I logged 65 books read last year on LibraryThing, starting with A.K. Larkwood’s fantasy novel “The Unspoken Name” (finished January 22) and ending with Catriona Ward’s un-shelvable “The Last House on Needless Street” (finished December 28). This is a slightly higher number than 2020’s count (56), and a bit more than a book a week.
The books ranged in length from novellas like Joe Koch’s “The Wingspan of Severed Hands” and Eric LaRocca’s “Things Have Gotten Worse Since Last We Spoke,” to a couple of doorstoppers like R.J. Barker’s “Bone Ships” and Kirby McCauley’s classic “Dark Forces” anthology.
I’ve been trying to read more books by women; this year, 27 of the books I read were by female authors, one by a non-binary author, and 37 by male authors; I hope to do better on gender equity in my reading diet this year.
My reading was overwhelmingly fiction – 60 of 65 books. I could probably benefit from a little more non-fiction in the mix, but since I prefer fiction I don’t feel obligated to increase it by much.
Of the fiction books I read, most were novels; 11 were short story collections (anthologies or single-author collections). I’ve started a goal of reading a short story a day for 2022, so I expect this year that the story collection number will go up.
Genre-wise, my fiction diet was largely horror and horror adjacent this year. Probably I should diversify a bit, but I feel like there have been some really terrific horror novels published recently – “My Heart is a Chainsaw” by Stephen Graham Jones, “The Blade Between” by Sam Miller, “The Ancestor” by Danielle Trussoni – so reading lots of horror doesn’t necessarily mean reading poor quality (though there were a few less than stellar, largely older, horror books in the pile).
My reading this year also skewed toward the recent. Broken out by decade, almost half were published in the last two years, and three quarters in the last ten. I only went back to the 19th century for one – a re-reading of Henry Miller’s “Turn of the Screw”.
Most of my books came from a library of one sort or another last year. 31 were from the Hennepin County Library, and 4 were from neighborhood “Little Free Libraries”. The recency bias is probably due in part to how easy it is to check out new e-books from the library. I’ll likely keep roughly the same ratios for 2022.
Most of my books this year were e-books – again, partly because of the convenience of getting them from the library, and also because I find e-books easier on my eyes. They also take up less space, and I can keep a few books going at once (I’m typically reading two or three at a time). I also listened to a few audio books last year – 9 in all – which are convenient for when I’m walking the dogs or doing chores. I expect this breakdown to stay largely the same in 2022.