Oops, I apparently never published this post at the end of 2016. I discovered it only after writing up a draft of my book list for 2017. So I’ll post this now and my 2017 list once the year wraps up. These are books from 2016. When I mention “this year,” I mean 2016; when I mention “last year,” I mean 2015.

---

Last year, I recorded having read 74 books for a total of 25,500 pages. I fell a little behind this year, logging 67 books and 22,107 pages, which I suppose is still respectable enough. Last year I padded my book count some by reading the 13 books in the Series of Unfortunate Events series to my kids and participating as fully as I could in the Tournament of Books, which required a sort of mania to manage. Much of this year in reading to the kids was consumed by reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, which contributed to the page count (these are 800+ pages apiece if I recall correctly) but added a paltry three books to the list. This year I read almost all things that were new to me (To Kill a Mockingbird was the exception, though I hadn’t read it in 25 years, so it was sort of new all over again), and I tried a different approach to picking what to read.

When writing last year’s summary of my reading, I noticed that I was reading mostly white American men. Since I am a white American man, I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense, but I figured it was time to broaden my horizons a bit, and the best way to do that is intentionally. So I made 2016 the year of reading people who weren’t white American/English/Canadian dudes. Brandon Sanderson and a late read of a Heinlin book (which gets logged on 2017 anyway) aside, I managed to avoid white guys. My failures were concessions to my family, who didn’t necessarily want to go along on my personal journey, though I dragged them along for some of it. The Sanderson at least featured a strong female protagonist; the Heinlein was a late break for my wife, who couldn’t bear another soporific read-aloud of Agatha Christie (who my children oddly really like).

So, how did I pick all these books by non-white men? Sometimes it was more or less at random. I actually browsed a little local bookstore a lot (enough that they got in the habit of thanking me not for my purchase but for my “contribution,” as if the sometimes not insignificant purchase was an act of charity) and read book covers to see what looked interesting. The store — Union Avenue Books —  has a small new paperback collection (I’m generally not charitable enough to buy in hardback) that rotates frequently enough that I could stop by and pick up a stack of six or eight books to last a month or two and find a fair few different books on my next stop. I basically profiled authors by looking for names that seemed unlikely to belong to white men, and when possible I would confirm by looking for an author photo or bio. It felt a little weird to physically profile people, and I consoled myself that it was ok since it was in the service of expanding my perspective to include the perspectives of people whose work I had not actively sought out before, but I’m still not sure it was actually ok. In any case, what’s done is done.

One thing I found was that when trying not to read white dudes, it’s very very easy to read white women. I read more white women than I really wanted to, to the extent that it felt a little cheaty, since though they do have a different experience of the world than white men, it seems very probable to me that overall, the experience these (I suspect largely entitled) women have of the world is probably very much more like the experience I have of the world than the experience of, say, a Nigerian Jesuit.

Now a word about my GoodReads rating system. First, I wish they allowed partial stars, as often I find five-star granularity to be insufficient for expressing how I feel about a book. Some books are better than three stars but not quite 4 stars, and it’s frustrating that I can’t express that in my quantifiable review. I tend to rate down, I guess because I’m a little snobbish and don’t want to elevate a book that didn’t really do it for me. So, a five-star book is basically transcendental for me; it changed my worldview or offered a perspective or a beauty of writing that made me really want to put it in a very small group of favorite books. A four-star book is very good and I liked it a lot (maybe even loved it a little) or found it exceedingly worthwhile even if not altogether enjoyable to get through. A three-star book I liked just fine. A two-star book I didn’t like much at all. A one-star book I pretty much hated. An abandoned book is very very rare for me, and I abandoned one this year (The Night Circus — irredeemable, and I wish I could bill the author for my time).

Of the books I read this year, I gave no books five stars but gave these 18 books four stars:

• Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
• Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
• The Song of Hartgrove Hall, by Natasha Solomons
• A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Epitaph, by Mary Doria Russell
• The Round House, by Louise Erdrich
• The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
• The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx
• The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
• Arcadia, by Lauren Groff
• Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
• A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Native Son, by Richard Wright
• The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff
• The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
• Wild Nights!, by Joyce Carol Oates
• In Country, by Bobbie Ann Mason

There were a few surprises here for me, notably the presence of some genre fiction in A Wizard of Earthsea (I wanted to continue the series but my daughter wasn’t digging it; I’ll likely revisit on my own later) and Epitaph, which is a loosely historical novel that isn’t at all the sort of thing I tend to pick up. Groff was a new find for me this year, and what a great find. The Vegetarian was more of a 3.5, but I rated it up rather than down because it was a bit of a puzzler for me, and I’m intrigued by puzzlers even if I don’t strictly like or enjoy them. I was glad to find Mason’s book so good, as I had read her Feather Crowns many years ago and found it merely ok. I would cheerfully recommend almost all of these books to just about anybody with the exception perhaps of The Vegetarian.

I gave three stars to these 37 books:

• Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories, by Agatha Christie
• The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
• The Education of Dixie Dupree, by Donna Everhart
• Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns
• The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt
• The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• The Final Empire (Mistborn #1), by Brandon Sanderson
• The Well of Ascension (Mistborn #2), by Brandon Sanderson
• Black Boy, by Richard Wright
• The Green Glass Sea, by Ellen Klages
• They May Not Mean to, But They Do, by Cathleen Schine
• Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan
• God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison
• The Jam Fruit Tree, by Carl Muller
• The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison
• Sula, by Toni Morrison
• Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
• Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh
• Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
• Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories, by Lauren Groff
• The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
• One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia
• Orhan’s Inheritance, by Aline Ohanesian
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Running in the Family, by Michael Ondaatje
• The Giant’s House: A Romance, by Elizabeth McCracken
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Music for Wartime: Stories, by Rebecca Makkai
• The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
• Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi
• The Book of Speculation, by Erika Swyler
• Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin
• The Fishermen, by Chigozie Obioma
• The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
• Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

Lots of the family reads made this list. I hadn’t expected to like the Mistborn books as much as I did (and the third was kind of bad and thus got only two stars). Sri Lanka is well represented here in the books of Ondaatje and Cummings, thanks to recommendations from a colleague and friend. Africa makes a couple of appearances, largely because I so enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun (a rare five-star) last year and wanted to read a bit more from Africa (which, I know, is a very reductive thing to say). The Sellout was a big disappointment to me, enough so that I fear that the defect is in me as a reader and not in the book (it failed to connect for me in the way that a lot of Barth fails to connect; there’s something very smart about it but also something over-labored and thus tedious and annoying about it). Tartt delivers solid books consistently (two this year netted three stars for me and another four). I would recommend these books with less confidence. Some would surely land for some readers, but this cohort of books on the whole didn’t wow me.

I gave two stars to these eleven books:

• Welcome to Braggsville, by Geronimo T. Johnson
• The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, by Katarina Bivald
• A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki
• Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
• The Hero of Ages (Mistborn #3), by Brandon Sanderson
• The Morgesons, by Elizabeth Stoddard
• The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood
• All Souls, by Christine Schutt
• The Monster War, by Alan Gratz
• Tales of Burning Love, by Louise Erdrich

The Erdrich was a real disappointment (I really liked The Round House), as was the Atwood, which I picked up randomly because it was on a table at a bookstore and I hadn’t read much Atwood and I was sort of feeling like maybe the U.S. was heading toward a Handmaid’s Tale-like future. My daughter liked Persepolis, and I was glad to learn more about Iran but didn’t really care for the book itself. The Stoddard and Wharton books were mostly just boring. Sanderson should have given up while he was ahead, and the Gratz was a real dud in my opinion after a more enjoyable first two books in that series.

I read but didn’t rate The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers because I’m very vaguely, tenuously acquainted with the author, and I feel weird about rating or commenting on books when I know the author (even though really I don’t — it’s a very very teensy, old connection, but enough of one that I feel weird about rating the book anyway).

Usually when I finish a book, I leave a very brief review on GoodReads, mostly just enough to tell a future forgetful me generally how I felt about a book or why I thought it was or wasn’t good. These micro-reviews aren’t really worth reading on the whole, but if you’re curious why a book landed in one pile or another and want to gamble on whether there’s useful context or not in my little review, click the link above and look for my review (easier to find if you friend me on GoodReads, I believe).

So, that’s 2016 in books for me. I’m glad I tried branching out. It was hard sometimes to avoid picking up a book by a white guy (there’s new Lethem, for example, and I got a book for my birthday that didn’t meet my criteria and has sat on my nightstand for 11 months), but I’m glad I mostly avoided it, and I’ll continue trying to keep an eye on how homogeneous my reading list is, and strive for heterogeneity. I think it’s probably more and more important to do so in a changing (or maybe merely acknowledged?) political climate in the U.S. that more than ever seems to favor the entitled and terrorize the rest.