2012 Year in Review

I noticed this post over on Neth Space and realized that I have all the information needed to do the same (I try to track my reading on Library Thing, and was getting my list up-to-date for awards nomination season).

However, before I get to the numbers, I want to let people know how happy I am to have been nominated for the BSFA award in the non-fiction category! It's for the essay on spacesuits that I did for Ian Sales' anthology Rocket Science, and I'm really amazed by how much attention it's gotten, first from the reviewers and now from the BSFA nominating population. 

I don't expect to win this award--Farah and Paul have both won before, Maureen did a brilliant job with her extended review series, and the World SF blog is a wonderful on-going resource. However, they're not kidding when they say it's an honor to be nominated. I'm also rather pleased to see that I appear to be one of the only nominees ever in this category for a piece that deals more with science than with literature. For one that makes me very happy as I hope to expand out into doing more science popularization writing in the future; and for two I hope that I can act, even in a small way, as a role model: women can't just do science, we can have fun doing science.

In the spirit of Science then, on to the numbers!

Books read in 2012: 30
Fiction: 19
Non-Fiction: 11
Collections of short stories: 7
Published in 2012: 15
Specifically read for review: 13
Specifically read as research for the Egan book: 8
By male authors: 17
By female authors: 7
Avg rating as awarded at the time: 3.4
Avg rating as adjusted after reflection: 3.33

(The male/female numbers don't include the short fiction anthologies unless they were single-author collections)

My highest rated book for the year was The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, followed by The Wiscon Chronicles Vol. 5, Timeless, and Beyond Binary. None of the books I read got less than two stars. 

So I'm running about 30/70 Female/Male, which isn't great. And only 30 books? In 2011 I read 53! Aaargh! Already the impact of having little Gadget running around is making itself clear. But I did better at reading things published in 2012 than I'd feared, although I still feel quite a bit behind the curve there. I've got high hopes for 2013 though, as I've already polished off four books so far, with a gender split of 75/25 F/M gender split (although two of those are from 2012... still playing catch up!)