2008 books write up

*looks at date*

Er. Better late than never?

Once again, I read fewer books this year. On the other hand, only two books less than last year, so I think that is not bad, considering that I started grad school and all! And I managed to blog every book I read, with the exception of rereads.

The biggest change for me in 2008 was starting the 50books_poc challenge; namely, to read 50 books by POC in a year. I had originally done it from IBARW to IBARW (August 2007 to August 2008), but it's nice to know that I met it for the calendar year of 2008 as well. If anyone's interested about why, I wrote up why I count and how the challenge affected me during IBARW 3. Next year, my goal is to increase the percentage of books by POC so that it's over 50% of all the books I read, total. I'm still trying to make it enough of a habit that I won't have to count, and it's rather embarrassing to see the huge jump in numbers once I started making an effort. The gap between 13 books by POC versus 64 is enormous and indicative of my own aversive racism; it didn't actually take that much effort to find those 51 additional books (although a large part of that is thanks to my local libraries, and aversive racism plays its own role in book selection in libraries as well).

It is nice to see that I do not have to worry much about the percentage of women I'm reading.

As always, feel free to ask about anything here.

• ( Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian )



• ( M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: The Pox Party )



• ( Atul Gawande, Complications and Better )



• ( Justina Chen Headley, Girl Overboard )



• ( Maggie Helwig, Where She Was Standing )



• ( Angela Johnson, The First Part Last )



• ( David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach )



• ( Andrea Smith, Conquest )



• ( Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales )



• ( Elizabeth E. Wein, The Mark of Solomon )

( Also recommended )

Total read: 129 (6 rereads)
51 by women of color, 64 by POC, 104 by women

( Complete list of books read in 2008 )