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| My shortest ever stack of finished books! I forgot to hang on to some of my library books for this photo, oops! |
I have to start by saying that 2021 was my first completely unobstructed reading year since I decided to embark on reading The List waaay back in 2009.
This summary is going to be different than it has been over the past few years. Basically I already wrote about these books in my What I'm Reading posts throughout 2021, and I'll leave you to find the individual titles if anything sounds interesting.
I picked up an entirely respectable number of 54 books in 2021, leaving seven of them unfinished, for a total of 47 books read, or almost four books per month. (For comparison, I started 69 books in 2020, and finished 65 of them!) My pages per day were down quite a bit from last year, at about 33 per day for prose alone, and 40 per day for prose and comics combined. This is also nothing to sniff at! 2021 was a major transition year for me both on the blog and off, and so I'm not surprised or disappointed that I read less than I might've otherwise.
Here are the usual charts no one asked for:
My pages read per day chart shows the average pages I read in a book per day, over the number of days that I read it, and plots the total pages per day, because I almost always have at least two books on the go. There's a downward trend over the course of the year, but I'm not sure if that's just because I read a ton in January and then quite a bit in the summer as well, and not as much as usual over Christmas.
As usual, the majority of the books that I read in 2021 were free ones! Hard copies from the library made up a full 3 out of every 4 pages that I read. The red piece of the pie below is for the "Borrowed" category. I only read one borrowed book in 2021, accounting for 2% of my reading total.
Author gender was the most equally split it's ever been, with the "B" category below representing "Both" as in books where there were co-authors or short story collections. To my knowledge, none of the authors I read last year would be considered gender non-binary.
And a new chart that I've never included before, here's a breakdown of the different categories of things I read, split up roughly along the lines of the categories below. Novels usually make up a much larger percentage!
Novels
Novels dominated my 2021 reading just like they usually do. I finished 23 of them, so almost two per month. In addition to that, 12 of them were by women and 11 were by men, and I swear I didn't do that on purpose. Standouts for the year include the unexpected fun I had with the first four books of Julia Quinn's Bridgerton series, Forster's gay love story in Maurice, revisiting my old favourite Dune, continuing with the Temeraire, Aubrey-Maturin, and Discworld series, starting the Trickster series, and so on. I've been enjoying being able to read any novel I want!The Outlander by Gil Adamson, 389 pages
The Castle of Llyr by Lloyd Alexander, 175 pages
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink, 276 pages
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, 247 pages
Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary, 155 pages
Maurice by E.M. Forster, 232 pages
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, 293 pages
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, 390 pages
Dune by Frank Herbert, 535 page
Dubliners by James Joyce, 242 pages (yes, this would ordinarily fall into my "flotsam and jetsam" category but it's the only one for the year so I'm sneaking it in here)
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, 325 pages
The House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill, 375 pages
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik, 405 pages
The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian, 332 pages
The Black Jersey by Jorge Zepeda Patterson, 313 pages
Sourcery by Terry Pratchett, 210 pages
The Duke and I by Julia Quinn, 402 pages
The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn, 422 pages
An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn, 358 pages
Romancing Mister Bridgerton by Julia Quinn, 370 pages
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, 444 pages
Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson, 319 pages
All-of-a-kind Family by Sydney Taylor, 189 pages
Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson, 360 pages
Graphic Thingies
I got back to comics in a big way this year, because they're quick to read and sometimes I wasn't reading very quick and just wanted to finish something. Uzumaki was pleasantly creepy and reminded me of the Southern Reach trilogy. Castle Waiting was sweet and heartwarming and just the right amount of odd. The Shadow Hero proves Yang is just as good when he's working with an artist vs illustrating his own comics.Uzumaki: Spiral Into Horror by Ito Junji
The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire, 224 pages
- Volume 1, 205 pages
- Volume 2, 197 pages
- Volume 3, 255 pages
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider, 128 pages
- Volume 1, 457 pages
- Volume 2, 375 pages
This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, 317 pages
Irredeemable by Mark Waid and Peter Krause
- Volume 1, 104 pages
- Volume 2, 112 pages
The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew, 169 pages
Non-Fiction
There's a nice symmetry to my non-fiction reading in 2021, similar to the novels, which is to say that I finished 12 non-fiction books, i.e. one per month. Nothing exactly blew my mind: there's a not insubstantial amount of "self-help" type stuff here and nothing really "hard-hitting" if you will, with the exception of Regretting Motherhood, which is absolutely harrowing. Six of the books were written by women, five were written by men, and one was written by a heterosexual couple. Again, I didn't shoot for this balance, it just happened!Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly, 120 pages
Subtitle: Nellie Bly's Experience on Blackwell's Island
The Most Human Human by Brian Christian, 275 pages
Subtitle: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Aliv
Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich, 417 pages
Subtitle: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath, 224 pages
This Word Now by Owen and Jodi Egerton, 283 pages
Debt by David Graeber, 391 pages
Subtitle: The First 5000 Years
Downsizing the Family Home by Marni Jameson, 227 pages
Subtitle: What to Save, What to Let Go
The Joy of Less by Francine Jay, 287 pages
Subtitle: A Minimalist Guide to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify
Wabi Sabi by Beth Kempton, 202 pages
Subtitle: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life
The Art of Fiction by David Lodge, 230 pages
Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom, 230 pages
Subtitle: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
You Bet Your Life by Paul A. Offit, 221 pages
Subtitle: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovations
Unfinished
There were seven books that I didn't finish in 2021, and I feel like I'm really honing my instincts for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, several of these were simply books that I was just attempting to read at the wrong time, and may revisit later. Ada Palmer's The Will to Battle just needs to be read closer to the preceding entries in the series. I attempted some non-fiction that needed more concentration than I had to devote this year as well, specifically The Sabres of Paradise and Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But there are so many books and so little time, and I'm done with finishing anything that I feel lukewarm about.The Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch, after 248 pages
Subtitle: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus
The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith, after 64 pages
Whispering Rails by Gilbert A. Lathrop, after 91 pages
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, after 367 pages
The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, after 51 pages
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, after 216 pages
Why Good Sex Matters by Nan Wise, after 46 pages
Subtitle: Understanding the Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, Happier, and More Purpose-Filled Life
Number of books read: 47 (plus seven unfinished)
Total pages in 2021: 14,491
Total pages per day: 40 (33 excluding graphic thingies)
Total audiobook time in 2021: 0!
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