2021 In Books

Historically, I tend to have a bit of a hit-and-miss relationship with reading. I commonly go through spurts where I will read incessantly for a few months followed by a few months where I don’t read any books. While the beginning of 2021 trended toward the latter, the back half of the year lent itself toward the former. While I had a Goodreads goal of reading 12 books throughout the year, I ended up smashing it by reading 23 (!) books.

You can see my full stats at Goodreads, but I thought it would be fun to capture some of the more interesting metrics in a blog post.

Year In Review

In raw numbers, those 23 books worked out to my reading 7,866 pages. I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate since I know a lot of the ebooks that I was reading didn’t work out to the same number of pages listed on Goodreads. Regardless, the number has to be at least relatively close.

I had an interesting mix of books, between long novels and a few shorter novellas, such as the first couple of works in Martha Wells’ fantastic The Murderbot Diaries series. My shortest read at 128 pages ended up being the horror novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth:

On the flip side, my longest read was Caliban’s War, the second novel in The Expanse series, which clocked in at 583 pages:

Overall, the 23 books I read had an average length of 342 pages.

The most popular book I read was Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. This was a re-read for me to help keep my mental straight going into a second, stressful year of pandemic. It was shelved by a total of 1,670,839 people.

The most niche book I read was Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill. It was shelved by a mere 9,716 people. I happened to stumble across it when someone I follow on Twitter mentioned reading it.

Finally, the highest rated book I read throughout the year was Project Hail Mary, written by Andy Weir of The Martian fame. It managed an impressive average rating of 4.1 across Goodreads.

2022 Reading Goals

Since I beat my 2021 reading goal of 12 books pretty handily by almost doubling it, I opted for an ambitious — for me — 30 book goal in 2022. I’m hopeful this will help keep me motivated to read rather than opting to streaming endless hours of television during times when I don’t feel up for being particularly productive. So far I’d say I’m on a good pace since it’s not yet halfway through January, and I’ve already finished my 3rd book. I’m currently reading The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling as my 4th.

How I Read

I’ve had a few friends ask if it doesn’t get expensive to read so much. The answer for me is a definite “No” because I only purchase a fraction of the books that I read. My first stop for any book I’m interested in reading is my local library. I access their digital content via the Libby app. For my particular library, I was actually able to register for a digital library card directly from Libby, though your mileage may vary; I know some people who needed to physically stop by the library to get a card first.

From Libby, I manage my loans, can put a hold on any book that’s currently on loan that I want to get in line for, etc. Libby has a decent ebook reader baked in, though I personally opt to read my loans through the Kindle app since that makes it easier to read them on my Fire tablet — which is lighter and easier to hold than my iPad for long reading sessions. Libby is awesome, and I’d highly recommend checking it out if you want to try getting more into reading.