2020 Final Tally

 Not a lot of foreign authors in my 2020 final tally but more diverse than the first posting.

My final tally for 2020 included 52 authors from 9 jurisdictions -

US = 31

UK = 12

Australia = 2

Ireland = 2

Canada, Iceland, Russia, Poland and Cyrus all had 1 each (Cyprus was actually a Dual Nationality - UK / Cyprus born in Cyprus and that was author Alex Michaelides).

One author, Patrick Ness, is a dual US / UK citizen born in the US but lives in London.  I included him as UK since he wrote the books from the UK.

So 59.6% were by American Authors while 90% were by Native English speakers.

What about gender?  I was surprised by the dominance of male authors.  There are 36 male authors represented and just 16 females.   So 69% were male authors.

I say surprised because many of my favorite authors are female.  But my reading list from 2020 (and indeed 2019 and 2018) came from "Best Book" lists as I am trying to finish reading books from the two lists - BBC Big Reads and Modern Libraries 20th Century with other books mixed in from Goodread lists or books I heard of from elsewhere.  

I will be interested to see how 2019 and 2018 compare.  

So far in 2021 I have completed 26 books but I haven't looked at those stats yet either as to nationality of the author nor whether they were male or female.  I will be making an effort in 2021 to read more "non-native English" authors so books written by authors NOT from one of the 6 native English speaking countries.

This morning I completed my own spreadsheet of world jurisdictions  with the authors / books compiled by https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/thelist/.  I will try to add to that list and then start selecting books written by authors from jurisdictions from which I haven't yet read anything.

My reading in 2020

 I have started reviewing the 100 books I read in 2020 to see which authors I read and information about them. It appears I read books written by 52 different authors.  I alphabetized the list and started looking at where they were from and their gender.

The first 28 authors broke down as:

19 authors from the United States with 13 different States represented.  A couple of the authors were actually born abroad and one, Cassandra Clare appears to have moved around the world with her parents so I don't have a state assigned to her.  One of the 19 was Native American belonging to one of the Lakota Tribes (Sioux).

4 Authors were British, 2 were Irish, 2 were Irish and one was born in Cyprus but one parent is British.  I tentatively have them listed as being from Cyprus.  

Of those first 28, 20 were male and 8 female.

My mix of reading material in 2020 came from the BBC Big Read Top 200 list, Modern Library Best Novels of the 20th Century List, Goodread Best Authors and miscellaneous.

I plan to finish the statistics on 2020 but also look at 2019 and of course 2021.