I can’t add anything to what  has written about the current awfulness. I am appalled. (This of course was what prompted my post on identity a few days back.)

To change the subject back to where it ought to have been, in the spirit of , I’ve done a backwards audit of my bookblogging since 2004 (the first full year that I blogged every book I read). My PoC authors percentage is not very impressive – 26/1088, 2.4%, with last year being particularly poor (thanks in part to my consumption of all-white Doctor Who novelisations and Shakespeare plays). The relevant books are:

2004 (3/146 books total, 2.1%)
Fermat’s Last Theorem
Persepolis I
Wild Seed

2005 (4/137 books total, 2.9%)
Babel-17
A Personal Matter
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide

2006 (8/207 books total, 3.9%)
The Kite Runner
Beloved
The God of Small Things
Things Fall Apart
The Color Purple
Never Let Me Go
The Einstein Intersection
Kapilavastu

2007 (6/235 books total, 2.6%)
The Art of War
The Satanic Verses
Wild Swans
Dhalgren
Palace Walk
Mindscape

2008 (5/363 books total, 1.4%)
A House for Mr Biswas
A History of the Arab Peoples
Freedom From Fear
The River of Lost Footsteps
Contested Lands

2009
none so far (of 52).

I should be able to do better than that. At present I have the following on my unread list:

Non-fiction:

• Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi)
• A Universal History of Numbers (Ifrah)
• Search for a New Somali Identity (Hussein Ali Dualeh)

sf:

• Kindred (Butler)
• Black Juice (Lanagan)
• Cities of Salt (Munif)
• So Long Been Dreaming (Hopkinson)

Comics:

• Persepolis II (Satrapi)
• With The Light (Tobe)

That’s a total of nine. I think I can reasonably aim to read all of them, and that same number again, in the rest of this year.

Comments disabled; this is more in the nature of a public note to myself.