During 2021 I read 25 novels, eight memoirs or autobiographies, 14 works of non-fiction (two on Covid and four related to climate change and/or sustainability) and two short story collections. Forty-nine volumes in total, which was rather fewer than in 2020. I put the difference down to two things: fewer long train journeys as a result of Covid restrictions; and including the first three works of Charles Dickens, which took up a significant proportion of my reading time. I am anyway a slow reader but with some sentences taking up as much space as a paragraph or even a page of a twentieth-century novel, Dickens’ style took a bit of adjusting to.
In 2020 I had read 60 books, only 20 of them novels. This tendency to read more non-fiction during the lockdowns seemed to be something other readers noticed as well. Real life had taken on sufficient unreality, becoming more like something usually experienced in a film or in fiction, and so we turned to reading more about the world as others had experienced it in the past or to the sciences that were already helping people to tackle the pandemic and that offered some reassurance that things could get better, while also sounding warnings about other global problems.
With a towering TBR pile accumulated during 2021 – and with the certainty that the year will bring yet more volumes to be added to it – I look forward to another year in books. Happy New Year!
NB: Nicky's Blog 