What I've been reading

Since a new LJ community for 50 reads in 2011 hasn't been established (yet), I will just be posting to my personal LJ and will begin cross-posting if/when the new community is established.

My first two reads of 2011 are:

1. "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" by Sherman Alexie. I read his novel "Indian Killer" last year and liked it, though it didn't provide a lot of "closure." I thought I'd read more by him, so I picked up this book, his first published book of short stories. They have the same characters showing up in many stories, so it had a sort of coherence I found satisfying, even though most of the stories didn't follow a traditional plot arc.

and

2. "The Lightning Thief" by Rick Riordan, first in the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" series. I listened to this as a book on CD and it was fun, if a little fluffy. It definitely feels like a YA book and is written at a fairly simple level. For instance, I saw a LOT of plot points coming up a mile away. Still, it was a fun read and I'll likely read more in the series.

I'm going to try to repeat some of the same goals for this year as last:

1. Read at least 50 books.

2. Try to bump my percentage of nonfiction reads to at least 35-40 percent of the total reads for the year.

3. Last year I only managed 7 books by authors of color, so I'm going to shoot for 8 this year. I also want to read at least 2 books by disabled authors and at least 2 by GLBT authors, and I'm going to shoot for gender balance in my authors. It doesn't have to be exactly 50/50, but I'd like to come closer than I did in 2010 (17 books out of 49 by female authors, plus one compilation that had 3 male authors and one female author).