2011 Reading Roundup

This year I completed 148 novels, novellas (90 pages or more) and scripts. Late in the year when I realized I was getting close to 150 I tried to get in a few quick reads to reach a nice round number, but it just didn't work out. December is a really busy time for me. 148 is still a lot of of books, and the most I've managed since I started keeping track in 2000, except for last year, when I read 253. I doubt that I will ever manage that number again, as it requires doing almost nothing with my free time except reading. And I like reading, but do have other hobbies. On the other hand, I might have done quite a bit better this year if I hadn't taken up Farmville in April. It's fun, but it eats a lot of time. I think one of my resolutions for 2012 may be to spend less time playing Farmville.

I tried keeping a spreadsheet this year in addition to my paper records in the hope that I'd be able to sort the data and make it easier to come up with my numbers, but the online spreadsheet I was using didn't sort things quite as easily as I've grown to expect when using Excel. Nevertheless, it did allow me to track more categories than I usually do.

So, in 2011, here is what I read:

47 fantasy
37 mystery
22 romance
5 horror
4 urban fantasy
4 nonfiction
3 paranormals
2 suspense
1 alternate history
and the remainder were general fiction of one sort or another. As last year, many of them were male/male stories of one sort or another -- mystery, romance, fantasy, etc. However this year I only read 56 gay works of 90 pages or longer (and lots of shorter works I didn't count), down considerably from last year's number.

I figure that I read

73 ebooks
32 hardcover
31 paperback
9 scripts
3 audiobooks

Of those, I bought 88, 38 were from the library, 12 were free works, and 10 were borrowed.

By far, the most unpleasant books I read this year were Embassytown by China Mieville, which I had to finish because I'd received an ARC and was required to write a review; and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, which I finished so that no one could dismiss my review when I honestly said I didn't like it. Both those books were a a very unpleasant slog.

It's harder to pick the books I enjoyed most. My reading resolution this year was to read entirely according to my whims, whatever I felt like reading, whatever appealed to me, without worrying about what I "should" be reading. I even decided not to bother reading the Hugo Award nominees this year, something I always do in the years when I am eligible to vote. But because I didn't read anything that wasn't appealing to me (with the exception of the two works listed above, and what a waste of time they both were) I had a good reading year. There are many, many things on my list that I enjoyed, though not all of them were outstanding. So let me just pick a few:

I started reading the Ceepak & Boyle mysteries by Chris Grabenstein. They are set in a seaside town in New Jersey and feature two cops, one a former military man with a very firm moral code, and the other his young partner, who has a wonderfully amusing and distinctive narrative voice. They're just a pleasure to read, and I've got my mystery book group reading the first one for this month's selection. Hopefully they will enjoy it as much as I did.

Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson was not at all what I was expecting. It's a novella in a series about a couple of necromancers who travel around and get into trouble. However the main characters barely make an appearance in the story. It is, instead, a sort of fantasy re-telling of the Canterbury Tales, except with cannibalism. Once I finally stopped trying to figure out when the usual characters would appear, I was treated to a very dark and very darkly funny story.

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovich is a paranormal police procedural set in London. A young police officer discovers that he can see dead people, and ends up apprenticed the the police's only wizard. London is richly painted, and it was a compelling read. I believe I gulped it down in one sitting. I have the second one in my TBR pile, and will definitely get to it in 2012.

Aloes by Chris Quinton is a paranormal gay romance, in which a man who suffered a severe head injury now discovers that he has synaethesia -- he can tell when people are lying or telling the truth.

I also really enjoyed Truth in the Dark by Amy Lane, which is a gay twist on Beauty and the Beast, in which a very homely and crippled man goes to live for a year with a beautiful lion-man, and they struggle with their perceptions of which is the beauty and which is the beast. I put off reading this one for quite a while because I wasn't at all sure about it as described, but it turned out to be a really good read, and Amy Lane is working her way onto my list of favorite male/male writers.