Dataview looks cool. I don't have a lot of experience with this, but your example sounds like it can be achieved with the Note Overview plugin, along with a tagging system of your own design (for example: #book, #gr_review, #series, #read_2021) and some text in the body of notes (author, all related names and titles, perhaps the year it was read too, etc.). It cannot extract the metadata and display it as neatly as in Dataview, but you'll get a nice table that matches your query and automatically gets updated.
Here's an example of a Note Overview header that mixes free text and tags in the search query:
<!-- note-overview-plugin
search: "year read: 2021 tag:book tag:gr_review -tag:series"
fields: created_time, title, tags, excerpt
alias: created_time AS Date, title AS Title
sort: created_time DESC
-->