published new in 2024 and another 14 in 2023; only two were from the 20th century, and neither of those were published before I was born. 15 were by authors I hadn't read before, while at the other end, 9 were sequels to or otherwise in series with books I'd read in the past, and three were outright rereads.
What is a genre? A miserable pile of signifiers (I do not stand by this definition). I marked 31 books as SFF, five as genre romance (one of which was also on the SFF list), and three as litfic; that leaves two, which were a murder mystery and a probably-not-supernatural horror.
I read 26 ebooks and 14 physical books. 27 of the books I read, were borrowed through the Ottawa Public Library (or other libraries it grants ebook-borrowing access to), including two interlibrary loans -- a smaller proportion than usual, but obviously still a majority. I read one (Kelly Link's The Book of Love) out loud to my spouse. And on the topic of "novel-reading" edge cases, two of these were linked short story collections, while 12 were long novellas; if I count the novellas as half-books, then my overall number goes down to 34.