Books!
All week, I've been wanting to write a newsletter about some of the media that I enjoyed in 2021 -- books, tv shows, movies, and video games. Throughout the year, I try to keep lists of what I watch and play, and I use goodreads to track my reading. In past years, I've tried to track my listening habits as well, but those lists got unwieldy and not fun quite quickly -- Do I just include the name of the spotify playlist or do I write down individual tracks I enjoyed? What if E puts on music while we're doing something else, do I need to keep track of all the background music in my life?? -- so I didn't bother in 2021.
As much as I want to share some of the media I enjoyed last year, it also seems like kind of a daunting task to look through my lists and choose favorites and explain what made them so good in a couple of sentences. So, for this issue of the newsletter, I'm just focusing on books, and I'm approaching it from a kind of data perspective. Because that seemed fun to me!
In 2021, I read 46 books.
Of these, 8 were children's picture books that RJ sent me for Christmas. Of these 8 children's picture books, 4 made me cry. My favorite was Welcome: A Mo Willems Guide for New Arrivals because it made me cry the most.
Of the remaining 38 books that I read, which weren't children's picture books, 18 were romance novels and 2 were romance novellas. 10 of these were historical romance, 9 were contemporary, and 1 was scifi/dystopian. 12 of these were straight romances, 4 were lesbian romances, 3 were romances between a straight man and a bisexual woman, and 1 was a romance between a straight(?), poly woman and a bisexual man. That last one was All or Nothing by Rose Lerner, a romance novella between a Jewish woman and a Christian man in early 1800s England. Did I mention it's kinky? I really enjoyed it.
I could say so much more about the romances I read last year, and maybe I will in a newsletter next week, but let's move on for now.
15 of the books I read in 2021 were physical books that I own (this includes the 8 children's picture books that I just received for Christmas), 8 were audiobooks, and the remaining 23 were ebooks. The audiobooks and ebooks were all borrowed from Boston's library system, which E and I thankfully still have access to. My favorite audiobook experience was Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, which makes sense because it's read by the authors, who host a podcast together.
I read 12 nonfiction books last year and 8 of them were about pregnancy or parenting. Of these pregnancy/parenting books, 2 were graphic memoirs, 3 were a mix of memoir and research, 1 was sociological nonfiction, 1 was a pregnancy-through-the-trimesters guide, and 1 was a cute, illustrated gift book called Horizontal Parenting written by Michelle Wu and illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova.
20 romances plus 12 nonfiction books plus 8 children's picture books only brings us to 40, and leaves 6 books unaccounted for. Of these last 6 books, 2 were YA fantasy novels, 1 was a middle grade fantasy novel, 1 was a graphic novel (also fantasy!), 1 was a hard to categorize novel made up of stories that follow a queer black woman vampire from the 1800s to an imagined year 2050 (The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez), and 1 was Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis, which I mentioned way back in issue number 9 of On / Off: In Search of Queer Joy: Part 4.
And that's what I read in 2021, by the numbers. Let me know if this was interesting and if you want to hear more about anything I read last year. Who knows, I might write more about this topic whether you like it or not!