My best discoveries of the year: The poetry of Tishani Doshi; Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout (whom I’d read before but not fully appreciated until this year); also, the classic nature writing of Edwin Way Teale.

The authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood and Janet Frame (each: 2 whole books plus parts of 2 more), followed by Doris Lessing (2 whole books plus part of 1 more), followed by Miriam Darlington, Paul Gallico, Penelope Lively, Rachel Mann and Ben Smith (each: 2 books).

Debut authors whose next work I’m most looking forward to: John Englehardt, Elizabeth Macneal, Stephen Rutt, Gail Simmons and Lara Williams.

My proudest reading achievement: A 613-page novel in verse (Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly) + 2 more books of over 600 pages (East of Eden by John Steinbeck and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese).

Best book club selection: Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay was our first nonfiction book and received our highest score ever.

Some best first lines encountered this year:

• “What can you say about a twenty-five-year old girl who died?” (Love Story by Erich Segal)
• “The women of this family leaned towards extremes” (Away by Jane Urquhart)
• “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” (from The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff)

The downright strangest book I read this year: Lanny by Max Porter

The 2019 books everybody else loved (or so it seems), but I didn’t: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Topeka School by Ben Lerner, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse by Charlie Mackesy, Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

The year’s major disappointments: Cape May by Chip Cheek, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer, Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis, ed. Anna Hope et al., Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer, The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal, The Knife’s Edge by Stephen Westaby and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

The worst book I read this year: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Some statistics on my 2019 reading:

Fiction: 45.4%

Nonfiction: 43.4%

Poetry: 11.2%

(As usual, fiction and nonfiction are neck and neck. I read a bit more poetry this year than last.)

Male author: 39.4%

Female author: 58.9%

Nonbinary author (the first time this category has been applicable for me): 0.85%

Multiple genders (anthologies): 0.85%

(I’ve said this the past three years: I find it interesting that female authors significantly outweigh male authors in my reading; I have never consciously set out to read more books by women.)

E-books: 10.3%

Print books: 89.7%

(My e-book reading has been declining year on year, partially because I’ve cut back on the reviewing gigs that involve only reading e-books and partially because I’ve done less traveling; also, increasingly, I find that I just prefer to sit down with a big stack of print books.)

Work in translation: 7.2%

(Lower than I’d like, but better than last year’s 4.8%.)

Where my books came from for the whole year:

• Free print or e-copy from publisher: 36.8%
• Public library: 21.3%
• Secondhand purchase: 13.8%
• Free (giveaways, The Book Thing of Baltimore, the free mall bookshop, etc.): 9.2%
• Downloaded from NetGalley, Edelweiss or Project Gutenberg: 7.8%
• Gifts: 4.3%
• University library: 2.9%
• New purchase (usually at a bargain price): 2.9%
• Church theological library: 0.8%
• Borrowed: 0.2%

(Review copies accounted for over a third of my reading; I’m going to scale way back on this next year. My library reading was similar to last year’s; my e-book reading decreased in general; I read more books that I either bought new or got for free.)

Number of unread print books in the house: 440

(Last thing I knew the figure was more like 300, so this is rather alarming. I blame the free mall bookshop, where I volunteer every Friday. Most weeks I end up bringing home at least a few books, but it’s often a whole stack. Surely you understand. Free books! No strings attached!)