Books in 2021!
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:
- 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
- Check, Please! Book 1: #Hockey! and Check, Please! Book 2: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Ukazu
- How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
- 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
- We Are Not from Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
- Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
- Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
- 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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(Crossposted from this post on Dreamwidth, which is now my primary journal. Comments are fine in either place.)