It’s annual scrapbook time! As usual, this is a compilation of my favorite media consumed in the year, except for television, which encompasses everything I watched!
Sadly, there is no theater category this year, because pandemic, but I did get to travel quite a bit!
Last year I enjoyed so many books that I had to split up this post into three — speculative, non-speculative, and non-fiction. This year, The Year of the Reading Slump, I have 15 books in total that have made it onto the list, which is an indicator of how much my reading year kind of sucked, sadly. So, the fact that these books managed to stand out in the middle of one of my worst reading years ever should tell you how good they are!
They are absolutely in no particular order except maybe kind of chronological, going in order from December to January, but honestly, even that’s not accurate. Oh well. Doesn’t matter.
Onto the books!
I had a very odd and rather lackluster reading year in 2021, culminating in a really awful slump that began sometime in mid-June and still hasn’t really ended. Not really sure what the issue was, but I’m very excited for a new reading year. For this post, I’m going to be looking at how I did on my 2021 goals (not terrible), I’ll be examining some stats, and I’ll be listing my new reading goals/resolutions for 2022!
This post is coming a lot later than usual because I almost didn’t do it, because I got lazy, but then I remembered how much I love coming back and looking at an overall wrap-up of the new media I discovered and loved in the year.
So, as usual, this is a compilation of media newly discovered; except for TV and theatre, it’s not a record of absolutely everything I watched or listened to, but just my favorites, or the things I want to remember.
I really thought I hadn’t consumed very much television this year, but I actually watched quite a lot, including a summer of tons and tons of British crime dramas, which I totally forgot about! Other highlights include a lot of Arabic music, seeing Hamilton on TV, managing to see two whole live shows before the pandemic came crashing down, and making a total 180 on Dakota Fanning.
I’m cheating a bit with my favorites list this year; I read so many books (124 in total) that there’s no way I can choose only ten, so I’ve separated things out. This is going to be my list of favorite non-fantasy (or, more broadly, non-speculative) reads.
Hadeer Elsbai 