Closing the books – 2019 edition

The geographical distribution (author’s country of birth) of my 2019 reading. (Guide on how to make this type of maps).

A year has ended which means that I once again get to use all the data that I have collected in my trusted reading spreadsheet during the year.

All in all it has been a good reading year, in total I finished 123 books in 2019 (118 in 2018 and 99 in 2017), 51 by a woman, 52 by a man and 20 by multiple authors.

Decade of first publication for the books I read during 2019.

As in the previous years books by authors from UK (46), US (33) and Sweden (11) dominated my reading, but I managed to read books written by authors from 22 countries (27 in 2018 and 21 in 2017). Although the numbers are down a bit from 2018 I am still happy with them as they indicate that even without the reading challenge I participated in in 2017 and 2018, I still keep reading fairly widely. Among books not originally written in English or Swedish, my favourites this year was The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson (Iceland), Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag (India) and The three-body problem by Cixin Liu (China).

Some other 2019 reading highlights have included:

• My family and other animals by Gerald Durrell
• Moominpappa at sea by Tove Jansson
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• Going solo by Roald Dahl
• Snöns historia by Mats Ekdahl

2019 was also the year I rediscovered how much fun Science Fiction novels can be and I made heavy use of Baen’s free library to try new authors (their free anthologies are especially great for that).

I also got my first proper ex libris, which made me really consider what my physical books actually mean to me. 60 of the books that are most important to me now carry a bookplate and I plan to add ca 1 book per month to that number from here on.

Book blogging has also remained important to me, although I have been somewhat less active than in 2018. It is my primary place for bookish discussions so I am very happy for all of you who keep visiting and commenting, thank you!

Most visited blog posts in 2019

• Why everyone needs to read The Brothers Lionheart (now with a very interesting, but spoiler-filled, discussion in the comments section)
• Time for a spin (unfortunately referring to a classic club spin which I haven’t finished…)
• Reading goals for 2019
• The dangerous temptations of literature (in which I make maple syrup candy for the first time)

I wish you all a happy new reading year!