2021 book year in review

While 2021 wasn't a great year for a lot of things, it was a pretty great year for reading for me. I spent the first four months funemployed during a pandemic, leaving me with little to do but sit at home and read all day. For the first time since I've been tracking, I broke 100 books in a year!

	Woman	Man	Trans Woman	Trans Man	Nonbinary	Multiple authors	Grand Total
Asian and Asian American	7	14					21
Black	17	4					21
Latinx	8	2					10
Middle Eastern	4	4					8
Multiracial	4	1			1		6
Native	5	1					6
White	19	15	1	1			36
Multiple authors						3	3
Grand Total	64	41	1	1	1	3	111

Gender diversity was pretty similar to last year:

Time period	Authors that aren’t cis males
Childhood	39%
High School	18%
College	56%
Post-College to 2016	41%
2016	69%
2017 and 2018	68%
2019	79%
2020	66%
2021	63%
Overall	59%

Racial diversity was too, although I read more books by authors of Asian descent:

Time period	Asian & Asian- American	Black	Latinx	Middle Eastern	Native	Mult- iracial	White
Childhood	0.6%	1.8%	0.6%	0%	0%	-	97%
High School	0%	3.7%	0%	1.2%	0%	-	95.1%
College	1.4%	2.9%	2.9%	11.4%	1.4%	-	80%
Post-College to 2016	2.1%	22.4%	2.8%	4.2%	0%	-	65%
2016	8.5%	22.3%	11.7%	11.7%	4.3%	-	33%
2017 and 2018	4.5%	36.4%	4.5%	3.0%	1.5%	6.1%	43.9%
2019	14.2%	24%	9.5%	9.5&	6.3%	-	34.9%
2020	8.6%	28.6%	7.1%	10%	2.9%	11.4%	31.4%
2021	18.9%	18.9%	9.0%	7.2%	5.4%	5.4%	32.4%
Overall	6.6%	13.3%	4.1%	2.6%	1.7%	2.6%	68.3%

My favorite fiction books of the year were:

• Transcendent Kingdom byYaa Gyasi. I loved her earlier novel Homegoing so I had high expectations for this one, and I wasn't disappointed. The protagonist is a neuroscience student, which resonated with my undergrad experience in a fun way, and the writing and character development are fantastic. I particularly liked the meditations on the relation between science and religion.
• Everything by Kazuo Ishiguro, especially The Buried Giant, Never Let Me Go, and The Remains of the Day. I know I am several decades late on this one, but holy crap he is an amazing writer (there's a reason he won the Nobel Prize in Literature!). I had to just sit and think for several days after finishing each of his books. I especially liked his play on the fantasy genre in The Buried Giant.

My favorite nonfiction books of the year were:

• Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. It's a memoir of her time at various startups and tech companies in Silicon Valley, and it is... uncanny... in how accurately it captures many of my experiences since moving here. It felt like she was spying on me and writing about my life, but in a more literary and insightful way than I ever could.
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. I've read a lot of books about race and racism in the US over the years, but this one approached the topic in a way that was new and eye-opening to me. She opens with the story of how most American towns used to have huge, well-maintained, and popular community pools, but when they were ordered to desegregate they drained the pools rather than integrate, thus making life worse for everyone - even the white people. She then goes on to show that this "drained pool politics" is basically the reason we can't have nice things that other Western countries have, and includes a ton of interesting policy history that I didn't know. She also includes lots of damning studies, like how more segregated cities are also more polluted - when there is a "Black part of town" to put all the factories, power plants, landfills, etc... there isn't much attention paid to mitigating their environmental impact, which results in worse air and water quality for everyone in the city.
• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman. This book is an oral history of an activist group working to end the AIDS epidemic as it was first starting to emerge and be understood. It is fascinating both as a window into a history that I knew very little about, and a manual about how successful social movements happen. ACT UP included everyone from rich white gay men who used their connections to lobby pharmaceutical companies about pricing and clinical trial practices, to poor queer women of color who organized community clinics, needle exchanges, and ad hoc hospice care for AIDS patients, to periodic mass convenings of people that convened on places like the CDC and Catholic churches to protest. Everyone had a role to play based on their skills, resources, and contributions, but the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is ultimately what led to the group's fracturing after several years. It was yet another book where every few pages I learned something new that I couldn't believe I had never been taught or heard of before, which is what makes great nonfiction. The theme of a previously unknown virus causing a pandemic with massive societal repercussions also strongly resonated given the past two years.

This year is off to a rough start with Omicron already having caused one preschool closure, so between that and me having a full-time job I'm not expecting to read as many books in 2022, but here's hoping I still have time for some great ones before the next variant emerges.