Undoubtedly, in many ways, 2021 was a weird year. It was also allllllmost a record year for my reading output. In the 14th year of keeping a spreadsheet to track my reading, I came just a few pages short of my highest total page count. It was not a record for the number of books I read, but after setting a goal of 18 for the year, I am happy to report that as of this morning I completed my 19th read in 2021.

I am also happy to report that thanks in part to the wisdom of complete strangers, I had a fantastic year in terms of really liking what I read. There were no true duds in the group and many that were both outstanding and unexpected.

Here’s the list:

–Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando Flores
–The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars
–Black Broadway in Washington, DC by Briana McNeil
–The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
–Welcome to the Goddam Ice Cube by Blair Braverman
–American Gods by Neil Gaiman
–The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
–The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
–Sing for Your Life by Daniel Bergner
–La Biblioteca de los Sueños Imposibles by Lin Rina
–Baseball Life Advice by Stacey May Fowles
–Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
–In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
–A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
–Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
–Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
–All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
–The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
–The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

One of the more interesting things I did this year was make use of an offer by a local bookstore for them to curate a set of books. I gave them a total price and the names of some authors and books I’ve enjoyed and they sent over a box, its contents completely unknown to me until I opened it. I read two of them this year and both rocked. I’m looking forward to reading the rest in 2022.

I can thank my wife for picking up La Biblioteca de los Sueños Imposibles for me, my only Spanish read of this year. I need to do at least two, maybe three in 2022. And shout out to the several people who recommended All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps my favorite book of the year that I finally picked up after having it sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

I mentioned at the start my near record number of pages. This feels like a good moment to examine the spreadsheet data for 2021:

Nineteen books was the most I’ve read in a year since 2016, and look how much longer each of the books was this year. That is thanks in part to La Biblioteca de los Sueños Imposibles, which checked in at 583 pages and took me a whopping 102 days to finish. Black Broadway in Washington, DC was the shortest read at 192 pages, while Interpreter of Maladies checked in as the fastest read, taking me just three days to complete.

Interpreter of Maladies also has the odd distinction of being one that I forgot I had a copy of on my bookshelf. I had myself on the waiting list for the e-book from the library while I plowed through La Biblioteca de los Sueños Imposibles, and since that book took me a while, I kept having to defer every time I made it to the front of the list. Whoops.

On a related note, this year also brought a new e-reader into my book life. I was having tons of hassle with my old Nook connecting to download books from the library. It was a multi-step process that failed frequently. In stepped the Kobo, which has a roughly zero-step process that automatically downloads any e-books I check out before I can even flip open the cover. Much more ideal. I read three books on the device this year, and overall read three books from the library (The Storyteller was an actual physical book I need to return in the next five days).

Every year in this space I like to single out the books I would most recommend, a process that as I write this sentence I’m dreading since I truly enjoyed so very many of the ones I read this year. But here goes.

Five I recommend to anyone: All the Light We Cannot See, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Incendiaries, A Man Called Ove, Killers of the Flower Moon.

I usually also point out a few I would skip in retrospect. This year it would hurt my heart to say that about any of them, because I really would run right through this list again if I had it all to do over. But if I have to, and I mean HAVE TO, I would eliminate The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. I only say that because it took a while to grow on me and I liked the second half much more than the first. Sorry, Edgar.

Some other random notes: There are about 30 pages in my copy of American Gods that are all puffy and wrinkly because I had a day off and sat next to a lake to read. I was planning to be there for hours and ignored what turned out to be a fine misty rain that settled in. Whoops. For the first time in many, many years I actually paused a book in progress to read another. We were invited to see an opera performance at Wolf Trap featuring a singer whose story was told in Sing for Your Life, so naturally I had to quickly grab a copy from the library and crank through it just in time. Other than having to adjust the spreadsheet formulas to account for the time shift, it all worked out. A few of the early reads are missing from the photo because I later sold them at a used book shop down the street. Several weeks ago I was there browsing and saw my copy of Tears of the Trufflepig and it was like seeing a shelter puppy waiting for a new home.

On to 2022! I’ll put down a goal here of 18 total books, three of them in Spanish. Happy reading.