2021 was Year 4 of this blog as a dedicated (mostly) book review blog, and year 6 really of my return to reading Science Fiction and Fantasy. I expected this to be a relative down year - meaning I'd read less books than last year, when I spent six months furloughed in COVID-quarantine. But I shifted jobs in April to one that provided me with a two hour commute, which meant I was suddenly reading 200 pages a day, and well, I basically matched my reading output from last year.
That said, it was a very different year of reading - as I managed to accomplish a feat I'd thought was unlikely in prior years - I managed to read more works written by people of color than not, for the first time ever (and it wasn't particularly close). And in the process I've found a lot of really great new-to-me authors and as usual, some really really great works - for the 2nd straight year my average grade has smidged upwards, and only some of that is grade inflation I swear.
As usual for these recap posts, this series will consist of three posts as follows:
Part 1 (This post) will be a quick summary of what I've read and how that worked out.
Part 2: Will go over my favorite works of the past year.
Part 3: Will go over the works I would recommend NOT reading or that I couldn't finish for various reasons.
2021 Featured me reading the same amount of books as 2020 - 220 Books - and 35 novellas, up from 31 last year. More interestingly, was this shift from prior years:
Yes, this year was the first year I managed to read more books by Authors of Color than by White Authors, with over 55% of these books having at least one author of color. As you might imagine, this took deliberate effort - the publishing industry, especially the genre one, is dominated by white authors. There are PLENTY of authors of color out there, but they are still not anywhere near as representative as they should be in the industry, even with a select few breaking through and winning awards over the past few years.
And so I've spent probably the last 16 months trying deliberately to read more books by writers of color, from various diverse backgrounds, such that I've used my record keeping to try to not go more than 1-2 books in a row without reading an author of color. I didn't avoid any books by White authors that I would've read anyway, but there were plenty of alternatives to the others - authors who I didn't know, or only liked previously, and this is the result, one I'm very happy with. I also tried to hit authors of color from different backgrounds and places in the world (for example, at one point I realized I'd read only one work from an indigenous author all year, so I made an effort to correct that). And well, following Authors of color on twitter, and attending FIYAHCon and listening to books listed, made it fairly easy to find these books once I started trying.
And again, adding these books did not reduce the quality of my reading at all, for anyone who doubted that. Both of my two perfect score books this year were written by authors of color, and my average score out of ten marginally increased from 7.85 to 7.89, some of which might be simple grade inflation, but even then is a clear sign that the quality I'm reading remained at least on a similarly high level.
Less interestingly, I again read 83% works by non-male authors, but that's not surprising at this point, and that distribution of Male/Female/NB authors remained at a similar level to the past. Again, if you're reading majority male authors in genre right now, you are doing the genre wrong and are only limiting yourself.
Okay so finally, let's look at the breakdown of scores I've given out this year (note this doesn't include about 10+ books I've yet to score but have finished):
So Yeah, while I only gave out two perfect scores this year, I liked the vast majority of what I read quite a bit, with only 12 works rating below a 6, which is my grade for "meh", meaning anything below that level I disliked and would discourage against reading. In what has to be a first for me, and might be that grade inflation, my most common grade was a 9 (39 books), although 8.5s (38) and 8s (36) were also really common. I liked what I read! So here's hoping that continues next year.
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