According to Goodreads, in 2021 I read 118 books (almost 38,000 pages). This does not include the 10 books I didn’t finish. It does include a few cookbooks and a couple of novellas. As always, it was mostly ebooks (99 to be precise) and most of them were from DCPL. Most of the print books I read came from my neighborhood indie, Loyalty Bookstores, by way of Bookshop.
This is up from 84 books in 2020, and can be attributed to the five months that I wasn’t working, plus a good habit of reading instead of doomscrolling, which I need to revive. (I seem to have replaced scrolling Twitter with scrolling hobby-realted subreddits.)
I read 33 books by authors of color, down from 41 last year. I still struggle with exactly how to tag that on Goodreads, and sometimes how to figure out if an author identifies as a person of color to begin with. I’m going to continue doing the best I can with that, and put more energy into identifying books by non-white authors to begin with.
Here are my highest-rated novels of the year, in no particular order:
- Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
- All’s Well, Mona Awad
- Foul is Fair, Hannah Capin
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, both by Becky Chambers
- American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins
- The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailley
- The Survivors, Jane Harper
- The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow
- The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune
- The Spellman Files, Lisa Lutz
- Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
- The Serpent Sea and The Cloud Roads, both by Martha Wells
And highest-rated nonfiction:
- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
- The Customer of the Future, Blake Morgan