That's right I have finished my last classes to get my MLIS from San Jose State and will hopefully get a letter verifying this soon because I will be paranoid that I forgot something until then. I am very excited about finally being an official librarian so I no longer have to correct people when they act as if everyone who works in a library is a librarian and say that I'm actually a library clerk. Also, not going to grad school any more will be nice. I've been going to school with no breaks other than summer since I was in preschool and have been working at the same time since my senior year in high school so only working forty hours a week seems like semi-retirement to me.
I have plenty of plans to fill my new-found free time though. I'll finally have time to do more sewing and crafting and hopefully I'll be able to exercise and cook more as well. Perhaps I'll even be able to keep up with my languages or even learn a new one. Maybe I'll learn guitar. Maybe I'll go rockclimbing. I'll be able to do all the things I said I would when I had free time. Or at least some of them. It's all very exciting and a bit intimidating.
I'm also thinking about doing a bit of an overhaul on the blog. I like the Sassy Shelver name but now that I can actually call myself a librarian I'm tempted to take advantage of the fact. Plus, I don't actually do much shelving any more. We'll see.
I've also, of course, done a lot of reading this year. And I hope to do even more next year now that I don't have homework sucking up my time. Here's a review of the books I read in 2011. I am proud to say that I reviewed all of them, although some of these reviews will not come out until next year because I developed a bit of a back log as I was busy wrapping up grad school.
I read 85 books in 2011. I've broken it down into audience so I can see how well I'm balancing reading for work and reading for pleasure, genre to see if I'm successfully reading widely so I can recommend different kinds of books, and nationality of author (for the fiction books) to see if I'm reading a diverse mix. I then whipped up not terribly attractive but very easy to make excel charts of them because it's the holiday season and I've been busy. Without further ado, the stats:
I think I did a good job balancing audience, although with my juvenile and tween fiction classes to take care of I didn't do as much adult reading as I would have liked and I definitely felt it by the end of the year. I was craving some nice complex adult narratives (and this craving was thoroughly satisfied by Sea of Poppies, which I'll post about later.)
I did an okay job reading widely although it's clear what my favorite genre is.
I would like to have better percentages on this chart next year. I read 35% non-American authors, but I mostly did this by birthplace so some of those authors were born elsewhere and came to America later. Additionally many of those were from other English-speaking countries. Only 7 or 9.3% of the authors originated from non-English speaking countries and only 4 of the books I read were originally written in another language.
I won't make any resolutions for the next year here because it's usually a futile process for me. My feelings are summed up pretty well by the webcomic sheldon. I will say that I am excited for the new year though and I hope you are too. To quote Neil Gaiman:
"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
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