Fifty-two books in 2021

In 2005 when my blog was on LiveJournal, I participated in the 50bookchallenge group, attempting to read fifty books in a year. When I switched to WordPress in 2008 I found a WordPress plugin for a challenge to read fifty-two (books) in fifty-two (weeks). I liked the symmetry of 52-in-52, so I kept with the 52-in-52 challenge for a while after I switched to Drupal. Even after I stopped counting I kept writing book reports for a while.

In 15 years I never reached the goal, either of 50 or 52 books. In 2021, I finally hit the target. I fell behind a bit and realized in September I’d have to work pretty hard to hit the target. At that point I needed somewhere around one book every four days. I admit that at that point I leaned pretty heavily into genre fiction with the crime novels and sci-fi, but I did not just pick short books.

I did not write a book report for each (or even any) of the books, but I do have a list.

#	Title	Author	Word count
1	The Butlerian Jihad	Kevin J Anderson, Brian Herbert	193,000
2	Tiamat’s Wrath	James S A Corey	176,000
3	The Human Division	John Scalzi	146,000
4	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury	71,767
5	The Concrete Blonde	Michael Connelly	176,702
6	Some of the Best from Tor.com 2020 Edition		205,000
7	Forty Words for Sorrow	Giles Blunt	116,133
8	Leviathan Wakes	James S A Corey	169,000
9	Exit Strategy	Martha Wells	36,000
10	The End of All Things	John Scalzi	111,000
11	Caliban’s War	James S A Corey	190,320
12	Abaddon’s Gate	James S A Corey	160,370
13	Cibola Burn	James S A Corey	174,870
14	The Delicate Storm	Giles Blunt	146,422
15	Nemesis Games	James S A Corey	145,580
16	A Game of Thrones	George R R Martin	303,000
17	Babylon’s Ashes	James S A Corey	169,000
18	A Clash of Kings	George R R Martin	330,000
19	Neuromancer	William Gibson	94,216
20	Persepolis Rising	James S A Corey	170,800
21	Black Fly Season	Giles Blunt	126,235
22	By The Time You Read This	Giles Blunt	111,080
23	Revenger	Alastair Reynolds	121,140
24	The Last Coyote	Michael Connelly	171,656
25	Count Zero	William Gibson	87,000
26	Digital Minimalism	Cal Newport	71,000
27	The Future of Another Timeline	Annalee Newitz	103,000
28	Trunk Music	Michael Connelly	132,000
29	Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement	Sarah R Davies	60,227
30	Zen in the Art of Writing	Ray Bradbury	34,000
31	This Truth never Fails	David Rynick	66,688
32	Angel’s Flight	Michael Connelly	116,000
33	A Storm of Swords	George R R Martin	429,000
34	Shadow Captain	Alastair Reynolds	142,000
35	A Feast for Crows	George R R Martin	314,000
36	The Echo Wife	Sarah Gailey	83,000
37	The Road To Dune	Kevin J Anderson, Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert	138,000
38	Crime Machine	Giles Blunt	81,761
39	Victories Greater Than Death	Charlie Jane Anders	101,000
40	The Consuming Fire	John Scalzi	81,000
41	The Last Emperox	John Scalzi	80,000
42	Red Mars	Kim Stanley Robinson	160,377
43	Bone Silence	Alastair Reynolds	179,434
44	Leviathan Falls	James S A Corey	160,000
45	Elder Race	Adrian Tchaikovsky	40,000
46	Blood Work	Michael Connelly	128,000
47	A Darkness More Than Night	Michael Connelly	126,000
48	Until the Night	Giles Blunt	86,068
49	Velocity Weapon	Megan E O’Keefe	164,000
50	The Will to Battle	Ada Palmer	141,000
51	In the Flat Field	Charles Keatts	64,965
52	Makers	Chris Anderson	73,148
		Total words:	7,257,959

There are a couple of shorter books there, as you can see by the word count. I’m not interested in developing strict guidelines about what counts as a book. I saw a lot of controversy in the old LiveJournal group about what counts or doesn’t count. Some people got up in arms about things like comic books or audiobooks appearing in people’s lists. ¹ There’s no prize for winning here, and I base what appears on the list on my own conscience.

Generally I use 50,000 words as the threshold, but I give myself leeway to make exceptions. Martha Wells’s Exit Strategy is only 36,000 words and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race is 40,000. By most guides those would be novellas rather than novels. But both are standalone stories (Exit Strategy is part of the Murderbot series but each book is its own story) that I can imagine finding on the shelf in a bookstore, not as part of a compilation. Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing was the shortest at 34,000 words.

Those are balanced by 36 books greater than 100,000 words including four George R R Martin books each more than 300,000 words. The average length was 139,000 words. I’m comfortable calling this a win.

In case you’re wondering I store the list of books I’ve read with authors, publishers, ISBNs, and start and end dates in a PostgreSQL database so that I can query statistics and look at reports any which way I can write a query for. Everybody’s gotta have a hobby, I suppose. Though now that I’ve written that out, normalizing data structures seems like a terrible hobby.

I want to point out that I read all nine of James S A Corey’s Expanse novels in 2021, but not in order. I read the eighth one (Tiamat’s Wrath) in January, and with the news that Leviathan Falls, the last in the series, would be released by the end of 2021 I decided to reread the series to refresh myself. I skipped rereading Tiamat’s Wrath because it had only been a few months since reading it the first time.

1
I wouldn’t count comics myself, unless I found one where the word count was over 50,000 words, and that’s going to be tough to estimate.