2021 Year in Review: My Favorite Works of the Year

 



This is the second post in my 2021 Year in recap, with this post featuring me discussing my favorite works of the year.  Traditionally that's featured me posting my few perfect scores and maybe the books I've graded a 9.5 or a 9 out of 10, and then maybe discussing my favorite characters of the year.  I've kind of eschewed the latter because I've read so many characters and books that it's hard to recall who are really my favorites - for that matter, I have over 30 books with a 9 out of 10 this year, so I'm going to skip that list here as well.  

Instead, I'm going to post my top 12 graded books here in this post, and discuss what I really found that I liked over this last year of reading.  As I mentioned in my last post, this has been a good one.  

2021 Year in Review: Basic Summary of my Reading

 


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.