Books of 2021
Jan. 24th, 2022 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yiskahSeparate books meme, because my procrastination needs are great.
How many books did you read this year?
116, which was four fewer than I’d wanted and one fewer than last year, but whatever, I am fine with it. I have put overall percentages into my end of year meme thing, but have just gone through to check genres (assigned on very much a gut-instinct basis – there are definitely some books that could have fallen into multiple genres) and have found the following:
SFF (including YA): 15 (13%)
General fiction: 27 (23%)
Horror: 5 (4%)
Memoir: 8 (7%)
General non-fiction: 9 (8%)
Poetry: 1 (1%)
Short stories: 3 (3%)
Romance: 31 (27%)
Non-genre YA: 16 (14%)
…Which is surprising, especially the high number of romance novels, given that five years ago I would say that it was the only genre I never read at all.* However since then I have discovered a set of queer romance writers whom I trust enough to buy anything they put out. That said, I have also read a certain amount of much-less-good queer romance in the past year, and not even enjoyed it as a “guilty pleasure” (not that I think any pleasures should be guilty) but instead found it a bit bleak and irritating. So, less of that in 2022 (see below).
*Edited on 28 Jan as I just realised I initially missed "never" out of that sentence which makes this whole paragraph very confusing.
Did you reread anything? What?
The only thing I can think of is Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian, which I was so helplessly charmed by that I reread it as soon as I’d finished it. I cannot remember the last time I did that, probably not since I was a child! To be fair it was also at a time of great stress: I was taking a very last-minute trip to the Central African Republic and the day before I was due to leave I was supposed to finalise a report I had been drafting for the Mali project I was working on and had spent HOURS on it over the weekend and then I woke up on Monday morning to find that my laptop had inexplicably reset overnight and all my work had been lost (S C R E A M), so I had to redo it and then travel horribly early to London and then book into an airport hotel for a few hours in the middle of the day so that I could do a workshop for work and then fly overnight and I was SO SO TIRED. Anyway at some point on planes or in airports I read PCGL and it was the soothing read that I needed, and I reread it immediately on arriving in Bangui. Usually I have this thing when I have really, really loved a book where I feel like I have to confiscate it from myself and ration it so I don’t “ruin it”, and I think a lot of that is to do with how, when I am strongly emotionally engaged in a book the real world feels inadequate and I am worried that I will … morph into a half-book, half-human chimaera or something? Anyway for some reason I didn’t feel that at all about PCGL and I’m not sure why not.
What were your top five books of the year?
Let’s see. Off the top of my head, the books that I read this year that I thought were objectively the best books (in no particular order) were:
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
The Fortune Men, by Nadifa Mohamed
On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
… and actually there are loads of things that could take the fifth place. Maybe Silence is My Mother Tongue, by Sulaiman Addonia?
And then there are the books that I LOVED the most, which would be:
The Kingdoms, by Natasha Pulley
Peter Cabot Gets Lost, by Cat Sebastian
Summer Sons, by Lee Mandelo
Something by AJ Demas – maybe Something Human?
…which all have a strong flavour of queer romance (though I would say that only two of them are actually within the romance genre). What, me, outsourcing my strongest emotions to fiction? How DARE you.
Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?
2021’s best discovery was AJ Demas! She writes queer romance set in an analogue ancient Mediterranean and I don’t think I’d ever heard of her until Amazon was like “maybe you would be into this?” I read the first two of the Sword Dance trilogy and then went back and read her other two books and then pre-ordered the final book in Sword Dance and loved absolutely all of them. She has such a deft, light touch with her characters and just the right amount of world-building for it to seem believable and I am looking forward to whatever she writes next.
Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?
Ahahahaha fucking hell I have … probably over 2000 books on my Kindle? So, yeah.
Did you meet any of your reading goals? Which ones?
The only reading goal I had was to read 120 books, of which, as I have mentioned, I was four short. I would have liked to have knocked more books off the big list of classics that I compiled back in … 2015 I think, but I did at least knock ONE book off it, thanks to Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf (which was fucking GREAT).
What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?
I think probably Khirbet Khizeh, by S. Yizhar – it was originally published in 1949 but was also one of the very first books I remember getting when I first started buying books for my Kindle rather than using it for free stuff from Project Gutenberg (what a slippery slope that was), which would have been maybe 2012. It is a short Israeli novel about Israeli troops emptying a Palestinian village and I thought it was very very good indeed.
How many books did you buy?
Loads and loads and loads. I keep thinking I should make a new year’s resolution to buy fewer books but there is no point, I will just break it immediately. However I have just about stopped spending an hour or so on the first day of each month going through the new monthly deals for Kindle, having come to the conclusion that most of the discounted books are things that I already have, AND they’d started including not-very-discounted things on there (I will take a chance on a book I’ve never heard of if it’s 99p or 1.99, but not if it’s 4.99).
Did you use your library?
I did not. I think my library has been closed for most of the pandemic and I am ashamed to say that I never really use it anyway, though when I do pop in once in a while to print something there are always plenty of people there and I will fight tooth and nail to keep it open. I have also got better at patronising my local bookshops, as I am lucky enough to have FOUR independent bookshops within an easy walk of my flat (though two of which I’ve never actually been to, sorry), and so if there’s something I want in hardcopy I will order it through either Category Is… or Outwith. Which is not good for my finances but it is bad for Bezos’s finances, which is a decent enough bargain for me.
What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?
Probably 90 minutes or so? I read Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking on a plane and it was definitely a very quick read.
What reading goals do you have for next year?
I don’t have any specific goals – the last couple of years I’ve aimed to read 120 books in the year and I’ve always missed by a few, and this year I have decided to see what happens if I stop attaching goals and targets to every little thing I do, including the things that I do for fun and relaxation, and maybe instead just … trust myself to do the things I like to do? I realise this is tied to my core belief that if I do not FORCE myself to do things I will revert to some sort of primordial form and literally do nothing but loll about in bed for the rest of my life, but conceivably this is not actually the case.
I do have a small reading resolution, which is to stop reading just-okay romance novels, as I have come to understand that they are not just less-good versions of the thing that I want, but are in fact antithetical to my interests in a way that leaves me cross. I have been trying to figure out what it is that annoys me so much, and I think it’s this: I avoided m/f romance for YEARS because I felt that it reinforced gender dynamics that I found not only deeply unsexy but actively damaging,* and then I started to read queer romance because a lot of it subverts those dynamics or at least does something interesting (and hot) with the power relations between the protags, but it turns out that when you start to cast your net more widely within the queer romance ocean, you start to pull up a whole load of books that simply replicate those problematic m/f power dynamics with a different constellation of genitals involved. And I could not be LESS interested.
*Yes I do know that there is m/f romance that doesn’t do this, but you have to wade through a whole load of dross to actually get to it.
What’s the longest book you read?
Honestly no idea, as I read pretty much everything on my Kindle. Probably Billy Summers by Stephen King, though: his books are generally doorstops. Ah, and google tells me it’s 525 pages in print, which isn’t quite as long as I’d thought, but I can’t immediately think of anything I would have read that’s longer.
What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?
Probably The Kingdoms, by Natasha Pulley, and it absolutely met my expectations as it was definitely the book I loved the most from this year.
Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?
I didn’t participate in anything because good lord, why would I? I think I have been at least vaguely conscious of the big ructions in Book Twitter, and mostly just found it disappointing and baffling that the world of books is just as subject to ego and manipulation and fuckery than any other subculture. (This shouldn’t surprise me, people are people, book people are no better.)
Any books that disappointed you?
What were your least favorite books of the year?
(I’m not sure if Clare combined these questions or whether they were combined in the original meme but either way I’m keeping them like this.)
I normally feel bad about writing negative things about books because I am extremely aware that writers are PEOPLE who have access to the internet and an unfortunate penchant for googling their own names, and I’m also very aware that there are books that I love that other people loathe, everything is subjective etc. etc. HOWEVER. I read two romance books that I disliked so much that they made me quite cross, and I don’t think the authors are going to track me down in this little friends-locked DW post, are they? So: Total Creative Control, by Joanna Chambers and Sally Malcolm, which takes a mean and moody protagonist and dials him up so much that he is basically abusive and all I wanted to do was sweep up the poor, gaslit love interest and get him out of there. And A Winter’s Earl, by Anabelle Greene, which was simply bad, and yet I felt the need to grit my teeth and get through it. No more of that in 2022!
I continue to hate-read Lionel Shriver and I don’t care who knows it.
What genre did you read the most of?
Romance, it turns out! Who knew!
Did you read any books that were nominated for or won awards this year (Booker, Women’s Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer, Hugo, etc.)?
Not deliberately! I did read No-one is Talking about This and The Fortune Men, both of which were nominated for the Booker. Clare’s version of this meme tells me that Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton, which I read at her behest (Clare’s, not Dolly Alderton’s) was nominated for the Wodehouse humour prize and was the runner-up for Comedy Women in Print. Oh, apparently Piranesi won the Women’s Prize for Fiction!
What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?
Maybe Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights? It is a YA retelling of Romeo and Juliet set among the gangs of 1920s Shanghai, and the setting and the worldbuilding are great, but the characters and the central romance left me pretty cold. Probably I am simply too old for the sort of overwrought romance that people in their late teens / early twenties write. Not a huge fan of Romeo and Juliet either, tbf, so it’s hardly the book’s fault that it wasn’t really my thing.
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Date: 2022-01-24 09:02 pm (UTC)Hmph. Ghosts, you read... (scowls in Stalking the Wild Dik Dik)
Read Murderbot now! I need to talk about it at you!
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Date: 2022-01-25 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 09:22 am (UTC)