Fiction Reading List (January - December 2021)

So, yeah, this is my first (and only) fiction reading list update for 2021. Normally, I read enough that I break the year  into two halves, but that wasn't practical this time around. Oh, not because of how awful 2021 was, since it wasn't, but mostly because I exclude academic titles from these productivity lists, and academic reading seems to have monopolized my time this year -- a product of all the research I did on the anthology. The end result is a very unimpressive fiction reading list for the 2021.

In fact my fiction reading has been so sparse of late, I deliberately volunteered to review a biography of John Wyndham, a writer I'd never heard of, just to force myself to read more fiction books as research. ... and ended up loving Wyndham, by the way.

FINAL STATS FOR 2021: 6,155 pages (or 31 books) over 365 days, which averages out to about 17 pages per day.

For reference, last year in 2020 -- the real year of the pandemic -- I read over 16,000 pages of fiction. Counts for 2020 can be found here and here; counts for 2019 can be found here and here; counts for 2018 here and here.)

January- December 2021

FICTION
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, 400 pg.
Ernest Cline, Ready Player Two, 350 pg.
John Gardner, Grendel, 175 pg
Johannes V. Jensen, The Long Journey, 400 pg (DNF)
Poul Anderson, The People of the Winds, 200 pg
Poul Anderson, "The Star of the Sea," 100 pg.
Diana L. Paxson, Brisingamen, 250 pg.
Joon Ha Lee, The Dragon Pearl, 300 pg.
Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft, 200 pg
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End, 200 pg
David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus, 200 pg
John Wyndham, Out of the Deeps, 200 pg.
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, 225 pg
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos, 225 pg.
John Wyndham, Chocky, 150 pg
John Wyndham, The Trouble with Lichen, 200 pg
John Wyndham, The Outward Urge, 150 pg.
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, 200 pg.

POETRY
John Heath-Stubbs, Artorius & various works in Collected Poems, 300 pg.
John Heath-Stubbs, Hindsights: An Autobiography, 250 pg.
Charles Williams, Taliessin through Logres / Region of the Summer Stars, 175 pg
W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety, 150 pg
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, 30 pg
Timothy Murphy, The Deed of Gift, 75 pages
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, 200 pg.
C. Day-Lewis, From Feathers to Iron, 50 pg.
Edward Lucie-Smith, ed., Holding Your Eight Hands, 100 pg.
Robert Frazier, ed., Burning with a Vision, 100 pg.
Lillith Lorraine, Time Grows Thin, 100 pg.
Fred Chappell, Midquest: A Poem, 200 pg
Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Bramah and the Beggar Boy, 300 pg.

Notes

So, yes, there was a lot of poetry for 2021, all of it as a supplement for the anthology. Many poetry books I didn't read in their entiretys, but I also left out the reading of individual poems. Sure, reading "The Queen of Drum" by C.S. Lewis might add thirty pages to my total, for example, but that's only one work out of his Collected Poems, and one needs to do a reasonable list. (For Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, though, that was a book by itself, so was easier to justify its inclusion.) But there's lots of things like that left off.

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