Books in 2021!

[starfishstar]

How many books read in 2021?

99 books


How many fiction and nonfiction?

79 fiction, 20 nonfiction


How many male authors, female authors or books written by both?

IF COUNTING BY TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS:
70 by women, 25 by men, 3 by nonbinary authors, 1 co-written by authors of different genders

IF COUNTING EACH AUTHOR ONLY ONCE, EVEN IF I READ MULTIPLE OF THEIR BOOKS:
57 female authors, 19 male authors, 3 nonbinary authors, 1 mixed-gender authorial team


How many books by people of color?

44 books (44%) (Increasing every year!)


Favorite books of 2021?

Always the hardest question of the year! How about:

1. Everything I read this year as part of my ongoing (re)read of Mildred D. Taylor’s Logan Family series: Song of the Trees; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Let the Circle Be Unbroken; Mississippi Bridge; The Friendship; The Road to Memphis; The Gold Cadillac

2. Check, Please! Book 1: #Hockey! and Check, Please! Book 2: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Ukazu

3. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

4. Hamilton: The Revolution: being the complete libretto of the Broadway musical, with a true account of its creation, and concise remarks on hip-hop, the power of stories, and the new America by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

5. We Are Not from Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez

6. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

7. Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

8. Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas

9. Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo

And some additional recs:

The Street by Ann Petry
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh
Little Red Rodent Hood by Ursula Vernon
Fatty Legs and A Stranger at Home by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton
The Seas by Samantha Hunt
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater
Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina
Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore
Shirley and Jamila’s Big Fall by Gillian Goerz
Pansies and For Real by Alexis Hall
Beverly, Right Here by Kate DiCamillo


Oldest book read?

Huh, somehow I’d been assuming it was going to be Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer – which feels old, because the stories draw on Jewish folklore traditions. But it was actually published in 1966!

So it looks like probably the oldest was Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1939), followed by several from the 1940s.


Longest and shortest book titles?

longest title:

Hamilton: The Revolution: being the complete libretto of the Broadway musical, with a true account of its creation, and concise remarks on hip-hop, the power of stories, and the new America by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

shortest title:

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi


Longest books?

Unquestionably A Promised Land by Barack Obama, at 768 pages. (Followed by several books with 500-some pages (e.g. Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman, Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore, Theft by Finding by David Sedaris, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.)


Any translated books?

Yes! Yay! 8 books translated into English: 1 from Yiddish, 1 from Icelandic, 1 from Japanese, 1 from Arabic, 1 from Dutch, 1 from Swedish and 2 from French. Also 2 books translated from English into German.


Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author?

Depending on how you count it: EITHER Alexis Hall (5 books) OR Mildred D. Taylor (4 books…but it’s 7 books if also counting shorter works (novella/long short story length – but each one published in book form) within the Logan Family series).

Followed by Ursula Vernon with 4 books. And then authors by whom I read 2 books: Carlos Hernandez, Kristin Cashore, Rebecca Stead, Maggie Stiefvater, Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, Ngozi Ukazu.


Any re-reads?

Various, including (but not limited to):

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Let the Circle Be Unbroken by Mildred D. Taylor were rereads from my childhood, now that I’m making a project of reading the entire series.

Some books I reread in preparation for their sequels coming out (Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman, Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater).

Some I read for the first time this year but then reread within the same year because I enjoyed them so much (The Check, Please! volumes by Ngozi Ukazu, Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall).

And of course some rereading for fic/fest/gift canon review purposes (various Kristin Cashore for Yuletide, Isaac Bashevis Singer and other classics of my childhood for Purimgifts).


Which books wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
Many/most of them! I keep a big list of all the books that get recommended to me, or that otherwise cross my path and sound interesting, and then I spend my life trying to make a dent in the list. :-)


Did you read any books you’ve always been meaning to read?

Hm, actually most of these hadn’t been on my list all that long before I read them. I did finally read a number of the books about writing that have been hanging out on my list for a while (e.g., Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison, How Fiction Works by James Wood, The Anatomy of Curiosity by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff).

The Street by Ann Petry had been on my list for ages (recommended by a colleague two jobs ago, at my previous library job!) and one or two others were from that era. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison I’d been trying to track down for a while, so that was one of the immediate benefits to signing up for online access to the NYPL and their wealth of ebooks.

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Comments

[gracerene]

Always so fun to see this wrap-up! I'd planned to do something like this myself since I enjoy your reflections so much, but then I ended up reading 400 books in 2021 and that is a lot to wade through...

I've not read Mildred D. Taylor since high school but your rereads have made me want to pick the books up again!

[starfishstar]

400 books!! How do you do it (and I mean that as a serious question)?? I read more than pretty much anyone I know in my non-fandom life, but you read literally 4x as much. (Are you a speed reader? I literally can't imagine any other explanation! But I sure am admiring regardless.)

Yes, Mildred D. Taylor is an amazing author – definitely more than I would have noticed or recognized as a kid. Highly recommended!

[gracerene]

LOL, yeah, it's a couple of factors!
1. Speed Reader
2. I have a daily practice of starting my day with 10% of a NF book, and then with listening to audiobooks (on increased speed) on my daily walks, so those add up in addition to the books I read.
3. About half of those were romance novels, and many of those are shorter than a standard novel and much easier to blow through
4. Honestly, my mental health wasn't great last year, so I spent a LOT more time reading than I would when I've got a more full/balanced life...

[starfishstar]

Wow, well, together that does all add up to be very impressive! And that's a neat idea, about starting each day with a portion of an NF book. (I assume that's for "nonfiction" in his case?) I often listen to audiobooks at increased speed, too, which I don't know that that says good things about my level of patience...but some people just speak so slowly! ;-)

I hear you on how mental health affects this stuff – for me, I guess much of the time it's more likely to be physical health (so much of the time, my body aches so much that it's hard to do anything but lie around and listen to audiobooks...) but mental health for sure can have an impact too.

Thanks for indulging my curiosity! (And sorry that my comment response time these days is 2+ weeks...life is hard.)

[rabbitica]

We also really liked Boyfriend Material!

There's a Tess of the Road sequel coming out? Not sure I'll read it because I was not a fan of that book, but also hard to pass up another book set in that world...

[starfishstar]

Yes, Tess of the Road sequel – titled In the Serpent's Wake (unfortunately no longer the working title of Tess of the Sea, which I found amusing) – coming Feb 1. That's funny, because I found Shadow Scale kind of disappointing as a sequel to Seraphina, but I thought Tess of the Road was incredible. The empathy she grants every character, ever unfoldingly more...I was really impressed.

[rabbitica]

Oh interesting! I liked Shadow Scale (except how depressing it was) but Tess of the Road felt like a lot of characters who are there to teach Tess how Actually, Disabled People Can Have Sex Lives and Sex Workers Can Have Agency and Other Important Lessons.

[starfishstar]

That's interesting – Tess of the Road didn't feel like that to me at all (disabled people being there just to teach Tess a lesson) but I can certainly understand that take. Shadow Scale to me could have been better plotted (the ideas made sense but some of the pacing was wrong, etc.) and felt like a bit of a character assassination for Kiggs. :( I should give it another chance at some point, because there are certainly great parts of it, but unfortunately my memory of it is a bit meh. (Then again, that's my feeling about Winterkeep, too, and most people LOVED it, so I know I'll need to revisit!)

[rabbitica]

omg Winterkeep I thought it was good but in a like, knife to your heart kind of way UGH