2009 Review

As it’s the last day of December, the time seems right for a look back at what I read in 2009.

I’ll start this post with a quick look at my December reading list. I started the month by racing through the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse box-set then read William Boyd’s The New Confessions (large) and then The Quincunx (even larger) and then I zoomed through 13 Treasures and 13 Curses in the last couple of days. At £1 per book, that makes a £10 donation to Book Aid this month.

Whilst on the subject of Book Aid, I just want to mention again how pleased I am that Jodie from book gazing set up The Year of Readers. The self-imposed “fine” of £1 a book this year has meant that I have given £125 to Book Aid International in 2009. Or, looking at it another way, this year I effectively bought 62.5 books to send overseas which gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I will definitely continue to support them next year but have not quite decided if it’ll be in the same structured way. I’ll post more about that in the new year.

And on to the almost obligatory (in blogging terms) 2009 review! Of the 121 books I read this year, the genre breakdown* was:

General Fiction: 57
Fantasy/Science-Fiction: 55
Graphic Novels: 5 (of which 2 were fiction and 3 non-fiction)
Non-fiction: 4

Blimey – that’s a lot of SF&F! In a nicely even split, 61 of those books were written by female authors and 59 by males. I also read books by 48 authors who were new (to me) in 2009.

Out of those 121 books, 51 were bought as new by me this year with an additional 16 new books coming in as gifts or prizes. 18 were purchased second hand (from either green metropolis or local book stalls) and 28 were borrowed from the library and two more from a friend.

That means that just a handful of the books I read this year came from the 2008 brought forward TBR pile… Gulp! I am also pretty confident that the actual number of books I personally bought this year was far higher than the 69 I read which is shocking! Perhaps I need to impose a stuck-in-a-book style “Project 24” buying cap in 2010…

It’s time for my worst stat of all… I only read one book that I have previously read. Yes. One. This utterly flies in the face of my constant assurances that I need to keep so many books in our home because I will re-read them. It strikes me that perhaps I should not have been quite so honest in this post in case my husband reads about it so let’s leave it as our dirty little secret for now!

All in all, 2009 was a pretty good reading year for me - although I did read a lower number of books than I expected to. I’ve just checked my 2008 total and that was a final count of 133 books so perhaps it was just in line with the norm!

Next year I would like to read more non-fiction (perhaps one a month?), catch up on un-read classics, delve into some poetry and try to push the boundaries of my reading comfort zone a bit further. Taking into account my Christmas book loot, and the additional 15 books I “accidentally” bought on Boxing Day, I’m definitely set up for an enjoyable first few months.

* Slightly arbitrary but it works for me!