Books Read in 2021
Since 2013, I’ve kept track of every book I’ve read. Starting a few years ago, I began including audiobooks. (If you don’t believe those should count, that’s your problem, not mine; they don’t have to go on YOUR list.)
I usually average somewhere between 25 and 30 books per year, and this year would be considered normal: 27 completed books, 17 of which were print or ebook, 10 that were audio, and a total of nearly 11,000 pages. That works out to one book every two weeks, which, given my schedule—including my own writing—I’m happy with.
My 2021 list includes all four entries in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by the late Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a few of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series, and a couple of epics, including Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.
Only two were books I’d read before: Frank Herbert’s Dune (which I first tackled back in the 1980s), and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which I read in the ‘90s.
My list, as always, included fiction and non-fiction. I enjoyed new books first published this year, a few that date to the 1960s, while the oldest was an Agatha Christie mystery from 1931.
[image error]And, since I’m asked the question each year, I’ll tell you my favorite—and it wasn’t even a close race. Andy Weir’s Project: Hail Mary instantly became one of my Top 20 choices of all-time. If you dive in, I would strongly recommend the audiobook version. I can’t tell you why without it being a spoiler. Just trust me; do the audiobook of this one.
The first finished book of 2022 will be one I’ve started in this last week of ’21, a fantasy novel—and I’m not even a fan of the genre. But I like to explore various genres outside my comfort zone, and I encourage people to do the same. It stretches different muscles in your brain.
As for my own writing, I didn’t publish a new Eric Swan thriller this year (I’m working on #5 right now), but I stayed very busy. I re-worked and re-published six books in my young adult science fiction series under a new pen name. I also published two young adult mystery novels in serialized form under that same name using the Kindle Vella program.
And I wrote three “fun fact/trivia” books under yet another pen name; those will be published in the first quarter of 2022. So while I didn’t put out anything new this year under the name Dom Testa, I still managed to write, upload, or re-launch more than ten books in 2021. It was a very productive 12 months.
If you’re wondering WHY the need for so many different names, I explain that in a blog post .
Wishing you a happy new year, and I hope you stumble across a bunch of great books to devour in 2022.
Dom
(Links in this article are affiliate links, which means I receive a very small commission on any sales - but it costs you not a penny more. For the record, I never post links to products I don’t use or don’t fully endorse, and I’ve read every book mentioned in this post.)
