Fifty-two books in 2021

In 2005 when my blog was on Live­Jour­nal, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the 50bookchallenge group, attempt­ing to read fifty books in a year. When I switched to Word­Press in 2008 I found a Word­Press plu­g­in for a chal­lenge to read fifty-two (books) in fifty-two (weeks). I liked the sym­me­try of 52-in-52, so I kept with the 52-in-52 chal­lenge for a while after I switched to Dru­pal. Even after I stopped count­ing I kept writ­ing book reports for a while.

In 15 years I nev­er reached the goal, either of 50 or 52 books. In 2021, I final­ly hit the tar­get. I fell behind a bit and real­ized in Sep­tem­ber I’d have to work pret­ty hard to hit the tar­get. At that point I need­ed some­where around one book every four days. I admit that at that point I leaned pret­ty heav­i­ly into genre fic­tion with the crime nov­els and sci-fi, but I did not just pick short books.

I did not write a book report for each (or even any) of the books, but I do have a list.

There are a cou­ple of short­er books there, as you can see by the word count. I’m not inter­est­ed in devel­op­ing strict guide­lines about what counts as a book. I saw a lot of con­tro­ver­sy in the old Live­Jour­nal group about what counts or does­n’t count. Some peo­ple got up in arms about things like com­ic books or audio­books appear­ing in peo­ple’s lists. ¹I would­n’t count comics myself, unless I found one where the word count was over 50,000 words, and that’s going to be tough to esti­mate. There’s no prize for win­ning here, and I base what appears on the list on my own conscience.

Gen­er­al­ly I use 50,000 words as the thresh­old, but I give myself lee­way to make excep­tions. Martha Well­s’s Exit Strat­e­gy is only 36,000 words and Adri­an Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race is 40,000. By most guides those would be novel­las rather than nov­els. But both are stand­alone sto­ries (Exit Strat­e­gy is part of the Mur­der­bot series but each book is its own sto­ry) that I can imag­ine find­ing on the shelf in a book­store, not as part of a com­pi­la­tion. Ray Brad­bury’s Zen in the Art of Writ­ing was the short­est at 34,000 words.

Those are bal­anced by 36 books greater than 100,000 words includ­ing four George R R Mar­tin books each more than 300,000 words. The aver­age length was 139,000 words. I’m com­fort­able call­ing this a win.

In case you’re won­der­ing I store the list of books I’ve read with authors, pub­lish­ers, ISB­Ns, and start and end dates in a Post­greSQL data­base so that I can query sta­tis­tics and look at reports any which way I can write a query for. Every­body’s got­ta have a hob­by, I sup­pose. Though now that I’ve writ­ten that out, nor­mal­iz­ing data struc­tures seems like a ter­ri­ble hobby.

I want to point out that I read all nine of James S A Corey’s Expanse nov­els in 2021, but not in order. I read the eighth one (Tia­mat’s Wrath) in Jan­u­ary, and with the news that Leviathan Falls, the last in the series, would be released by the end of 2021 I decid­ed to reread the series to refresh myself. I skipped reread­ing Tia­mat’s Wrath because it had only been a few months since read­ing it the first time.

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  I would­n’t count comics myself, unless I found one where the word count was over 50,000 words, and that’s going to be tough to estimate.