jmtd → log → 2021 in Fiction

Following on from last year's round-up of my reading, here's a look at the fiction I enjoyed in 2021.

I managed to read 42 books in 2021, up from 31 last year. That's partly to do with buying an ereader: 33/36% of my reading (by pages/by books) was ebooks. I think this demonstrates that ebooks have mostly complemented paper books for me, rather than replacing them.

My book of the year (although it was published in 2019) was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: A short epistolary love story between warring time travellers and quite unlike anything else I've read for a long time. Other notables were The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel and Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg.

The biggest disappointment for me was The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which I haven't even finished. I love KSRs writing: I've written about him many times on this blog, at least in 2002, 2006 and 2009, I think I've read every other novel he's published and most of his short stories. But this one was too much of something for me. He's described this novel a the end-point of a particular journey and approach to writing he's taken, which I felt relieved to learn, assuming he writes any more novels (and I really hope that he does) they will likely be in a different "mode".

My "new author discovery" for 2021 was Chris Beckett: I tore through Two Tribes and America City before promptly buying all his other work. He fits roughly into the same bracket as Adam Roberts and Christopher Priest, two of my other favourite authors.

5 of the books I read (12%) were from my "backlog" of already-purchased physical books. I'd like to try and reduce my Backlog further so I hope to push this figure up next year.

I made a small effort to read more diverse authors this year. 24% of the books I read (by book count and page count) were by women. 15% by page count were (loosely) BAME (19% by book count). Again I'd like to increase these numbers modestly in 2022.

Unlike 2020, I didn't complete any short story collections in 2021! This is partly because there was only one issue of Interzone published in all of 2021, a double-issue which I haven't yet finished. This is probably a sad date point in terms of Interzone's continued existence, but it's not dead yet.