Reading 52 Books in 52 Weeks, Year 6

I’ve now read 52 books in 52 weeks for the sixth year in a row! (See blog posts from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.)

I technically should’ve published this in early 2020, but I was working on this article for Girls’ Night In on setting and achieving reading goals. Better late than never!

What I did differently this year

My reading routine didn’t change much from last year. I still use my book-tracking spreadsheet to track metadata around the books and authors I read. The final count ended up being 61 books (!!), with 54 books by women, 29 of those written by women of color, and 7 books by men, 5 of those written by men of color. (Some of these books had multiple authors.)

The major change to my reading life was getting a Kindle, which I think helped me read well past my reading goal. After discovering romance novels last year, I continued reading a lot of them this year— mainly on my Kindle. While I vastly prefer reading physical books, I like the highlights and notes function. Bless the NYPL Overdrive which has a substantial selection of ebooks and easy Kindle syncing.

I also found that some books were better suited for certain formats. For example, if I knew a book was going to be heavy on visuals or required me to flip around a lot (like fantasy books where I’m referencing maps or character lists), I usually opted to get the physical copy.

I was even more into book clubs this year than I was last year! For Eater Book Club, where we read books about/involving food, I read The Cooking Gene, Save Me the Plums, and With the Fire on High. I read Trick Mirror for two book clubs. For The Cosmos Book Club, a book club for Asian women featuring books by Asian women, I read The Best We Could Do, Miracle Creek, Severance, and If You Leave Me (technically a reread). My friend, Emma, also started a book club where we read books by women — alternating fiction and nonfiction—and it’s not only introduced me to some great books (Normal People, The Collected Schizophrenias, and Fleishman Is in Trouble), but also some incredible people. We met in-person at various people’s apartments and bars, often with wine, snacks, and baked goods. For the holidays, we did a White Elephant book swap which remains one of my favorite book-related gatherings. (Writing this in 2020 makes me extremely bummed.)

I also started writing a lot more consistently this year, largely thanks to a writing group with some friends from The Cosmos. I took a few writing classes with Catapult and did half of National Novel Writing Month in November—28,000 words in 30 days. I’ve read that some authors don’t read when they’re writing, or can only read genres different than what they’re writing in, so I am honestly surprised that my writing didn’t interfere with my reading as much as I thought it would.

Pages read per month:

Breakdown of books I read:

I had a more even breakdown between fiction and nonfiction (38 vs. 23) compared to previous years.

In nonfiction, I read about Chernobyl because I was obsessed with the HBO show (Voices from Chernobyl), internet and meme culture (Because Internet, Memes to Movements), and millennials and contemporary culture (How to Do Nothing, Kids These Days, and Trick Mirror). I read a lot more memoirs (Chanel Miller, Michael Twitty, Tegan and Sara, Ruth Reichl, Michelle Obama, Ali Wong, Thi Bui), essay collections (Meaty, The Good Immigrant, The Collected Schizophrenias), and short story collections (Lot, Exhalation).

I continued to read Asian and Asian American authors, such as Angie Kim, Xuan Juliana Wang, Ling Ma, and Helen Hoang. Per my romance novel kick, I read 19 romance novels, many of which were written by Julia Quinn, Tessa Dare, Alyssa Cole, and Alisha Rai. (I was making my way through all of Tessa Dare’s books and Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series.) I even read a meta book about the romance genre, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, written by the creators of the excellent blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I finished N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy and devoured all of the books in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses. I was so engrossed in the first book that I missed my subway stop!

I’m still a loyal patron and supporter of the New York Public Library, to which I owe much of my reading success. This year, I stuck to books mainly between the range of 200–400 pages. While some YA novels could be as long as 600 pages, they read extremely fast.

How I track what I read

I tweet out a book when I finish it with the hashtag #52booksin52weeks. I use Coach.me and Goodreads to track day-to-day progress. I’ve started to compile all of my tweets/books into Twitter moments for better discoverability: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

How I choose books to read

I continuously add books to my to-read list on my book tracking spreadsheet and/or on Goodreads. I still get a lot of recommendations from friends and authors I like and follow. If I enjoy an author’s book, I typically try to read their previously published or forthcoming work. This year, I got book recs from Elle, Shondaland, NYPL, Electric Literature, and BuzzFeed.

A few favorites

• A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
• Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Know My Name by Chanel Miller
• Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Severance by Ling Ma
• With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
• A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare
• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
• The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
• The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

What I’m doing differently this year

I’m writing this at the end of 2020, so LOL.

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