2017 Reading Review

[oulfis]

Yes, that says 2017 in the title: I never actually got around to looking at my data from last year's reading, and now that this year is basically over and I want to see how my reading challenge affecting things, I figured it's now or never!

A Tale of Two Tests

In 2016, my reading was pretty shaped by my coursework and my comprehensive exams. 2017 was all about my special fields exam, which I sat in December 2017. This is pretty obvious in the "motivation" for each book:



The difference between the content of these two exams is expressed pretty hilariously in a graph of the publication dates:



Can you guess what period of literature I specialize in...? That ONE SINGLE BOOK at 1900, in the 2017 list, looks so lonely! (It was The Making of a Marchioness, a delightful comfort-read.) Many of the "contemporary" books are secondary criticism, too, which are still basically about the 18th century. Graphs like this one show, I think, why I tell people that I don't know anything at all about "recent" literature, i.e., literature post-1830.

Not-Reading

I'd expected the exams to produce an interesting pattern in a graph of when I read each book as well, but that's not quite what I found:



The exam definitely played a role, in 2017 -- you can see me hurrying to finish a LOT of books in December! But what really surprised me was that gap of two months in February and March when I didn't read a single thing. I finished a book Jan 21, and didn't finish another until March 22. That's the second-longest stretch of not-reading in my recorded history. (The longest is from Nov 26, 2012 to Feb 12, 2013. I spent most of 2012 working three jobs to pay off my extremely recent top surgery, and Nov to Feb was when all my grad school applications were due.) February 2017 is when I finally had a hysterectomy, so that must have disrupted my routines more than I thought!

The Actual Books

Although my special fields exam focused intensely on the 18thC, the general "demographics" of my reading didn't change a lot from the previous year's coursework-and-comps. This one's just as embarrassing, for example:

One of my 2017 books was an edited collection by multiple authors, so I got excited that maybe I could count it as "multi" -- but no, as far as I could tell, every single author was white. Making these graphs two years in a row has really hit me in the face with the fact that my reading, and my research, is much whiter than I think it is.

But I read plenty of writing by women:



The gender ratios there come from the fact that my academic reading is 50/50, and my pleasure reading favours women:

It does surprise me, somewhat, that I think of myself as a scholar who studies women's writing, and I go to great lengths to find women to place at the centre of my scholarship -- and yet my "female-dominated" fields reading list was 50/50. But the fields list was required to, in part, familiarize me with The Canon of 18thC writers, which meant a lot of mandatory men; I was able to dodge William Blake, thank god, but I was subjected to enormous amounts of Wordsworth.

I also read a lot less drama for fields than for comps, even though I think of myself as someone who doesn't buy into the pooh-poohing of 18thC drama:



I think seven plays is a fairly respectable amount, really. Most of my drama and poetry reading occurs ends up the "multi" category (hidden in both years because I only read a few), which includes anthologies. All of that Wordsworth didn't give me a single 'credit' in "poetry"!

Conclusions

My primary reading goal for 2018, after a cursory skim of my 2017 reading, was to increase the racial diversity of what I read. Like, maybe I could read one book by a non-white author? I also wanted to build up habits of reading for pleasure.

Having seen this data now, I'm also curious to see if I was more female-focused with my 18thC reading after I was done with my fields exam.

How did those go? Tune in next time to find out!