Books: 2015, 1st Quarter

Posted April 3, 2015 by Alison Mitchell

As I’ve written before, I keep a log of all the books I read.  I don’t really do anything with the list, though.  Occasionally I’ll have trouble remembering an author or title and it comes in handy, but it’s more just something I do for no particular reason.

At the beginning of this year, I read Jessamyn West’s blog post about the way she tracks her reading, and decided to give it a try.  A cursory look back at 2014 made me think that my reading was pretty evenly distributed between male/female authors, fiction/nonfiction, and authors of color (the categories she tracks).  So, for the first three months of 2015, I tracked all that information, sure I would come out with a diverse, inclusive list.

I was kind of wrong, and kind of surprised about that.

Here’s what I read in January, February and March 2015:

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Kinda Like Brothers by Coe Booth

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Euphoria by Lily King

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Active Bodies by Martha H. Verbrugge

Will’s New World by Arthur C. Hodges

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Snowflake Bentley by Gloria May Stoddard

Honeydew by Edith Pearlman

Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

The End of Eve by Ariel Gore

My list is pretty evenly split between fiction and nonfiction (7/9), but the authors are almost entirely female (14/2) and white (13/3) — I thought there would be more male authors and authors of color.  However, I don’t want to get hung up on those particular categories — this list includes books by authors who are young, old, LGBTQ, famous and obscure (including a self-published book by a friend of my father).  There are a few current bestsellers and some that were published many years ago.   In the last three months, I read novels, memoirs, academic nonfiction, YA and a very helpful parenting book.  So, even though the list skewed white female, I feel like my reading is pretty varied and includes different perspectives, which is important to me.

We’ll see what the rest of 2015 holds.