Drawing and Writing Pokemon Things

That’s a lot of books even for me (more than double what I read last year!), but it makes sense. When work from home started in 2020, my life shifted away from education-adjacent tasks into content creation-adjacent tasks, and I started to spend a lot of time reading and making videos about books. It took me a while to hit my stride in 2020 (for a while, I couldn’t make myself sit down and finish a book at all), but once I got going, that momentum carried me all the way into 2021. 

This was also the year I committed to grad school and the librarianship career path, so I’ve been working harder to think about not only the books that I like personally but a) the books that would a good fit for my library’s collection and b) what trends are happening in publishing right now. Young adult (YA) fiction is starting to feel like a person I’m getting know. I want to report back what I’ve learned and share some of the best treasures I found.

My stat brag starts with a qualifier: I read 93 books cover-to-cover and marked another 7 as “DNF.” That stands for Did Not Finish, but it really means this book was bad enough that I had to stop and I will not start again. For those books, I did at least skim enough to get a sense for characters, themes, and plot, but my page count is inflated. C’est la vie, life is short! Maybe this year I’ll get even more books in.

So let’s dig into what kinds of books I read!

A few of the books I read came as recommendations or caught my attention because of their critical acclaim, but others I read simply because I wanted a new audio book right that second while I was folding laundry or whatever and it was available. If an interesting-looking book was by an author of color, I was more likely to pick it up, but I didn’t have a quota I was trying to reach. 

That said, I was interested to see what patterns arose, so I did my best to track data about author race. Where possible, I used authors’ own self-identifiers, but it wasn’t always easy to find author information online or to discern shades of melanin in a photo: there’s a margin of error here.

In a few places, my bookshelf represented some groups better than the actual US population of that group (according to the 2020 census). For example, US population is only 13% Black and less than 2% Native American. That’s pretty neat, especially since some very good stories came out of that segment of my reading. I definitely wouldn’t be upset if I read more next year, though. Those are both groups who are generally underrepresented in every way possible, and even if 100 novels by Native American writers came out next year, there’s still a history of centuries of white dominance to contend with. Furthermore, Black and Native American Identities are so varied that I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Growing up Black in the rural south is pretty different from growing up Jamaican is pretty different from growing up Apache in south Texas is pretty different from growing up on an Ojibwe reservation near the Canadian border. I’m going to keep seeking out books by both of those groups.

In other areas, I didn’t do so hot. The US population is 18% Latinx, and I only read 13 Latinx novels. I also failed to read a single Arab author, so I’ve got a few near the top of the my list for 2022.

I can’t know for sure how accurately I’ve recorded the number of queer authors on my list. Not everyone is out, and authors don’t owe it to their readers to be out (as YA author Becky Albertalli recently had to remind her Twitter followers when she felt compelled to come out as bi). To the best of my knowledge, 26/100 of the books I read were by queer authors.

I read more books about queer characters than I did books by queer authors. That has at least something to do with changing industry expectations: readers, librarians, and publishers want to see queer characters more than they ever have before. Queer also authors didn’t necessarily write characters whose identities matched their own (like Rose Szabo, non-binary author of What Big Teeth, which features several gay and bisexual characters but no trans characters).

I love that so many books (especially those for young people) are exploring queerness and queer culture now, but it is disappointing how often it was just a quick aside in the life of a straight, cis-gender protagonist. This is not to say that ever book needs to be a queer book, just that I see you, token gay couple in the background, and I’m not super impressed by your grab at my attention.

Since I work in a teen library, it shouldn’t surprise you that most of the books I read were written for teens. Naturally, that means I read a lot of romance, adventure, fantasy, and coming of age stories.

Most of the books I read, adult and YA books alike, were also books that came out in the last five years (with the notable exception of The Master and Margarita). Trends in YA die like mayflies, so I focused my efforts on books released in 2021 and books available on the shelf at my library right now (or on the Libby app right now). If you’re looking for classics, I don’t have much to offer you this year.

These are tags I manually generated for each of the books I read, not publisher tags. I was interested in trends and patterns I saw emerging beyond just character race or genre. Like, the surprising number of stories about ghost dogs (more than two!), the prevalence of dual perspective romances, and the books that explored music.

And now, finally, some recommendations!