The Best Books I Read in 2021

Best-Books-of-2021

I read 116 books in 2021.

With a big goal to achieve a certain level of fluency in French in 2021, I read as many books in French as I could, especially in popular-fiction categories that provided me with lots of dialogue and current-day normal-person language. (In other words, not in my preferred literary genres—but I didn’t have a goal of reading amazing French literature, but of learning the language.) Between one-third and one-half of the books I read in 2021, I read in French.

Other than this push to read as many novels in French as possible, my 2020 quest for books that made me think while giving me a great story to follow continued. This meant that I sought out new perspectives and ambitious narratives—and that I cared less about a perfect turn or phrase or a seamless tale and more about following along with a writer trying to do something interesting.

Take me somewhere, show me something, make me feel, make me think, push me, I urged.

I didn’t always find what I craved in the novels I selected. And I found that many of the reviewers I’d trusted to steer me well in the past let me down in 2021.

I’ll need to find new guides for 2022.

However, I did encounter some amazing books in the 116 I read during 2021. When January 2022 arrived, I struggled to create a super-shortlist of the best-of-the-best from all the books I read.

To create this list, I went through the lists of books I read each quarter, focusing particularly (though not exclusively) on the books I’d bolded as the best reads of that quarter. Though I had twenty-two bolded books for 2021 across all four lists, I narrowed my best-of-the-best list to these final three books, ordered by the author’s last name:

As in 2020, I determined my absolute favorite books of 2021 via the following criteria:

  • they gave me new perspectives, new considerations, and made me think

  • months later, my mind continued to chew on them

  • they elicited (and may still elicit) a visceral as well as an intellectual response

And as in 2020, I found the last criterion—the visceral response—the hardest for even the books I truly loved to satisfy. Yet I stick by it because, for me, a true “favorite book” must provoke emotion, not just thought.

I’d recommend these three books highly to anyone seeking story- and character-driven, meaty fiction that will push you to think and to feel.

Of course, I have a few honorable mentions, books that made the shortlist but missed my list of final favorites, even if only by a smidge due to not quite hitting one of the criteria full-on:

Though I read the Dieudonné book in French, you can read it in English under the title Real Life.

If you’d like to check out the other books I read in 2021, including the books I bolded as favorites for each quarter that didn’t make the annual best-of-the-best or honorable mentions list, here’s the full suite:

What should I read in 2022, do you think?

P.S.—Interested in my best-of-the-best lists for previous years? Read my article listing my favorite books of 2019 and my post on the best books I read in 2020.