16 books in 2019. 26 books in 2020. 38 in 2021. An encouraging trend. I’ve never read more books in a single year, and it feels good. I’ve continued to use reading to detach my iPhone from my brain-stem, often carrying a book around and reading in short periods instead of fiddling with my phone. I didn’t play video games at all this year, replacing it with reading – keen to play a little next year though, if the new PS5 games are good. After three years of consistent reading, I feel like I’ve made significant progress breaking out of ‘the shallows’. To cap off the year of reading. Here’s some simple stats/facts: Worst book: 100 Plus 11,800+ pages, apparently 11/38 from women authors (gf rightly nags me about this) 18/38 second hand books I read a lot of famous and well regarded books this year, and they were so good I couldn’t pick a favourite. That said, these are a top 5 in terms of how much they durably affected my emotions and thinking. The Grapes of Wrath The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musing on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary The Nickel Boys Debt: The First 5,000 years Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind The Rise of the Radical Right As in the 2020 post, clicking the book cover takes you to a short review. Below are the covers, titles, authors, and ratings of the 38 books I read this year. Click them to read my short review. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick ★★★★ The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ★★★★ Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology K. Eric Drexler ★★★ Project Hail Mary Andy Weir ★★★ Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse ★★★★ The Sciences of the Artificial Herbert A. Simon ★★★★ Zen in the Art of Writing Ray Bradbury ★★★ The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6) Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4) Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ Snow Crash Neal Stephenson ★★★★★ An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management Will Larson ★★★ Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Nadia Eghbal ★★★ The Psychology of Computer Programming Gerald M. Weinberg ★★ Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber ★★★★★ Beautiful World, Where Are You Sally Rooney ★★★ The Medium is the Message Marshall McLuhan ★★★★ Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft G. Pascal Zachary ★★★ Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right Jane Mayer ★★★★★ The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary Eric S. Raymond ★★★★★ Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age Paul Graham ★★★ Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes ★★★★☆ Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★ The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck ★★★★★ The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead ★★★★★ A Visit from the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan ★★★★ Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2) Toni Morrison ★★★ The Quiet Revolution Jim Cairns ★★ The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Ray Kurzweil ★★★★ The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering Frederick P. Brooks Jr. ★★★★★ The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Neal Stephenson ★★★★ The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller ★★★★ 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith Sonia Arrison ★ Silent Spring Rachel Carson ★★★★★ The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander ★★★★★ Down and Out in Paris and London George Orwell ★★★★ I’ve set my 2022 reading goal at 40 books.