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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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My reading goals for 2019

30/1/2019

6 Comments

 
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In January last year, I posted on my goals to ensure that at least 50% of the books I read were from independent publishers and/or by female authors. Convinced that diversity is good for the brain, I aspired to make 20% of my reading choices translations. My analysis, posted earlier this month, showed I achieved on all three, but failed a fourth target of 25% BME authors. So what are the implications, if any, for my reading across the coming year?


I’ve decided to keep monitoring these areas – after all, I’ve figured out how to work the spreadsheet to produce my pretty graphs – but I’m not going to report them here until the end of the year. Instead, I’ll be prioritising a couple of other strategies for reading diversely, focusing on women in translation and reading from around the world, categories that might overlap but won’t necessarily.
 
In my post for women in translation month last August, I flagged seven qualifying books I’d read over the previous twelve months. The stories took me around the world to Europe (Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland) and beyond (Iran, Oman and Japan). But I’m determined to beat that between September 2018 and August 2019. Given that, five months in, I’ve read six qualifying books, I ought to manage easily. So I set myself a goal of reading another six women in translation by the end of the “academic” year.
 
The following month I had fun totting up the thirty-two countries I’d visited virtually since the beginning of the year via my post on Reading the world. Not having anything better to do with my time (!) I’ve extended that list both from my pre-2018 reviews and new books I’ve reviewed between September and now. My list now stands at 70, but that’s still less than half the 195 countries in the world.  Can I find another thirty to reach 100 countries in fiction by the end of 2019?
 
My third reading goal overlaps with my writing/promotion goals and is as vague as some of them! But I want to be more focused on supporting writers I can learn from and for whom that support has the potential to make a difference, however small, i.e. good writers but not necessarily the highest flyers. I was delighted when Elizabeth Lowry, author of Dark Water joined in the comments on my review and elsewhere I’ve had some conversation with Lissa Evans about Old Baggage and with Louisa Hall about Trinity. No surprise it’s women writing hard-to-pin down fiction where that most seems to matter (although, to be fair, I have had acknowledgement from male authors in the past).
 
My reading year has got off to a good start with reviews of eleven novels and a memoir. Tap or click on the image to see them all.


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Half of these books are published by independents, half written by female authors and a third by BME writers. Five of the twelve are translations and I gave a quarter a 5-star rating. (Seems I can’t rein in my enthusiasm!)

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My first read of 2019, Sam Taylor’s translation from the French of Retribution Road by Antonin Varenne, and published by MacLehose Press, was a long read which didn’t initially look like my kind of book. But it turned out to be a page-turning treat, encompassing mid-nineteenth century global history, adventure, suspense, the psychology of the impact of trauma or the sociopolitics of the symbiotic relationship of commerce and killing.
 
Published by Riverrun, A River in the Trees by Jacqueline O’Mahony is another novel with a historical strand; in this case the conflict is the Irish War of Independence. There’s also the contemporary thread about a woman at a crossroads in her life toying with returning to her roots. I loved it for the moral issues (subtly explored) in fighting for freedom and for the beauty of the writing.
 
History again for Louisa Hall’s Trinity, published by Corsair, is a beautifully written meditation on bombs and betrayal, patriotism and paranoia around the development, deployment and aftermath of the original weapon of mass destruction.

Over to you now! How’s your reading year going so far and have you set any goals? What do you think of mine?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
31/1/2019 06:14:10 am

Thanks for sharing your reflections on last year's reading and goals for this year, Anne. Your achievements and graphs are both impressive. I think that once we start collecting data such as you have, it's difficult to stop. While it is not a problem for you, it can become a problem for some (e.g. teachers). The difference is that you are collecting and interpreting the data because it's of interest to you (and your readers) but the data that teachers are compelled to collect is often time consuming and useless to them.
I have to admit my ignorance here. I have forgotten what BME stands for and Goggle couldn't provide a satisfactory answer, unless it is BioMedical Engineering. :) Education is riddled with ever-changing acronyms and initialisms and I can never remember what they mean.
I wish you success with achieving your goals, though I have no doubt that you will achieve them.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
31/1/2019 08:37:37 am

Absolutely! So much time wasted and energy drained collecting data of limited use.
Apologies: BME is the previous term for black and minority ethnic now more commonly appearing as BAME in the UK but we're drifting into people of colour.
Love that you 'Goggled' it!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
17/2/2019 07:37:29 am

Thanks for the explanation, Anne. Sometimes those typos come out most amusing, don't they? :)

Anne Goodwin
17/2/2019 01:05:40 pm

Indeed ;-)

Charli Mills
31/1/2019 07:14:19 pm

Anne, you set good goals for your reading to help you be mindful of diversity. Those are good intentions to have. I don't set reading goals, other than time. My priorities are research, profession and pleasure. I certainly learn about more diverse books from you and Retribution Road just arrived. That one is for pleasure after I finish a 1,000-page epic by one of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson. Research reading at the moment is documents. Professional reading includes book I'm considering for my marketing course this fall and one Norah might like (actually I think she could write a book like this) called Make Your Teaching Something Special. I joined a local reading council and it's the book study for the quarter. I wonder if I should start tracking my reading as you do?

Reply
Anne Goodwin
1/2/2019 03:22:10 pm

It’s very easy to track your reading on Goodreads with no obligation to write reviews. I do hope you enjoy Retribution Road I passed my copy to Mr A because he likes a good murder, but he did find some plot holes that didn’t bother me! And yes, why hasn’t Norah written that book!

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