Travis’ 2021 Year In Review

Year in Review: An Introduction

It’s time for a year in review post! I like spreadsheets and I like books, so in 2021 I finally built the Reading Tracking spreadsheet I’ve been wanting to make for years. I’m also woefully behind on all things blogging and sleep related due to raising a smol human, so this post is coming out in a less-than-timely manner. But it is coming out! Yay for small wins.

I’m hoping to make these “Year in Review” posts a recurring thing, both to analyze what I’ve read in general and to hold myself accountable to pushing against any internalized biases I might have in selecting what I read.

Book Stats

I read a total of 76 books in 2021, adding up to 35,714 pages. Can you see the point where having a baby impacted my reading time?

I also find it interesting to compare the number of books read each month (in blue) to the number of pages read each month (in red). Sometimes there is a pretty big difference (like in June when I was reading The Wandering Inn). For this reason, much of my reading tracking will look for any differences between stats broken down by book versus stats broken down by pages. After all, if I read a 10-page science fiction book and a 1,000-page fantasy book, can I really say I split my reading evenly between the two genres? Hopefully this adds meaningful data to this Year in Review.

I absolutely lean toward reading more recently-published books. 2021 was the clear leader (which makes sense given advance review copies and timing podcast episodes with new releases), with 2020 and 2019 following close behind. Pretty much everything before 2011 is due to reading Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series and Michelle West’s Essalieyan series.

It’s fun to quantify my procrastination on books as well! 2019 books were on the long side, since my lazy brain put off the chonky books until my fear of missing out caught up with me. 2020 books were by far on the short side, because I wanted to catch up on books I missed last year while sticking with shorter books.

My reading is very much dominated by fantasy. The one action adventure book was Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. It was free on Hoopla and I love Libba Bray’s writing, and that book absolutely did not disappoint.

The podcast/audiodrama numbers here are underrepresented since I haven’t figured out a great way to track “page numbers” for those. The main takeaway here was most of my reading is in audio (despite only having 3 months of a work commute), and I read far more e-books this year than I usually do. There’s something to be said for reading one-handed on your phone while a smol human sleeps on top of you.

Ha. Less than 40% of my reading in 2021 was “for fun.” Which isn’t to say I didn’t have plenty of fun with the rest of my reading, but there was a blog/podcast/etc. obligation to go along with those reads. And I tend to be an over-preparer, which is why over half of my reading was for the Fantasy Inn podcast. I’ve meant to read an author’s latest book to prepare for an interview and found myself reading their entire back catalog… more times than I’d like to admit. No regrets though!

Oh hi there Orbit. Your books are great, and so are your publicists 🙂 I could definitely use to read more small press and self published books, and my friends who read books from 50+ publishers last year are probably judging me right now.

A Look at Authors

It’s been years since I first looked at my reading habits and realized almost every book was written by white men from the US or UK. I hadn’t consciously made that choice, and I resent that choice being made passively for me, regardless of what factors contributed to it. I can do better, and tracking author stats is one way I can ensure that.

Note that some demographic information is not readily/publicly available, so I either excluded those data points or took my best guess. I’m mainly interested in overall trends though, so I’m okay with missing a small percentage of accurate data.

Not much variation between the book and page charts. My reading has flipped from nearly 80% men to roughly 20%, which is interesting. Some is a conscious effort on my part, some is just what particular books I’ve been interested in lately.

My reading is still mostly US/UK/Canada. Still a lot of work to do there if I want to read more diversely. Also: my charts, my rules. Scotland is no longer part of the UK (you’re welcome, Hiu).

This is both encouraging and still not good enough. I read a lot of books by white authors, though not as many as in past years. Maybe in a few years I’ll do a “trends over time” analysis post about my reading. For now, I’m pretty happy with this Year in Review.

Closing Thoughts

Overall I’m pretty happy with my reading progress in 2021, and I think I’ve finally found a spreadsheet I’ll stick with. I’ve got it set up to slice and dice the data however I like, in case I want to generate graphs for something like, say, how many Orbit fantasy books I read for the podcast in September 2020 by writers outside the US/UK. The data nerd in me is giddy.