2021: Some Reading Stats

I’ve posted my Top Books of 2021, and now it’s time to turn my attention to some reading stats – the sort of blog post that so many of us love reading. And as I get older, increasingly a test of memory… I also think I’ve referred to 2020 as ‘last year’ quite a lot, but hopefully you can work out what’s going on.

Number of books read
I read 182 books in 2021, which is comfortably the most I have ever read in a year. In the previous year the total was 147, and the total has hovered around the 150 mark ever since I started living on my own.

Why was it bigger this year? Well, I did do A Novella A Day In November, but I also got more into audiobooks – and let’s not forget that three-month lockdown at the beginning of the year, where I didn’t have much to do.

Male/female writers
126 of those books were written by women, 55 by men, and one book was by a husband and wife team. That means 70% of the books I read were written by women, which has been steadily and unintentionally going up every year. Again, it’s partly because of reading for possible British Library Women Writers titles… but mostly just because those are the books I’m drawn to, I suppose.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 135 works of fiction – 101 by women – and 47 works of non-fiction. That is a much higher percentage of fiction than usual. Over the past few years, about a third of the books I’ve read are non-fiction, but for some reason I really needed to step out of the real world more in 2021…

Books in translation
Partly because of reading some EUPL prizewinners, I matched my all-time high for books in translation – albeit it’s still only 11 books. There were four from Finnish, including three by Tove Jansson, and the others were from Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Russian, Danish, French, and German.

Re-reads
I re-read 13 books in 2021, and I think every single one of them was either for a podcast, book group, or writing British Library afterwords. I still don’t really re-read just because I want to experience the book again.

Number of audiobooks
This is where things really amped up. In 2020 I listened to eight audiobooks and that was my most ever – and I trounced that with 21 in 2021.

New-to-me authors
Counting these was a bit of a revelation. I only read 64 new-to-me authors this year, meaning that only 35% of the books I read were experiments on new names. It used to be about half, and has been getting lower. Apparently there is some need for dependability in the pandemic, but I do want to think outside the box more in 2022.

Most disappointing book
There were a few disappointments with books by authors I love turning out not to be my cuppa tea. I’d saved Sun City by Tove Jansson for years, but it was definitely her worst book. Even my love for Michael Cunningham couldn’t overrule my distaste for sci-fi in Specimen Days. Oh, and Heritage by Vita SackvilleWest was appalling and showed that she got the zeitgeisty rural novel out of her system early in her writing career, thankfully.

Worst book I read this year
I guess it was also a disappointment, but James Acaster’s Perfect Sound Whatever – an audiobook – was bizarrely bad. It’s about getting obsessed with music from 2016, when Acaster went through an extremely difficult year in 2017. When he was writing about his own life it was funny and insightful and honest. But almost the entire book is descriptions of albums that seem to be unquestioningly copied and pasted from earnest press releases.

Happiest discovery
On the other hand, I have been meaning to read Georgette Heyer for many years, and was always a little nervous that I’d dislike her – given how beloved she is. But thankfully my first experience, with April Lady, was a total delight. Phew!

Favourite book-related moment
It’s not a reading stat, but my happiest book moment of the year was being asked to be a guest on the Backlisted podcast, discussing the brilliant Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, which was just as brilliant on a re-read. A close second is, of course, seeing more British Library Women Writers books come back into print, and watching as people discover them.

Persephones
I’ve had a fairly non-rigorous goal to read more of the Persephones on my shelves. In 2020 I only managed one, but in 2021 I read One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell, and Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley.

Most failed challenge
I decided I’d read all of Angela Thirkell’s novels in order. Not all this year, of course, but I’d make a good start. Maybe one a month?? Well… I read one.

Most expensive book
While I got Infused by Henrietta Lovell as a gift from my friend Lorna, I have a feeling it’ll end up being my most expensive read – because this non-fic book about tea has persuaded me to ditch the teabags and get into loose leaf tea. At least for a bit.

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve been intrigued to see how often names turn up in book titles if I’m not deliberately seeking them out. In 2020 it was 20 – in 2021, it was 35. They pop up a lot.

Animals in book titles
I always forget to keep an eye out for this during the year… but they appear whether I’m looking or not. The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams, Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić, Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, Bear by Marian Engel, A Wild Swan and other stories by Michael Cunningham, The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden, Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing, and The Elephants in My Backyard by Rajeev Surandra. I think that must be a record – though only a handful of them actually had prominent animals.

Food in book titles
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkley, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young – and, at the other end of the spectrum, Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield.

Numbers in book titles
In ascending order, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young, One Year’s Time by Angela Milne, One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle, Three To See The King by Magnus Mills, I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild, Thirteen Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon, Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A woman’s life keeps restarting, a door is a portal between countries, a murderous doppelgänger turns up, a boat rolls through a town, a railway runs underneath a country, an iceberg falls from the sky, a man gets struck by lightning multiple times, a man and a boy swap bodies, a collection of Victoriana magically appears in a front garden, butterflies fly from a patterned lampshade, a carpenter is swallowed by a whale, a cult starts in a quarry, lichen promises prolonged youth, an invisible wall entraps a woman, a man moves into a tree, a baby is left in a box, a woman falls in love with a bear, a robot quotes Whitman, a dance hall disappears from a city and reappears on a Scottish island, and the main characters turn out to have been dead the whole time.