Bookpost: Slamming the lid on 2021

OK, finally: here's the last three book reviews I still hadn't posted from 2021.

( Two programming books and one ADHD book. )

2021 Wrap-up and Census

The count last year was a fairly grim picture of the state of my attention span and capacity to dream. I'm putting most of the blame on the ongoing and accumulating stress of living in the final days of a rapidly crumbling civilization. 👍🏼 (Which might or might not be what we factually look back on this period as, in fifty years' time, but the verdict of history is kind of beside the point — that's what the evidence points to as we live this, and that's the identity and nature of the stress it inflicts on us.)

• 6 video games with significant stories
• 2 comics (one of which was an eight-volume manga that I'm counting as one because 🤷🏽)
  • 1 of which was a re-read
• 19 novels
  • 13 by women, 6 by men
  • 15 re-reads, 4 new
• 6 nonfiction or technical books
  • 4 by men, 1 by a woman, and 1 by a mixed-gender team (incidental contributors excluded)
• 1 volume of poetry

So, call it 28 books (excluding the games), more than half of which were re-reads.

The first paragraph of this wrap-up sounds fairly depressive when I read it back, so I want to reassure that I'm doing pretty good, all things considered! It's just that I end up having to allocate my attention and energy a lot differently than I would allocate them if I lived in a healthier world. In particular, I've been having an incredibly difficult time consuming non-re-read fiction these last two and a half years, and that includes video games with significant stories. I can do it, sometimes, but it's much slower and harder than usual. I recently heard another person (and a much more prolific reader than me, to boot) say the same thing; what an odd effect! So a bunch of the energy I would have put into exploring new worlds in my mind has gone into learning skills instead, or just soaking up the time in an anodyne way by playing skill-focused games that are more or less free of story. I don't find myself drawn to doomscrolling to fill the gap, so that's good.