Monday, January 2, 2012

What I wrote about in 2011

Yesterday I broke down what I read in 2011, and, it may surprise you, that does not entirely reflect what I blogged about last year. Certainly, many of the books I read I then wrote about (although often not in the order I read them), but I also try to write about older books, literary awards, and various things that interest me. Thus, in 2011, of my 93 posts, 52 were reviews and 41 were tagged as "extras"

Here's how those reviews break down:
novel - 40
non-fiction - 5
poetry - 5
short stories - 3

Twenty-two of those reviews were of works written by men (with two of Alan Bradley's novels), and 31 were of works written by women (with two novels by Margaret Atwood in there). 

So, what is the point of doing all this? Mostly, I think it's important (for me) to take a step back and look at what I'm reading and writing about. Certainly I write mostly about fiction (which reflects what I mostly read), but it's easy to get caught in a cycle of just reading a book and then writing about it without thinking about how it fits into the bigger picture of what's out there and interesting to read and talk about. These lists help me think about what I should try to focus on in the coming year and, as always, offer you the chance to tell me if there's something you'd like to see more of.

So yay! I'm getting pretty excited about all the reading I'm going to do this year. Top of my list are:
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg
The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
Magnified World by Grace O'Connell

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