2021 in Books

[bardic_lady]

I wasn't going to do any year-end wrap-up, but then I looked at my reading spreadsheet and it called out that it needed some closure on the Read 2021 sheet before I started up the Read 2022 sheet, so here we go!


I started 107 books in 2021. I DNFed 4. I also didn't finish another 10 that I intend to finish eventually, I just haven't yet. 33 were re-reads.

Of my 106:

• 23 were fantasy (1 DNF/3 unfinished, 1 re-read) {13 adult, 9 YA, 1 middle grade}
• 23 were mysteries (1 unfinished, 13 re-reads) {23 adult}
• 23 were romances (2 DNF/1 unfinished, 4 re-reads) {21 adult, 1 YA, 1 I could make a compelling argument for either YA or adult}
• 16 were plays (1 DNF/1 unfinished, 9 re-reads*) {16 plays. They're plays. None of them were dumbed down? All were classics or adaptations of classics? You could make an argument for Peter Pan being for kids, but so what, they're plays. And I'm certainly not going down any roads that lead in the direction of "Shakespeare is for grown-ups" so fuck that.}
• 10 were sci-fi (4 re-reads) {10 adult}
• 3 were non-fiction (2 unfinished) {3 adult}
• 3 were comics {1 middle grade}
• 2 were classics (both unfinished, 1 re-read) {2 adult}
• 1 was historical fiction (re-read) {YA}
• 1 was horror {YA}
• 1 was biography {adult}
  
  My top 10 new books for 2021:
  1. Other People's Shoes, Harriet Walter. Absolutely phenomenal actor autobiography/one person theatrical history/theatre manual. Not surprising that I adored it, Brutus and Other Heroines, Walter's Shakespeare specific actor book is also stunning and brilliant and I recommend it to absolutely everyone. I love smart, thoughtful, thorough actors.
  2. The Mirror Season, Anna-Marie McLemore. I will read basically anything A-M writes. Their prose is so lyrical, their fairy tales are so true, they are so intensely brilliant and erudite. This one, which is adjacent to a Snow Queen re-telling, is especially close to my heart as The Snow Queen is especially close to my heart. CW: This is a book about sexual assault and surviving sexual assault. It is a book about teenagers surviving sexual assault. It is a difficult book to read, but it's also a gorgeous, perfect book about healing and not healing, about queerness, about magic, and with a pan POC protagonist.
  3. Anne of Manhattan, Brina Starler. I picked this book up on a whim, because I read all the L.M. Montgomery books as a kid and I'm a sucker for a good re-imagining. I was startled by how much I really really liked this book, in particular because it got Gilbert Blythe just right. I liked most of the updating the author did to place Anne of the Island in a small liberal arts school in Manhattan. I loved the book's take on Diana (black, queer, smart as hell). I loved the enemies (but were they?)-to-lovers arc for Anne and Gilbert, and I really liked that unlike the original, Anne and Gilbert had a lot more of the book to date and figure each other out, instead of going from "Anne's going to marry this rich boy!" to "Gilbert is dying of plague and Anne realizes that she's always loved him!" to "they're getting married!" in like two chapters. If you liked the Anne of Green Gables books and you like re-tellings and you're okay with het romance, this is a sweet, friendly, fun book.
  4. Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo. The book that ties up (many of) the loose strings from the original Grishaverse trilogy and the Six of Crows duology and the Nikolai duology. I'm not going to say I liked all of the conclusions, but I liked a bunch of them. I enjoyed the chance to revisit a bunch of characters. I'm always going to love Nikolai, the con-man privateer king of Ravka. Plus also DRAGON.
  5. Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers. Yes, it's true, between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I finally read the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which my mom had been encouraging me to read for decades. Thanks, zeatre. I also re-read several of them and am re-reading them on my lunch breaks at work for the moment. Murder Must Advertise is completely bizarre for so many reasons, but it's also an aesthetic that I really appreciate, it's fairly funny, and it's definitely my favourite of the non-Harriet Wimseys. (Harriet Vane forever)
  6. The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells. I realize that I am exceedingly late to the party on Murderbot. They are in fact very very good books, a lot of fun to read, and surprisingly comforting. Since I read them all in one go, I am counting them all as one book, because I'm not going to play favourites.
  7. The Scapegracers, Hannah Abigail Clarke. Queer teenage witches and magic books are a reasonably good way to lure me into reading something. I super liked this book and I was all excited because I finished it like a week before the second one was due to come out! And then it got pushed from September to December. And then from December (2021) to November (2022). So now I'm really disappointed. But I did really like this book!
  8. Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I am also really late to the Locked Tomb party. (I'm really late to all the parties, folks. I'm leery of things that EVERYONE LOVES all at once. Unless it's something I'm already into, there's a better than average chance that I will be late to all the Next Big Thing parties. I'm just contrary that way.) I was surprised and very pleased by how funny Gideon the Ninth is. (I was then deeply disappointed by how very not funny the first half of Harrow the Ninth was) Like everyone else, I eagerly await the coming of Nona the Ninth (who the fuck is Nona?) and the promised Alecto the Ninth. And I stand ready to defend my reading of Harrow as not-any-kind-of-lesbian, really really acearo.
  9. When Sorrows Come, Seanan McGuire. Toby Daye in CANADA! I loved all the Canadian specific things. Especially the High King talking about how one minute you're the High King of the Westlands and the next you're just a guy in line at Tim Horton's. Classic.
  10. Paladin's Strength, T. Kingfisher. I love T. Kingfisher's Saint of Steel books. I love all her White Rat universe books. I didn't like Strength as much as I liked Grace, the first book in the series [spoilers: possibly because I strongly disapprove of Istvhan leaving town permanently. I liked him. I wanted him to stay and provide further common sense for the paladin corps.] Still, it was funny, it was weird, and I liked it. (I also quite liked Paladin's Hope, the third book in the series, and I eagerly await the fourth and onward!)
  
  Top Re-reads of 2021:
  Look, I did a lot of re-reading in 2021. My brain wasn't always up to new material, so I wallowed in the familiar, except when my brain went "You've already read that. You can't read it again. Cheater." Which leads directly to me re-reading fic instead of reading books at all. Thanks, brain, you're helping.
  1. Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. My forever book.
  2. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Emmuska Orczy. The original hero with a mild-mannered alter ego, also the great love of my life.
  3. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers. Harriet Vane forever.
  4. Richard III, William Shakespeare. See, I do read things by cis dudes. Occasionally. RIII is up there in my top 3-4 Shakespeare plays. I've had terrible experiences working on it multiple times. Doesn't matter, it's still such an excellent play and Richard is such a brilliant villain. And it's funny. And he's having SUCH A GOOD TIME murdering people, right up to the second where it turns on him. We're doing the play for zeatre in a couple few months and I am SUPER excited. (Everyone else loves Mackers and Lear, GIVE ME RICHARD.)
  5. Ishmael, Barbara Hambly. One of my absolute favourite Star Trek: TOS novels. There's Klingons! And time warp! (As with Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales, I am a total sucker for Star Trek time travel) Spock is lost in Seattle c. immediately post Civil War! There are loggers and gamblers and a lady doctor and a Jewish man with unexplained ties to Spock himself! Also some fun wordplay! Trufax, when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, I wrote a continuation of this book (just the historical characters) for a class assignment, which is my first documented fanfic.
  6. The Thirteen Days of Christmas, Jenny Overton. I read this book every year. It's a sweet and silly historical romance about a young man who is encouraged by his true love to be more imaginative to win her heart and he... takes that charge very seriously.
  7. Bet Me, Jennifer Crusie. The first romance novel I ever read with a fat woman as the protagonist. It's funny, it's sometimes painful, it's charming. It's a fairy tale, but the modern kind with doughnuts and Italian cooking and a quartet of men who can all sing Sondheim. (There's more Elvis Presley in it than I'd like, but I'm sure for some people that's a feature, not a bug.)
  
  And that's what I have to say about books for 2021. Here's to 2022 having more books, just in general, and more really good books specifically. (If I feel up to it, tomorrow I'll do a run down of books I'm looking forward to in 2022.)
  
  * Every play that I work on for zeatre will end up being re-read at least once, because one readthrough is for making sure the script is acceptable (incl. restoring Folio punctuation for Shakespeares and redistributing/labelling stage directions for non-Shakespeares) and one readthrough is actually doing the play in zeatre. So yes, 9 of 16 plays were re-reads, but that's a production thing, not a re-hashing the same play by myself thing.