I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of a data nerd. I love collecting and tracking information about what I get up to. Looking at how much sleep I’ve got or what my heartrate is according to my fitness tracker. Keeping track of my habits and progress towards various goals in my bullet journal. And, of course, keeping a record of all the books I’m reading!

For what it’s worth, I’m not perfect at keeping up with any of these methods of recording or analysing self-generated data. In 2021 I made a concerted effort to keep up-to-date with what I was reading though, so this is the most complete I think it’s ever been. Since I actually did a decent job of it, I though it might be interesting to take a look at what I read last year. I wanted to look at what stood out looking back, and whether there are any interesting patterns I could find!

I read 94 books this year, and I didn’t revisit old favourites as often as I thought

My Goodreads target was 80, so I surpassed that. This year I think I’m going to aim for 90 books as a baseline, but my stretch goal will be 100 – let’s see if I can break triple digits!

Of those 73 were new reads. I was definitely expecting to have more like 50% re-reads, so that surprised me. It is possible I was less likely to remember to put in when I was re-reading books, so there may be a few missing from my round-up, but even if that’s true I still read overwhelmingly more new books than previously-read ones.

That’s good news for the TBR, I guess!

Genre and age group breakdown

35 of the books I read last year were science fiction or fantasy. This is based on my very rough categorisation, and I’ve left a couple of what I’d consider speculative fiction off the list which I guess could be contentious. But it’s my round-up, so it’s my rules.

Most of the rest were contemporary fiction, with a smattering of thriller/mystery books in there as well. Only two were non-fiction, which doesn’t entirely surprise me! But I’d like to try to pick up a few more NF reads this year.

Unsurprisingly, 43 of the 94 were YA. Since I mostly write YA I do tend to gravitate towards these books when I’m shopping, so this makes sense. I think I probably lumped a couple of new adult reads into this category as well, but the YA/NA conversation is one for another time.

I did a better job of reading a diversity of viewpoints

34%, 32 of my reads this year were by authors of colour. 29 of the new books –  so, just under half of the new books I read. When I was buying books last year I made a point of buying one by an author of colour for every book I bought written by a white author. That obviously had a dramatic impact.

It also meant that I bought a lot of books this year, which was fun. I had to buy a new bookcase last week because I was entirely out of shelf space for all of them.

12 of the books I read last year featured protagonists that were explicitly not straight or cis-gendered, so a much smaller percentage there.

I believe 11 had disability or mental illness representation in a main character, so again a relatively small number there – although still more than 10% of the books I read this year.

This year I’m going to expand my focus on reading from a wide range of perspectives.

Disappointments of the year

I normally aim to be pretty positive on here, but there were a couple of books I read this year that were a bit of a let-down.

In the case of Small Pleasures, by Clare Chambers, it was actually a really lovely book for the most part. Loved the writing, thought the characters were excellent, the whole thing was beautifully constructed. And then, without mentioning any specifics, the ending completely wrecked it for me. I read this as a book club read, thankfully, so I know I’m not alone in feeling like this! Up until the last few pages this would have been a 4- or 5-star read for me, but there you go.

The other book that sadly gets a mention here for me is Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space. I have historically found Shriver’s writing fascinating, the way she constructs characters that are compelling but often vastly unlikeable is something I’ve always enjoyed. But this book felt slow and clunky, and a deeply weird eight-page political rant in the middle threw me completely out of the story.

Right, onto happier topics I think:

Highlights of the year

I’ve read so many brilliant books this year that it’s hard to pick out just a few.

Pizza Girl, by Jean Kyoung Frazier, was lovely and kind of heartbreaking. I’ve spoken more about it here, but looking back I still don’t think I’ve seen such a lost character portrayed so well.

This was also the year I fell fully down the Leigh Bardugo rabbit hole. I finally read her Six of Crows duology, and Ninth House, and honestly hats off to her. She does some phenomenal character work, and I absolutely love her worldbuilding.

2021 also brought the finale to the Poppy War trilogy, The Burning God, by R. F. Kuang. If you want a trilogy to tear you to shreds, laugh at the tatters that remain and then set you on fire for good measure, this is the trilogy for you.

And that was my 2021 in books!

What were your top reads of 2021, and have you set yourself any reading targets for this year? Let me know in the comments!