Books of 2021

It was a weird year for reading.  (Well, it was a weird year for everything, as a matter of fact.)  There were periods when reading fostered self-care, inward reflection, and a much-needed recharge for me, but there were also times when my mind was so preoccupied with the stress of the pandemic and all the unknowns that I couldn't concentrate on reading a real book, and I found myself having to go back and re-read entire chapters.  I was in a funk for a while when nothing I read was really outstanding, but then I finished the year with a few incredible and heartfelt stories that left me feeling invigorated.  I read more poetry than I ever have before, and I looked for stories told from a different perspective than my own.  Sometimes nonfiction was exactly what I needed to feel grounded, while other times I was looking for an escape, like fantastical realism or a novel set in a completely different place and time.  Historical fiction still seems to be the genre I gravitate toward the most, but memoirs also resonate with me.  My beloved book club continued to meet all year (often outdoors, sometimes on Zoom, and all of us vaxed and boostered!) and we explored a wide range of genres together.  When other social gatherings were on hold for most of the year, I was more thankful than ever for this group of intelligent women who came together each month to share ideas and insights.  

These were my specific reading goals for the year, and some of the things I read to meet these goals:

1.  Discover a new favorite author:  Robert Jones, Jr., Rumaan Alam, Lucey Foley, Lauren Wilkinson, Samanta Schweblin, Patricia Engel

2. Read a new title from an old favorite:  Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom, Ann Patchett's The Patron Saint of Liars, Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last, Amos Towles' The Lincoln Highway, Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, Chris Bohjalian's Hour of the Witch, Colum McCann's Dancer, Jo Nesbo's The Thirst, Ijeoma Oluo's Mediocre, Taylor Jenkins Reid's Malibu Rising, Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle

3. Read more titles by women of color:  Ijeoma Oluo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Nadia Owusu, Jacqueline Woodson, Uzma Jalaluddin, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Rita Woods, Tola Rotimi Abraham, Julia Alavarez, Catherine Hernandez, Leesa Cross-Smith, Lauren Wilkinson, Valeria Luiselli, Zadie Smith, Rupi Kaur, Kiley Reid, Isabel Ibanez, Francesca Ekquyasi, Tola Rotimi Abraham, Quan Barry, Elizabeth Acevedo and many others

4. Indigenous voices:  Danielle Geller, Louise Erdrich, Beatrice Mosionier, Linda Hogan

5. Transgender or two-spirit voices:  Sasha Geffen, Meredith Talusan, Julian K. Jarboe, Zeyn Joukhadar, Joshua Whitehead

6. A genre outside of my comfort zone: Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (described as literary fiction and "a collision of technology and play, horror and humanity"), Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe (described as a collection of "body-horror fairy tails and mid-apocalyptic cyberpunk"), This Ragged, Wastrel Thing by Tomas Marcantonio (described as a "gritty cyberpunk noir"), Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (described as "lesbian literature," if that's really a genre!?), The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Afrofuturism), Fabio Moon's Daytripper (graphic novel)

7. Read a National Book Award finalist: Shuggie Bain, The Poet X, Trust Exercise, The Great Believers, Leave the World Behind, The Prophets, Tokyo Ueno Station, Interior China Town, The Secret Life of Church Ladies, A Children's Bible

8. Buy more books from independent book stores:  Locally I shopped at Bee Hive Books, Collected Works, and The Ark.  I also shop online through Birchbark Books in Minneapolis and Malik Books in Los Angeles.  

9. Finish books on my shelf: I made a small dent in the stack but I'm nowhere near accomplishing this goal!

10. Translated work:  Tokyo Ueno Station, The Lying Life of Adults, Blindness, Suspended Sentences

11. Read more poetry:  Elizabeth Acevedo, Louise Erdrich, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Kate Baer, Rupi Kaur, Zetta Elliot, Linda Hogan

12. Read a classic: Ulysses, The Blithedale Romance, Middlemarch, Of Mice and Men, Anna Karenina

As always, it was really difficult to narrow down my list of favorites, but after much deliberation, here were my 21 favorite titles of 2021:

Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart

Thirty Names of Night, by Zeyn Joukhadar

The Rose Code, by Katie Quinn

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

The Age of Light, by Whitney Sharer

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

Home Body, by Rupi Kaur

The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, by Sasha Geffen

Jesus Land: A Memoir, by Julia Scheeres

The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, by Ijeoma Oluo

Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi

The Prophets: A Novel, by Robert Jones, Jr.

The Blue Jay's Dance, by Louise Erdrich

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker, by Damon Young

See my complete 2021 list here

For the next two months I'll be reading almost exclusively textbooks and cardiology articles as a I prepare for a board certification exam, but these are 22 titles I look forward to reading in 2022 once I have some leisure time again:

How We Were Beautiful, by Imbolo Mbue

Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Unbound, by Tarana Burke

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink

Razorblade Tears, by SA Cosby

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doer

A Little Hope, by Ethan Joella

Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler

The Perishing, by Natashia Deon

Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang

The Trees, by Percival Everett

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura

We Are the Brennans, by Tracey Lange

The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides

West with Giraffes, by Lynda Rutledge

People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry

Where the Dead Sit Talking, by Brandon Hobson

Purple Hibuscus, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Happy New Year and Happy Reading!