A Quick Look back at 2021

Including a Christmas book haul!

I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas and a very Happy New Year. As we are already a few days into 2022, and before I share what’s coming up in January, I thought I would take a quick look back and share the outcome of my Goodreads challenge, the last couple of books I read in December and the amazing books I got for Christmas.

So let’s get to it.

I set myself the goal of reading 60 books in 2021 and I managed to read 66. I’m really pleased about that because I had a couple of reading slumps so it’s possible that I could have managed more. I have set myself a target for 2022 but will tell you about that in my next post.

I have been (and still am) reading Faith Jones’ Sex Cult Nun which talks about her life in The Children of God cult and is (as I described it on Twitter) icky, and I was determined that it wasn’t going to be that last book I finished in the year, so I picked up two shorter works, which were both fantastic:

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers was just delightful and I wrote down more quotes from this small but perfectly formed story than I would have expected, but contains great wisdom and I’m really looking forward to the next volume which is due to come out in July

Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M Valente; I think this might have been the first of her books that I have read although I have several in my stash. I really enjoyed it; it gave me (trying not to spoil) a real Mother! vibe

And now the book haul. I’m just going to list titles and link to Goodreads. These are books that were on my wishlist either because they were only available in hard copy or I couldn’t quite justify buying them at the time and they became excellent suggestions for anyone who wanted to get me a book gift.