The Best Books I Read in 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:
The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott
Winter Counts, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
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:
The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam
Razorblade Tears, by S. A. Cosby
Things We Lost to the Water, by Eric Nguyen
Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishigiro
Black Buck, by Mateo Askaripour
La Vraie Vie, by Adeline Dieudonné (French-language edition)
My Heart is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones
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.