Oh, What a Year in Reading (2021)

A book lying in leaves

Despite the general state of the world, 2021 was actually a good year in reading for me. By the end of the year, I’d read 105 books, which is close to my previous all-time record from 2017 when I read 111. My secret? I read a lot of manga because my brain was mush.

Honestly, though, I think it would take a lot for me to have a genuine reading slump. I had a much harder time focusing for the first half of 2020 and still read a hugely respectable 75 books that year. That’s an unqualified success by just about any standard.

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My Year in Reading: 2018

My totals for 2018 were as follows:

87 total books

52 by male authors
35 by female authors

27 audiobooks
41 graphic novels

16 physical
71 digital

I feel like the best year-end wrap-up posts arrive a few months into the next year to make sure that they are totally relevant. That’s why I’m dropping this post about 2018 halfway through March of 2019 – to strike while the iron is warm but not so hot that it might burn me because who wants that?

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A Few of My Reading Statistics from 2014

Number of books I read last year: 53 2014 was the first year in a good long while where it felt like I might fall short of my reading goal. I’d originally challenged myself to read 75 books – I’ve easily read at least that many for the past few years – but it wasn’t long … Read more

2010: My Year in Reading

I had a great year of reading in 2010. I read even more than I did in 2009, and easily beat my previous record of 60 books in one year by finishing 68 in 2010. To be fair, that does include all 6 of the Scott Pilgrim books, which are fairly short and took about 1-2 hours to read, on average, but a book is a book, that’s what I say. I figure as long as I’m not counting Little Golden Books in my numbers I’m doing alright.

2010 was also a big deal for me because I decided I needed to do something about my ever-expanding collection of paperbacks and hardcovers. Carting around several dozen boxes full of books every time I move doesn’t get more fun the more I do it. Accordingly, in the hopes that it might help de-clutter my life, I bought myself a Kindle. The Kindle doesn’t dominate my reading life yet – I still have hundreds of physical books to read, and the public library is never far away – but I hope that in time it will at least prevent me from needing to buy another big bookcase to store my ever-expanding collection.

I also started an Audible membership this year, mostly because I was in a book club and needed to read the new David Sedaris book quickly, but also because they have a snazzy iPhone app and I thought I might like having a regular stream of audiobooks to listen to at work. Audible also happens to fit in quite nicely with my desire to avoid new physical book purchases.

The Sedaris was a bust – one of the two truly terrible books I read last year – but Audible has been a huge winner for me. The iPhone app has a lot of really cool features, especially the ability to view your entire Audible library and add and remove new books on the fly so that you don’t worry about taking up too much space. My favorite listens so far have been the First Law books by Joe Abercrombie, but I was also excited to pick up a collection of Woody Allen books read by the man himself. Listening to audiobooks at work has really been helping make the days go by quicker. I think it even makes me more productive some days.

Of course, no year-in-review post would be complete without a best-of list, so I’ve included a list below of all the books I read in 2010 and rated 10 out of 10. These are the books that blew my mind and made me love reading just that much more.

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2009: My Year in Reading

Another year has come and gone, and as I have since 2006, I kept track of my reading. Last year I managed to read (or listen to) a total of 60 books, which is a personal record. I think what helped me along was the large amount of traveling I did this year. I went on more than one business trip, flew to Pennsylvania for a friend’s wedding, and drove from Redmond, Washington to Sugar Land, Texas with my brother over the Thanksgiving break. That’s a lot of time spent on planes, in airports, and on the road.

Also, I may have read more books this year, but the total number of pages for 2009, 21,718, Is actually lower than my 2008 total of 23,411. I think my ’08 page count is much higher because I read a few giant books that year – The Count of Monte Cristo, which came in at 1488 pages, Cryptonomicon at 1168, Clash of Kings at 1040, and so on. A lot of the books I picked up in 2009 tended to be quick reads, and were comparatively short as well.

A lot of my reading for the year was pulled from the Hugo nominees for best novel, which was an excellent place to find some good books to read. As you’ll note, a number of the books I thoroughly enjoyed last year were nominees. After the jump, I’ll include the list of my favorite books read in 2009, in the order that I read them.

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