Books I read in 2021

As my year in reading goes, I've certainly read less books, but I've not spent less time reading. It's just some books take me longer than others. For example, I read Call of the Wild, an 80(ish) page book in 4 weeks and then I read a 400 page book in 4 days… so it's really swings and roundabouts.

I recorded 21 books on my Kindle this year, but actually one of them was read aloud to the kids (Which I do still count) but another one was all of 19 pages… which, I think really doesn't count (it was Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory by Martha Wells). So… 20 books then.

This post is mostly data driven (from my own web site's data) to give me a sense of the quality of the books I've read, otherwise individual reviews are all linked in this post or available on my books page.

Longest book: The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2) - 1,000 pages (and indeed the longest book I've ever read)

Shortest book: The Call of the Wild - 91 pages

Quickest read: 3 and 4 days (included as the page count is so wildly different)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers (160 pages)
Iron Widow (Iron Widow, #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao (392 pages)

Longest read/slog: 54 days - though I think thi might have been the months I was struggling with my tinnitus the most making evenings hard to pick up the book

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1) by Douglas Adams (133 pages)

Diversity of authors:

Women: 14 - two of which penned five of these books: Martha Wells and Becky Chambers
Men: 7 - two of which were non-fiction - which for me is a bit of an oddity

I also try to make some of my author selections based on experiences and upbringings that would be wildly different to my own. I found Xiran Jay Zhao, Liu Cixin and Nnedi Okorafor superb for this (and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow included some good recommended reading at the end of their book that I'll be checking out in 2022).