2021 Reading Round-Up 📚

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Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 54. Here’s a quick (?) overview…

2021 My Year in Books

Just as with last year, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Gee, I wonder why that was the case?

Non-fiction: Just one, and it was still right in line with my usual reading: Lester del Rey’s The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture. While del Rey absolutely has his biases and blind spots, especially when reading his history with the perspective of almost another fifty years of development in both SF and society in general, he’s still a good resource for looking back at these formative years. And for me at least, this retrospective was far more readable than Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, which I tried to read early in the year, but simply couldn’t get through.

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Three this year, the best of which (seriously) was Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I, the first book of the Bridgerton series. While romance isn’t my usual thing, and I see no great need to continue on with the series, I had enjoyed watching the Netflix show with my wife when it was released, and this was a perfectly acceptable and amusing bit of fluff.

Quality genre fiction: Once again, good goals fell to the reality of living in pandemicland, and I didn’t add quite as many “quality” books to my list as I thought I might.

As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden: cryptids, speculative evolution, parallel worlds, spacefaring trilobites, and dry British humor.

I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 44% of the way through. Of those I read this year, I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite between The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both of which are by Ursula K. Le Guin, and both of which were excellent.

Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.

Finally, some stats on my year’s reading, according to Goodreads:

Non-Amazon Book Tracking and Buying

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Two small steps away from relying on Amazon for bookish needs:

I’m moving my book tracking away from Goodreads in favor of The StoryGraph. Not quite as full featured (yet), but gaining features, and doesn’t pump your data into Amazon’s systems. And if you don’t want to lose your Goodreads data, no worries! The StoryGraph can import it. Here’s my profile.

For a while now, I’ve been ordering new books from Bookshop.org, which allows you to to choose an independent bookstore (ideally, one near you) to get a cut of every purchase you make. Sure, you’ll probably spend a little more, and your books won’t always arrive on the very day they’re released, but if you can afford a couple more dollars per book and a few days before you dive in, it’s well worth sending your money to small independent bookstores instead of Amazon.

For used books, if local used bookstores aren’t an option (which currently is very pandemic-dependent), I’ll order from Powell’s whenever possible.

Little things, perhaps, but they make me feel better about how I choose to spend my money.

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The Matrix Resurrections: Why the Matrix movies never stopped being relevant:

The Matrix has a complicated legacy. It’s probably the most influential American movie since Star Wars came out in 1977 (and it is now almost exactly as old as Star Wars was when The Matrix came out), and it’s by far the most popular piece of art created by trans people. But its sequels were divisive, and its ideas about questioning reality have influenced political reactionaries in dangerous ways. Now, with a fourth film in the series coming out on December 22, it’s time to go back … back to the Matrix, across five eras of the franchise’s history.

The Anonymous Sister

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A hundred million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.

While McClane’s wife is in the first couple films, and his kids are in several, to my memory, this is the only mention of McClane’s sister in the entire Die Hard franchise.

I figure this is because thanks to his smart-ass, cocky attitude, she never got along that well with her older brother, and then after he got famous for being all macho at that terrorist thing in LA, it was even worse. All anyone ever wanted to talk to her about was her annoying older brother, and she was just so over it. Then again at the airport, and yet again in New York? That was just too much, and she finally changed her name and cut off contact entirely. He could pretend to be a superhero all he liked, but she didn’t have to be a part of it – and after hearing about what he ended up putting her niblings through, she was even more sure she’d made the right decision.

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The peril of “normal” Christmas activities in space:

So, what would really happen if you tried to have a completely “normal” Christmas aboard the ISS – one with exploding crackers, gaudy tinsel and an unwholesome quantity of Christmas pudding? And how do astronauts celebrate it in reality? From run-away champagne to turkey cooked in a “briefcase”, welcome to the sheer chaos of a festive gathering while in orbit.