Currently reading: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

One of the things that I’m really lucky to have access to in my bookish life is Book Riot Insiders, a community which gives me access to some great resources. One of those is a channel of rad book bloggers, who have offered me some great support in getting started out. I am charmed to have been invited to host the year-end tag post for #BookishBloggersUnite, and the theme that was chosen was a 2018 wrap up! 

For the past several years, I have made it my goal to read 50 books. In 2017, I made it to 41. The last book that I read that year was for a queer book club that I was part of at the time, and it also wound up being the most read book in the Toronto Public Library system that year – a pretty impressive feat, given that TPL is the largest library system in all of North America. The book was Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Margaret Thien. I closed out my reading year crying my eyes out over its final pages.

In 2018, I finally surpassed my goal of 50 books. I hope to review and write about many of them in the upcoming year. However, since this is a new project, I thought it might be interesting to offer some information about what I read. For me, 2018 is particularly poignant, because I took a lot of time off of school this year for personal reasons, and had more downtime to play with. I feel like the books I chose this year were really my choices, and say a lot about me as a reader, and probably as a bookseller, as well.

• Total number of books read (as of December 11th, not including children’s books): 57
• First book read: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter 
• Last book read: Women Talking
• Average length: 277 pages
• Books by people of colour (based on information available to me): 27
• Books with authors who aren’t cis men: 49
• LGBTQ books and/or books with LGBTQ content: 34
• CanLit: 10
• Middle grade or YA: 25
• Graphic: 10
• Anthology: 2
• Non-fiction: 15
• Memoir: 7
• Fiction: 40
• Poetry: 1
• Speculative/SFF: 21
• Books I read in one sitting: 12
• DNF: 7
• Currently reading (unfinished in 2018): 4
• Referral sources: Another Story Bookshop, Book Riot podcasts, recommendations from @genderqueerwolf, recommendations from the FOLD
• Favourite books of the year: Freshwater, Our Homesick Songs, Hurricane Child
• Favourite audiobook of the year: the Fact of a Body
• Favourite picture books released this year (not otherwise included in stats above): All The Animals Where I Live, Pretty Kitty, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates, Pearl, Love, Z

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