2021: Lists and Numbers

It’s not a year-end round up without stats, is it?

2021 new-to-me authors

I read 40 new-to-me authors – well up on the 25 in 2020. Surprisingly, only ten of the 40 were via Kindle Unlimited. Of these, authors I’m really glad I’ve discovered:

Victoria Goddard: Her HANDS OF THE EMPEROR was in my favourites of the year, and its sequel was a great follow-up – I’m hoping for more.

AJ Demas: Again, two of her books made it into my 2021 favourites – I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for more from her.

Everina Maxwell: I was not expecting a queer SF romance to be put out by a mainstream SF publisher, but am loving this trend.

Chaz Brenchley: A late discovery, but am utterly adoring his mash-up of Chalet School books and SF, as unlikely as it sounds.

Freya Marske: I loved her AO3 fanfic and was looking forward to her debut – A MARVELLOUS LIGHT was an intriguing start to her trilogy.

JA Sutherland: I flew through his Alexis Carew milSF series (all on KU) – more please!

Author most glommed over 2021

Vanessa Nelson with 14 books – also a new-to-me author, and unsurprisingly, one with her entire backlist available on KU. So yes, I’ve read both of her fantasy/romance series (I much prefer the Taellaneth books over the Hundred series FWIW) and am up to date with her latest – they’re enjoyable (and undemanding) reads.

Tied in second (8 books each) are Sharon Shinn (all re-reads) and Glynn Stewart (all new releases – truly one of the most prolific authors ever!).

Kindle Unlimited usage

A stat that I track to make sure KU is still worth it for me – I read 61 KU books over 2021, which at £7.99 a month makes it around £1.60 per book (v. £1.30 in 2020).

Around 40% of these were 4* or higher reads for me, so yes, still good value for me.

And the numbers and graphs

I read 197 books over 2021, up from 168 in 2020.

What can I say? Obviously lockdowns and lack of holidays (*cries*) meant I had more reading time.

As I said in my previous post, I did a lot of re-reading in 2021 – 29 to be exact. This is up from 16 in 2020, which I said was unusually high for me in my 2020 recap. Ah, I’ve just realised I missed off Andrea K Höst’s Touchstone trilogy from my list of 2021 re-read favourites – I re-read the entire series (trilogy and related books) during 2021, and they are still definitely up there.

Another thing about 2021 was that I felt as though I read a lot of non-fiction – looking at actual numbers, I read SIX books. Ha. Well, considering that prior to 2021, I had read a grand total of seven non-fiction books since 2010 (which is when my Goodreads tracking starts), I’ve read almost as much non-fiction this year than I have in the past decade. No wonder I feel as though I’ve been reading a lot. I find these useful “commute” books (not that I’m doing a lot of commuting nowadays) – if I’m on the train or bus, they’re easy to dip in and out.

With all that being said, here’s how my 2021 reading looked like by month:

And how 2021 compares to the previous years by genre (in short, dominated by SFF):

And finally, all the books I’ve read in 2021, and of course, the annual Goodreads infographic.

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