Happy New Year! We made it to 2022...give yourself a hand; you deserve it. 

At the end of 2020, one of the things I resolved to do was track what I read throughout the year. I'm a pretty avid reader (this has been true most of my life) but I'd never really made an effort to track what I read over a 12 month period. So I figured this was as good a time as any. Below is my list of books read over the last year. Note: I did not track articles, magazines, newspapers, etc. That would have made this list so long it would have become impossible. So this is just books...but I'm still, honestly, pretty impressed with myself! 

Dave's 2021 Reading List

The Sign of the Four -- Arthur Conan Doyle

The Hound of the Baskervilles -- Arthur Conan Doyle

Various short Sherlock Holmes stories -- Arthur Conan Doyle

Wolf Hall -- Hilary Mantell 

Humankind -- Rutger Bregman

How to Be a Liberal -- Ian Dunt

Agent Running in the Field -- John Le Carre

La Belle Sauvage (read aloud with my son Max) -- Phillip Pullman

A Series of Unfortunate Events Books 1-11 (read aloud with my son Ginn) -- Lemony Snicket

Home -- John Allen

Bringing Up the Bodies -- Hilary Mantell

The Long Goodbye -- Raymond Chandler

The Maltese Falcon -- Dashiell Hammatt

The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler

The Guns of Navarone -- Alistair MacLean

The Thin Man -- Dashiell Hammatt

The Pillars of the Earth -- Ken Follett

Science Fictions -- Stuart Ritchie

Good Omens -- Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (read aloud to my son Max) -- Douglas Adams

The Night Manager -- John Le Carre

A Christmas Carol (read annually) -- Charles Dickens

Whew! 30+ books! As you can see, I am prone to old standards (especially for bedtime reading) but I like to mix in non-fiction and fiction. My fiction reading does tend towards the tried and true, as I often read fiction as a sort of "comfort food", often rereading books because I just like to spend time with characters (see: Good Omens). 

Favorite book; probably How to Be a Liberal by Ian Dunt. Rather than what might be assumed--a political diatribe--it is a look at the history of liberal philosophy (think Rousseau and John Stuart Mill/Harriet Taylor), the continuing impact of that school of thought, and it's positives and negatives. Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" get tossed around fairly willy-nilly, and it was great (and eye-opening) to dig into the philosophy a bit, divorced from any fraught political implications. I'll likely reread it this year, just because there was so much there it was hard to take it all in. 

Least favorite? The Guns of Navarone. I'd read it before and I love the movie. But it really is a fairly predictable and tedious pulp paperback war story. But it did kill a week while I waiting for something else to arrive! 

What did you read last year? What were your favorites or disappointments? Let me know!