2021 Reading Wrap-Up

It’s been a long time since I last made a post, but hopefully 2022 will be a stronger year for posting. I’m not sure if I’ll be posting regular reviews, as that has been a lot to keep up with, but you can expect to see more posts about what I’m looking forward to, my attitude toward reading, and maybe even some analysis of the bookish sphere.

For now, let’s look at how 2021 went.

Coming from last year where my reading statistics weren’t quite where I wanted them to be when it came to reading more diversely, I made particular effort to focus my reading and my book buying on books from authors of colour. I saw huge amounts of improvement in this area.

Statistics

Number of books: 65
Pages Read: 18,730
Top Genres: Science Fiction (27.7%), Fantasy (21.5%), Horror (20%)
LGBTQ+ Books: 48 / 73.8%
Books by Authors of Colour: 47 / 72.3% (for comparison, only 34% of the books I read were by authors of colour)
Books by Trans/Nonbinary/Genderqueer Authors: 12 / 18.4%

Reflections

2021 was an interesting year for my reading. I read quite a few books that were outside of my comfort zone and actively worked on decolonizing my opinions on what makes a good book. I’m hoping to read more books outside the realm of speculative fiction as most of my favourites this year weren’t fantasy, sci-fi, or horror. This definitely isn’t to say that I am going to stop reading speculative fiction! No way! There are too many amazing speculative fiction books being released in 2022 for that. But, it’s been nice to expand my genre horizons, and I am looking forward to continuing that practice.

One area I still need to improve my efforts in is reading more books from trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer voices. My reading is overwhelmingly cis, and I didn’t make enough effort in 2021 to solve that.

Moving Forward

I’m trying to keep my reading goals more qualitative than quantitative this year. I’ve set my yearly reading goal to 50 again because I know this is a very attainable number for me. My only other numerical goal is to read 5 non-fiction books (excluding memoirs). Which is again, attainable.

Otherwise, my goals are to continue to prioritizing books from marginalized voices (fuck yes to more queer and BIPOC content!) , reading more translated books (please, not everything has to be US or UK focused), and continuing to expand my reading tastes.

Do you have any reading goals for 2022?


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