October 28 marks the day when I read 100 books for the year.

Let’s take a look at the breakdown of what I read –

Books written by men – 81

Books written by women – 19

Translated works – 70

Nobel Prize winning works – 21

Books by Small Presses – 46

Fantasy novels – 5

Average pages – 168 pages

So let’s analyse the above

Obviously the glaring, massive, disappointing issue is the percentage of women writers compared to men. It’s not good enough and I am honestly surprised. If I was asked I would have said perhaps 40%, but here we are under 20% for the year.

I need to do better. I have enough books written by women to dramatically improve these numbers.

The next book, which I am almost done at the time of writing this, was written by a woman, but that would only take the year from 19% to 19.8%. Lots and lots of work here to do.

Some of the notable women writers I have read this year include the incomparable Marguerite Duras. I prefer her late works, which are sparse, pristine, close to formless. Open Letter publish a number of these and I would strongly, strongly recommend checking out her work.

I like Rachel Cusk, but A Life’s Work is not a book I connected with particularly well. In it, Cusk grapples with being pregnant and then having a child. And I mean, she really grapples with it. To the point where she struggles with whether or not she hates her child while loving it. And, for me, with a very young child, I just found it too much. I don’t love/hate my child, and I haven’t struggled with parenting. Perhaps when she’s 10 and I am distanced from the baby-phase I might be able to read such a book dispassionately, but alas at this stage in my life I cannot.

Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth was very strong. Boiled down it’s an historical dialogue between a famous man and an unknown (to us, historically) woman. They discuss art, love, life and it’s all absolutely fascinating.

Otherwise, 70% being translated work seems about right. I certainly actively go out of my way to read translated work, and this is shown here. I would anticipate most years of my life would show 60-80% translated books, particularly now that my Updike/Bellow/Roth obsession of my twenties appears to be over.

Nobel Prize winners at 21 is fine. I have no real goal here other than I want to read as many as I can. One book in five seems fine, fine, fine. I’m drawn to novellas, as can be seen above, and it sometimes seems that most Nobel writers write big chunky bois.

Small Presses at 46% is good. I’d like to push that up to 50%, but I’m fine with where it is. Special shout-out as always to Open Letter, which make up 12 of the books I’ve read this year. They are doing excellent work. Other big hitters for me is Dalkey Archive Press and New Directions. The stalwarts, in other words.

Fantasy at 5 books is ok. I want it lower than 10% and here we are. Not much to say here. I tend to use fantasy as a way to kickstart my reading slumps and get me back into literature, but at times I’ll really dive deep into fantasy. Not this year, as we can see – though I have bought a simply enormous amount of books in the SF Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks series. One day.

The average pages strikes me as slightly lower than I thought, but broadly speaking about right. I have a fondness for novellas. I have for years and I will continue to do so. The kind of literature I enjoy most explores an idea fully and then gets out of the way. That’s a novella.

So what does the rest of the year bring? Likely twenty more books. And they really, really need to be more heavily female. I’ve disappointed myself here, and with only two months left in the year I don’t really see how I rectify this in any meaningful way. Reading 20 books, all by women, before the year ends, still only puts me at one third written by females. Which I mean is better but c’mon.

At any rate, reading is not a numbers game, or not entirely so. I have not engaged in enough reading projects this year (ie – Spanish writers, Holocaust literature, Oulipo, etc), and this is something I’d like to do more of. Twitter is aflutter with reading projects and months devoted to a country or language or theme. And sure, that’s pretty great. But I chafe under the rope of another individual’s project, and so I will go it alone, reading, reading, reading.

But definitely reading more women.

Update – And here are the books

Barthes, Roland	Camera Lucida	28 October 2020
Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa	Weep Not, Child	27 October 2020
Handke, Peter	Don Juan	25 October 2020
Zweig, Stefan	Journeys	28 September 2020
Darrieussecq, Marie	Our Life in the Forest	26 September 2020
Leiber, Fritz	Swords Against Wizardry	26 September 2020
Eaves, Will	Murmur	24 September 2020
Didion, Joan	South and West	24 September 2020
Pessoa, Fernando	Selected Poems	5 September 2020
Calvino, Italo	Invisible Cities	3 September 2020
Bataille, Georges	Story of the Eye	2 September 2020
Aira, Cesar	Dinner	1 September 2020
Greene, Graham	Doctor Fischer of Geneva	31 August 2020
Ionescu, Anamaria	Zodiac	31 August 2020
Beckett, Samuel	The Lost Ones	26 August 2020
Madej, Ryan	The Marianas Trench	26 August 2020
King, Stephen	The Gunslinger	25 August 2020
Eliot, T. S.	Murder in the Cathedral	25 August 2020
Bolano, Roberto	The Spirit of Science Fiction	16 August 2020
Perec, Georges	An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris	16 August 2020
Levi, Primo	Moments of Reprieve	15 August 2020
Origo, Iris	A Chill in the Air	11 August 2020
Beckett, Samuel	Dante and the Lobster	9 August 2020
Pilch, Jerzy	A Thousand Peaceful Cities	8 August 2020
Saer, Juan Jose	The One Before	7 August 2020
Togawa, Masako	The Master Key	6 August 2020
Sebald, W. G.	Campo Santo	5 August 2020
Gappah, Petina	An Elegy for Easterly	3 August 2020
Bolano, Roberto	By Night in Chile	31 July 2020
Vila-Matas, Enrique	Because She Never Asked	30 July 2020
Armitage, Samuel	Book of Matches	29 July 2020
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	23 July 2020
Review of Contemporary Fiction	Georges Perec Issue	22 July 2020
Hamsun, Knut	Victoria	22 July 2020
Cusk, Rachel	A Life’s Work	21 July 2020
Sirieix, Fred	Secret Service	17 July 2020
Roth, Philip	Zuckerman Unbound	11 July 2020
Whitehead, Colson	Apex Hides the Hurt	10 July 2020
Xingjian, Gao	The case for literature	25 June 2020
Roth, Philip	The Ghost Writer	23 June 2020
Beckett, Samuel	The Expelled and Other Novellas	22 June 2020
Mieville, China	Iron Council	22 June 2020
Fernandez Mallo, Agustin	Nocilla Experience	16 June 2020
Turner, David	Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel	13 June 2020
Nors, Dorthe	Mirror, Shoulder, Signal	9 June 2020
Modiano, Renzo	Of Jewish Race	4 June 2020
Ondjaki	The Whistler	3 June 2020
Sosnowski, Andrzej	Lodgings	2 June 2020
Navarro, Elvira	A Working Woman	1 June 2020
Modiano, Patrick	Honeymoon	1 June 2020
France, Anatole	Balthasar	31 May 2020
Baudelaire, Charles	The Flowers of Evil	26 May 2020
Wolf, Christa	No Place on Earth	26 May 2020
Brecht, Bertolt	Mother Courage and her Children	22 May 2020
Mella, Daniel	Older Brother	21 May 2020
Azam, Maryam	The Hijab Files	19 May 2020
Tenev, Georgi	Party Headquarters	18 May 2020
Alexievich, Svetlana	Zinky Boys	17 May 2020
Rey Rosa, Rodrigo	Severina	16 May 2020
Hesse, Hermann	Journey to the East	14 May 2020
Neruda, Pablo	Selected Poems	13 May 2020
Heaney, Seamus	New Selected Poems 1966-1987	12 May 2020
Baudelaire, Charles	Paris Spleen	9 May 2020
Duras, Marguerite	L’Amour	7 May 2020
Erikson, Steven	Gardens of the Moon	6 May 2020
Holub, Miroslav	Vanishing Lung Syndrome	6 May 2020
Krasznahorkai, Laszlo	Satantango	30 April 2020
Maupassant, Gu de	Pierre and Jean	29 April 2020
Barba, Andres	Such Small Hands	28 April 2020
Camus, Albert	The Plague	28 April 2020
Watson, Holly	Never Seen the Sea	26 April 2020
Saat, Mari	The Saviour of Lasnamae	25 April 2020
Saramago, Jose	All the Names	23 April 2020
Sebald, W. G.	Vertigo	18 April 2020
Ogawa, Yoko	The Housekeeper and the Professor	15 April 2020
Modiano, Patrick	Sleep of Memory	14 April 2020
Rothes, Joshua	The Art of the Great Dictators	19 March 2020
Pizarnik, Alejandra	The Galloping Hour	17 March 2020
Camus, Albert	The Outsider	16 March 2020
Bidart, Frank	Half-Light – Collected Poems	15 March 2020
Rilke, Rainer Maria	Sonnets to Orpheus	14 March 2020
de Juan, Jose Luis	Napoleon’s Beekeeper	12 March 2020
Modiano, Patrick	The Search Warrant	9 March 2020
Mieville, China	The Scar	8 March 2020
Transtromer, Tomas	The Half-Finished Heaven	2 March 2020
Igov, Angel	A Short Tale of Shame	20 February 2020
Wolf, Ror	Two or Three Years Later	11 February 2020
Vollmann, William T	Whores for Gloria	6 February 2020
Kadare, Ismail	Broken April	5 February 2020
Mahfouz, Naguib	Miramar	4 February 2020
Duras, Marguerite	Abahn Sabana David	3 February 2020
Ljubic, Nicol	Stillness of the Sea	3 February 2020
Mariani, Lucio	Traces of Time	1 February 2020
Duras, Marguerite	Yann Andrea Steiner	30 January 2020
Blatnik, Andrej	You Do Understand	24 January 2020
Nordbrandt, Henrik	When we Leave Each Other	23 January 2020
Zambra, Alejandro	Multiple Choice	16 January 2020
Hazan, Eric	A History of the Barricade	9 January 2020
Hesse, Hermann	Poems	6 January 2020
Zambra, Alejandro	The Private Life of Trees	2 January 2020