A Rundown Of The 62 Books I Read In 2021
I read a lot of books this year. I read more books this year than I’ve read since before I was introduced to the internet. I read different types of books this year: literary fiction with a focus on alienated female characters where the plot takes a backseat, history/culture-based non-fiction, music-related books, contemporary romance, science fiction and nostalgia-based fantasy series read-throughs. Without further ado, here’s the books and what I thought of them, listed in the order that I read them.
1. Weather — Jenny Offill (3.5/5)
Weather is a “fragment novel”. It has chapters, but each chapter is composed of segments or fragments that don’t so much convey a linear plot as much as an impression of what’s going on. These can range from an observation the protagonist makes on her way to work to her lamenting the shaky state her marriage is in. And that’s pretty much it. If you are adamant that a book should have a plot, this may not be for you, but keep an open mind (because half the books here are going to be like this). Some of the observations, especially the anxieties towards the Trump presidency felt…overdone because it seemed to me like the protagonist would be among those with the least to lose in practical terms, but ultimately the book is well-written, easy to read, reasonably impactful and doesn’t overstay its welcome
2. Such A Fun Age, Kiley Reid (3/5)
This book explores the fallout of Emira Tucker a babysitter getting accosted at a supermarket while looking after her charge, because of her race, and the pall it casts over her dynamic with her employer, who is a social media influencer. I found it interesting that Emira’s displeasure about the incident centers more around her being solidified in the eyes of the world as ‘just a babysiter’ and her unhappiness at being relatively directionless in her mid-twenties. That’s probably the most unique thing about the book. It’s really entertaining, mostly all I could think when I was reading this was that it was absolutely going to become a TV show at some point if it wasn’t already in development, and that sapped at my enjoyment of this book. I also feel that this book wanted to be a satire, but also chickened out of playing up any absurd/comedic aspects too much. I’d still recommend it for being an entertaining, relatable and occasionally funny read.
3. White Teeth, Zadie Smith (5/5)
When I finished this book, and went on Goodreads to log it in, I was surprised at the number of one-star reviews this book got, because it’s easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. It follows the lives of two families, the respective patriarchs of which became unlikely friends during World War II. It portrays aspects of the immigrant experience in England. But my favourite thing about this book is Zadie Smith’s writing style. It is, to me, a quintessentially British style, with a lot of observational humour mined from the small moments. The writing style, the humour, and the empathy I felt the humour lent to the characters really made this book for me. I was immediately hooked and couldn’t put it down. Yes, the final tenth of the book isn’t as good, but by that point, there was so much goodwill built up that I am more than willing to forgive it.
4. One Of Us Is Next, Karen McManus (2.5/5)
5. One Of Us Is Lying, Karen McManus (5/5)
I read One Of Us Is Lying for the first time in 2017 and I still think it’s one of the best suspense novels I’ve read. It’s billed as “Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars” but the reason it’s good is that it’s able to move past the expected conventions fairly soon. I really liked the character development through the story as well, especially Addy’s arc. I finally got around to reading the sequel, One Of Us Is Next this year, and as you can tell from the rating, it’s just not as good as the first novel. I think this is mainly because Lying ended on a pretty conclusive note, and a sequel in the same area with Bronwyn from the first book’s sister Maeve as the protagonist this time around just didn’t work. One Of Us Is Lying is still great; mercifully the sequel doesn’t retcon anything that happened in Book 1, but I’d give Next a miss.
6. The Secret History, Donna Tartt (5/5)
This one gets a 5/5 from me because simply put: this book is entertaining as hell. Can I honestly say that I learned something from this book, or that it taught me to see the world from a new perspective? No. What this book does have is a cabal of extremely weird and sinister Classics students who the protagonist (and I) couldn’t helped getting caught up in the orbit of. It has a great atmosphere, which is probably why it is so beloved by the Dark Academia crowd; this is right up their alley. I liked it a lot too, mainly because of how unashamedly weird the characters are. I also appreciate the writing style being simply so as to let the plot and characters take center stage and make the book so gripping.
7. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2/5)
I had such high expectations for this one — it’s on multiple “Best Books Of All Times” lists and is treated as fresh and groundbreaking. Maybe, when it came out in 2004, the nested story structure and “meta” ways the protagonists of each section interact with each other was new. Unfortunately for Cloud Atlas, I’ve already read House Of Leaves multiple times, and it did a much better job with both these things. I felt that ultimately the nested structure — the most unique thing about the book — simply wasn’t utilized enough. The protagonists of each section don’t interact with each other in substantial ways. I’m not asking for a superhero teamup where they come together to defend a supervillain, but I wish there was a little more, because functionally, Cloud Atlas is a slightly quirky, genre-hopping short story collection with not much substance.
8. The City And The City, China Mieville (5/5)
The perfect book to read after Cloud Atlas because it did everything that I wanted Cloud Atlas to do. I first came across this book in a list of works that inspired Disco Elysium, which is a video game I like quite a lot. The City And The City is a police procedural murder mystery, but that’s primarily a vehicle to explore one of the most unique settings I’ve ever come across in fiction. The city the police officer protagonist is employed by has a sister city which shares geographic space with it, but residents of each are supposed to behave like and even think of the other not existing. Most of the book exists to set up and explore this setting and go into extensive details of how this might work. It’s some truly imaginative and well-thought out worldbuilding. The murder mystery is just the icing on the cake.
9. Outline, Rachel Cusk (5/5)
The quintessential “unrelatable female protagonist with absolutely no plot” novel. This book follows Faye, a recent divorcee on her trip to Athens to teach a writing course. Each chapter is a conversation that she has with someone on her journey. Faye tells us their life story, Faye and the character talk about some conflict going on in their life currently, Faye and the character generally gain some deeper insight into this conflict and how it ties into the larger picture of their life story, and you either see something of your own life reflected in all of this and maybe have some epiphanies of your own, or you find it insufferable and pretentious. I especially liked the final chapter which had Faye having a conversation with a woman who was essentially doing the same thing as Cusk, having one-sided conversations with other people, which defined her own character in opposition. It was a really good experience ultimately, but if you were to tell me this book is pretentious trash with more style than substance, I would absolutely see where you’re coming from.
10. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Ronan Farrow (3.5/5)
The first non-fiction entry on the list. The book documents Farrow’s efforts to put together the New York Times article that exposed Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of predatory behaviour and that kickstarted the #MeToo movement around the globe. I came away from it learning something about the journalistic process, and it was also just a good portrait of someone in the grip of a months-long, all-consuming project. Even though I knew how things eventually turned out, I still found the book a tense, suspenseful read.
11. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (4.5/5)
This year I finally caved, and read my first Franzen novel. I figured that after reading Cusk, there was really no point in pretending not to be a little pretentious about my tastes. I honestly went into this one with low expectations, I was expecting it to be populated by empty characters that the author clearly has contempt for, and unnecessarily detailed descriptions of female characters, but I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong. The novel does have gross descriptions of women, but it’s self-aware about it at least? And I found the book to be empathetic and even affectionate towards all of the main cast despite their many, flaws. There’s a questionable scene in the middle featuring a talking turd, which got a juvenile chuckle out of me considering the literary pedestal this book is on. The familial relationships in the novel resonated with me, as did the themes surrounding changes in life coming with ageing. Believe the hype with this one.
12. Inheritance, 13. Eldest, 14. Brisingr, 15. Inheritance, Christopher Paolini (5/5)
Something familiar and comforting after a heavy read. I was a fan of the Inheritance Cycle when I was in school, and I must have read the first three books in the series dozens of times. Inheritance, the final book unfortunately came out when I was just starting to grow out of the series, and at the time I disliked the way the series ended, and moved on from the series.
Inheritance was never a well-regarded series in the YA Fantasy world, mocked almost as much as the Twilight series. I’d always defended the series from the criticisms of lack of originality and general cringiness. Reading it in 2021 as a full grown adult, I was expecting to feel embarrassed about my tastes as a young teenager, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the series holds up really well. Maybe it’s leftover goodwill, or nostalgia, but I enjoyed reading it just as much as I did when I was 12. Ten years later, revisiting it was a nostalgic, affirming and unexpectedly emotional experience. I have absolutely no objectivity when it comes to these books so they all get top marks from me.
16–19. Percy Jackson And The Olympians Books 1 to 4, Rick Riordan (4/5)
Riding off the nostalgia high from completing the Inheritance Cycle, I decided to revisit another series from my early teen years. As a mythology nerd I was always guaranteed to fall in love with the series, and Percy’s sarcastic narration sealed the deal for me. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I didn’t have nearly as nice of a time revisiting this series. I don’t blame the books at all, I know they’re great. Maybe I should have spaced out the nostalgia trips.
20. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, Alex Niven (4/5), 21. Getting High: The Adventures of Oasis, Paolo Hewitt (3.5/5)
In March 2021 I fell in love with Oasis. This was a momentous development because previously, they weren’t just a band I didn’t know/didn’t care about, they were a band I actively loathed. It was the specific hatred of an anti-fan, someone who is about as familiar with the group’s work as a fan, but who hates the band. So in a way, the groundwork was already there for me to become a fan. I can’t even pinpoint a specific moment where the tides turned. All I know is that this March I realised that I wasn’t really listening to their music “ironically” anymore, and that I probably never had; it was just that I was far too snobbish to admit this to myself.
So in March, I spent pretty much all my free time listening to Oasis, reading about Oasis and thinking about Oasis. The two books I read during this time were 331/3’s analysis of Oasis’ debut Definitely Maybe and Getting High, which is a biography for the band. Alex Niven’s analysis of Definitely Maybe is very good, and accords a lot of credit to a band and album that could be written off as insubstantial and without depth (something that he rightfully calls out Oasis’ later output as). I found myself agreeing with pretty much every opinion of his, and I found that it did change the way I listened to Definitely Maybe.
Getting High is everything you’d expect from a biography of a rock band, especially one with a reputation for notoriety like Oasis: it’s gossipy, it’s meant to be scandalous (although as someone who came of age in the 2000s...yeah.), and tells you everything you need to know about the band’s history and members. The only problem I had with it was that at several points it felt like I was reading fanfiction about the Gallagher brothers, and even though I had the zeal of a recent convert at that point, I still found it supremely uncomfortable.
22. Uncanny Valley — Anna Weiner (2.5/5)
I have some very mixed feelings about this book. It is well-written and makes valid arguments — the tech industry can be hostile towards women, even unintentionally, and that it’s a relatively new player on the world stage and seems populated by strange characters who don’t seem to have the best interests of humanity at heart, and it gets across these points effectively. But I had my own perspective going into this book as a woman in tech, and the way most of these points were conveyed just did not sit well with me. The ‘hook’ of the book is that Weiner brings an outsider’s perspective to Silicon Valley, moving from a publishing job to a job at a tech company in California, which is why I suspect it garnered as much press attention as it did.
It felt to me that Weiner was clinging to this outsider label a little too fiercely. She seemed intent on painting people in tech jobs as weird, robotic, ambitious, yuppies with a sense of detached aloofness, even though for all intents and purposes, by the end of the memoir, she was more or less an insider. The alienation and borderline contempt she feels she gets from her coworkers for being in a non-tech job at a tech company rings true, but I think it was a missed opportunity not to include perspectives from woman with technical jobs at her two workplaces. I felt that Weiner didn’t really do a great job of explaining why the tech industry is uniquely worse than other big industries, beyond that it’s populated by weirder people. It comes off as insubstantial and surface-layer. For example, Weiner’s description of the New York publishing industry as insular and accommodating only to people who essentially already had money of their own, makes it seem as bad in its own way as the tech industry. I think there are better critiques of the tech industry out there, that are able to explain its specific problems better.
23. Shipped, Angie Hockman (3/5)
The first contemporary romance comfort read on the list. It’s a fairly by-the-numbers enemies-to-lovers (at least on the female lead’s side) romance which largely takes place on a cruise to the Galapagos islands. I think the idea of love at first sight through an office Zoom call is not just absurd, it is actively repugnant. The character arcs unfortunately largely fell flat too. Ultimately however, it was an unexpectedly poignant read because it came out in 2019 and the two leads work in the tourism industry. The book ends with them filled with hope for the next phases of their lives and careers. Needless to say, this one didn’t particularly cheer me up at all.
24. The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan (2/5)
Heroes Of Olympus, the follow-up series to the original Percy Jackson series wasn’t nearly as enjoyable. The humour and characters felt broader and even though the characters are older, these books read like they are meant for a younger audience. And it got a rocky start with The Lost Hero. We’re at Camp Halfblood, a familiar location, but there’s a new main character now, Jason Grace. Jason is an incredibly flat character, he doesn’t really have any distinctive traits or quirks. The other two leads, Leo and Piper are a little better, but considering the low bar Jason sets, it’s being damned by faint praise. I honestly don’t know why I thought a Heroes Of Olympus re-read would take when the original Percy Jacksons didn’t. Bad judgement on my part.
25. Britpop!: Cool Britannia And The Spectacular Demise Of English Rock, John Harris (4/5)
A holdout from my Oasis obsession, that you’re seeing a little apart from the other ones because getting my hands on this book was tough. It’s a documentation of the Britpop scene of the 90s with inputs from several of its key players. I was a huge Blur fan as a teenager (which partially explains my erstwhile hatred towards Oasis), and I think if I had read this book back then, I would have hated it. I think apart from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and maybe Blur’s Graham Coxon no one comes out of this looking good. Damon Albarn comes across as a poseur with a competitive streak he won’t own up to. Justine Frichmann seems like she has completely unjustified notions of superiority. While it would have been easy to paint Oasis as the worst of the lot, I thought Harris was quite restrained with them. I don’t know if this is a staple of the genre, because the only other book I’ve read like this is Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom (documenting the New York rock revival scene of the early 2000s), but it largely follows the same beats: the initial underground phase, the breakthrough and glory days and the post-peak drug-addled decline. Maybe it’s the way all rock music scenes are. All I can say is that I got what I wanted out of it, now that I am mature enough to understand that making good music doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.
26. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard (4/5)
This book focuses quite a bit on the administrative and domestic aspects of life in Ancient Rome as opposed to restricting itself solely to talking about the Senators and Emperors. I really appreciated that aspect of it because I ended up learning a lot that I didn’t know before. I think with this one, read the description on Goodreads, and if that looks interesting to you, you’ll like this book.
27. The Witch Elm, Tana French (3.5/5)
The Witch Elm is a murder mystery focusing on an Irish family who discover a skull in the trunk of the majestic elm tree in their back garden. Its protagonist is a man named Toby who is entertainingly oblivious to the offensive views he has and the discomfort people around him express when he says something off-colour. It’s a slightly long read, but I found it suspenseful and well-paced. I thought the family dynamics, with Toby’s cousins and his uncle kept things interesting. I think this book’s crowning achievement is that it managed to make Toby’s bigotry funny instead of off-putting and infuriating, since because the joke was always clearly on him and it it’s clearly actively hurting him in a number of ways.
28. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong (3.5/5)
This is a short collection of chapters about poet Cathy Park Hong’s experiences growing up as a Korean immigrant in the US. ‘Minor feelings’ refers to the sense of alienation she feels from broader society due to her immigrant status. The chapters are either general explorations of the Korean and broader Asian immigrant experiences in the US, and how Hong relates to it, or they are personal recollections of Hong’s journey on her way to becoming an artist. Personally, I felt like it was a mixed bag, but I don’t think that’s Hong’s fault. It was just that neither part, the personal nor political felt expanded on enough. Being left wanting more is probably the nicest thing I can say about this book.
29. Embassytown, China Mieville (5/5)
Personally, this was an excellent Mieville follow up to City And The City. A weirder setting, weirder concepts and a higher-stakes plot. The mind-bending concept this time around involves the Language, spoken by the indigenous race of aliens on the planet Embassytown takes place. I feel like even explaining how the Language works would spoil the experience of putting it together for yourself reading the story. It truly feels alien and once again, I found myself blown away by Mieville’s creativity. As with City And The City, a good chunk of the plot initially exists to teach you how the Language and wider world works, and then kicks the plot into high gear in the final act once you know everything you need to. It was an engrossing, compelling read that I felt broaden my horizons. One of the best books I’ve ever read.
30. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville (3/5)
Maybe I’d have liked this one more if I hadn’t just read Embassytown. Maybe I’d have liked it more if I read it during my Neil Gaiman phase in 2016. The previous two Mieville novels I’d read this year worked with truly mind-bending concepts like two cities superimposed on each other, and a Language that requires you to speak together with the same consciousness to be understood. Concepts that essentially took two-thirds of the book to thoroughly explain. Compared to that, a city populated by a variety of fantasy creatures, a really well-developed city with a detailed map, and populated by sightly more obscure fantasy creatures, it just doesn’t stack up. The plot felt Gaiman-esque, with a series of events initiated by the protagonist causing a calamity that ends up getting more and more parties all with their own agendas involved. It was probably the best thing about the book. And even that is marred by the fridging of the most prominent female character. Female characters getting killed off to progress the male lead’s emotional journey is my number one pet peeve trope, and anything with it has an uphill climb with me. I don’t think Perdido Street Station quite managed it.
31. A Game Of Thrones, George RR Martin (4/5)
I re-read A Song Of Ice And Fire in its entirety last year, and this was a failed attempt to do the same in 2021. Personally, I think this book is the weakest in the series, because so much of it is setup for the later books, but it’s still really enjoyable. It’s also made quite rewarding on repeat reads because you know how different plot points are going to play out. Even though this was probably my fifth or sixth time reading it, I was still able to get through it within a few days. But I think last year’s re-read was still too fresh in my mind to do it all over again.
32. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (5/5)
Americanah follows the differing paths that Ifemelu and Obinze, a teenage couple from Nigeria take, Ifemelu’s life as an international student in the US, and Obinze’s life as an undocumented migrant in London. I thought that similar to Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen, there was a lot of warmth and humour throughout the book that made it easy to read even when things were difficult for the protagonists. I especially enjoyed Ifemelu’s chapters because she had a very interesting perspective on America that you don’t get to see very often. Obinze’s chapters were fewer in number which is just as well since they weren’t as strong as Ifemelu’s, but I found the US/UK difference mined from his chapters interesting enough. As with a lot of books on this list, I don’t think it had a satisfying or rewarding ending, but it turns out that I’m really forgiving about that sort of thing.
33. Better Than The Movies, Lynn Painter (4/5), 34. Beach Read, Emily Henry (2/5)
I’m grouping these two contemporary romance novels together because I read them back-to-back and they’re an interesting compare-and-contrast. Both novels feature very genre-savvy heroines, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers trope and both books have some self-aware discussions of common tropes in the genre. I think that Better Than The Movies did a better job out of the two, on pretty much every level. It was charming, the characters and conflicts seemed relatable, and believable, and I think it was able to work the heroine’s obsession with rom-coms into her character arc in a satisfying way. You could see every plot beat from a mile away, but it was an enjoyable and restorative read nonetheless.
I really wanted to like Beach Read. Its premise is even more meta than Better Than The Movies’. A romance novelist and literary fiction author wind up in neighbouring summer homes and decide to combat writer’s block by attempting to write something in the other’s genre. It seems really interesting on paper, and yet almost nothing about this worked for me. January’s dislike for Gus in the initial parts of the book didn’t seem convincing. And not to sound like a prude, but they hooked up far to early in the book. I thought the characters were flat, especially the male lead, who I thought was basically the same person through the book. I think this book’s biggest crime was not doing more with the genre-savvy premise like Better Than The Movies. There was some attempt by each to see the value in the others’ genre of choice, and it did help their character development, but I personally did not find it terribly moving. The only reason I actually finished the book and that it doesn’t get a 1/5 is that it was pretty funny at times.
35. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (5/5)
With Better Than The Movies maxing out my sappiness gauge, I was ready for something to drain it again. I read Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy for the first time last year, and was constantly confronted with the feeling that I was too stupid for these books. Re-reading Wolf Hall this year thoroughly confirmed that suspicion. I was shocked at how much I missed on my first read-through, things that should have been fairly obvious. The early 2010s were the era of the TV antihero, but I think the most complex and developed one from that era is Thomas Cromwell. It took enough out of me that I didn’t have the mental/intellectual stamina to continue with the next book, Bring Up The Bodies, since I knew what was in store this time around. Maybe next year.
36. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett (3/5)
This book follows a pair of mixed-race twins in the US, one of whom eventually vanishes to live as a white woman, while the other continues to live as mixed-race/Black. The premise is contrived, but I don’t mind that at all. The book is extremely gripping, I finished it over the course of one afternoon. Unlike some of the other fiction on this list, I even thought the ending was fitting and satisfying. The reason I’m not rating this any higher is because it seemed more-or-less predictable to me. If you’ve watched any prestige TV in the last decade, you will be able to see where this is going.
37. White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color, Ruby Hamad (4/5)
This book reminded me a bit of No Logo by Naomi Klein, in that, if you came across this book, chances are that you already know the broad strokes of the arguments the book contains. Its value comes from putting all the pieces in one place, in showing you the indisputable big picture. I came away from this book feeling validated, and feeling angry. Most of this book is anecdotal evidence, but you really can’t disagree with any of it, and even this points to larger systemic issues at play as Hamad rightly points out.
38. The Atmospherians, Alex McElroy (4/5)
Call me shallow, but I immediately wanted to read this book when I saw the cover. The book opens with Sasha, a successful social media influencer getting harassed by MRA-types when an interaction with a troll online goes horribly wrong. She gets hardcore cancelled and ends up joining her friend in creating what is basically a cult. Sasha’s relationship with Dyson, and the interactions with the cult members each of whom has distinct personality flaws conveniently relayed to us, are all excellent. The status quo never holds for too long, and as soon as things seem to be settling down, something shocking happens to shake things up again, and I was kept on my toes until the very end. In conclusion: stop bulling Alex McElroy for their beach reading take. They can get away with it because their debut novel was good.
39. Heatwave, Victor Jestin (4.5/5)
This really short 112-page book confirmed to me what should have been obvious for ages. That I am a pretentious snob who prefers books with absurd/non-existent plots and characters and settings whose worst aspects are distilled to their very essence and whose behaviour and thoughts don’t resemble most human beings’. No plot, just vibes. This book is a prime example. It opens with the protagonist who is on holiday at the beach with his family, witnessing the death of a boy he knows at night, and instead of getting help, he buries the body and keeps it a secret. The rest of the book follows him as he interacts with friends, his crush and deals with the guilt and trauma of what happened, during an unprecedented heatwave. It’s atmospheric, it’s ambiguous, it’s obtuse, and it’s weird. I really liked it.
40–43. The Neopolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante (5/5)
Yes these books have been critically acclaimed to the point that you could reasonably assume they’re overrated, but that just isn’t the case here. These 4 books follow two friends, Elena and Lila who come from a working-class neighbourhood in Naples. They are both bright students, and their paths diverge when Lila’s parents do not permit her to continue with primary school while Elena’s do. Elena and Lila are deeply linked, and have a push-and-pull, yin-yang relationship. Elena is timid, Lila is bold, Elena is chaste, Lila is seductive, when things are good for Elena, they are bad for Lila and vice versa.
The fundamental experience of reading these books can be neatly summed up by this Tumblr post. It has too many dimensions for me to ever be able to do describing it any justice. Its anchor is Lila and Elena’s complex relationship, but it also deals with the experience of womanhood through different phases of life. Following the main characters and supporting cast from children to senior citizens was a deeply insightful and moving experience. These are probably the best books I’ve read this year, and after I finished reading them in July, I wasn’t able to touch another book for about a month because it took so much out of me. In a good way.
44. No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood (3/5)
This book can be split more or less neatly into two parts. The first half is your average fragment novel mostly focusing on Twitter, told from the perspective of an influencer who had a random tweet go viral. I found this part absolutely insufferable. Twitter is referred to only as ‘the portal’ and is a strange place where everyone is sarcastic and vindictive and with the directional fidelity of a weather-vane on a windy day. She wrote this part with the grimness and bemusement of someone who was being forced at gunpoint to spend time on Twitter. Not to make a lame joke based on the book title but, no one is making you do this.
The second half of the book is a complete change in tone and content. It’s an almost autobiographical retelling of Lockwood’s niece being born with birth defects, and the effects it had on Lockwood’s family. It felt like a splash of cold water after the first half of the book. Lockwood really conveyed the fear, grief and above all, the love everyone had for the baby. You could argue that the inherent abject sadness of the subject matter would automatically make for moving work, but I think Lockwood rightfully got a lot of credit for how she conveyed the reality, practicalities, and emotions of that period in their lives. Even thinking about certain parts while writing this section now bring tears to my eyes. Read at your own peril, it isn’t a very happy book.
45. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (3.5/5)
I read this immediately after No One Is Talking About This because I just had to read something lighthearted and funny. This nostalgic, funny recounting of Bill Bryson’s 1950s Iowa conjured up a cozy world where people were prosperous, kids could run wild, and the town main street was populated by mom-’n’-pop shops with abundant personality. If you’re a man, not white, not American, not straight or some combination thereof, 1950s nostalgia has probably always been baffling to you, as it has me. But I thought Bryson did a fair enough job of explaining why it was a special time for him while acknowledging that he was really lucky to have that experience. The section where he says he didn’t personally see any racism occur at his high school had me rolling my eyes a bit though. It was a very nice read, and for a book so based in humour, the understated melancholic ending was really effective.
46. The Midnight Library, Matt Haig (2/5)
You cannot convince me that this book winning the Goodreads Choice award last year wasn’t a joke or some sort of coordinated trolling attempt.The book opens with Nora, a woman who feels she has nothing in life attempting suicide, and instead being transported to a netherworld library where each book represents how her life would have played out if she had made different choices. It’s the book equivalent of the ‘nooo don’t kill yourself’ meme. You’ll see the resolutions coming from a mile off. It had a lot of potential and I liked the way the mechanics of the library were explained, but it was ultimately just really basic, shallow and predictable. For a version of this plot hook done well, check out the video game The Cat Lady.
47. Transit, Rachel Cusk (4/5)
The second part of the Outline trilogy. Faye is now back in London, and for the majority of the book is setting up a new flat. In the same way that her conversations in Outline tied into her stay at Athens for the writing workshop, here, they relate one way or another to Faye’s return to London. I found Transit to be a little more unfocused than Outline, and the epiphanies fewer and far between. The final chapter is a slight deviation from the rest of the book (look away if you’re worried about spoilers for a Rachel Cusk novel!) in that it takes place at a dinner party and there are numerous people present. There were probably a lot of themes in that one chapter there, I felt like they went over my head, but that it was really close, and maybe if I were a little less stupid, I might have seen more.
48. The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris (5/5)
This book is what I wanted The Vanishing Half to be. It has a fairly straightforward premise at first. Nella is the only Black person at her prestigious publishing firm in New York until another Black woman Hazel joins the company. Nella is initially thrilled, but both she and we as readers see that something is off with Hazel. This book implied that things were off and unlike Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers, was able to follow these hints of unease with a reveal that is truly out there. I love this book for the giant swing that it took, and I love that it worked. This is the first piece of fiction that made me feel the exact same sense of fear, dread and hopelessness that the original Stepford Wives did.
49. The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas (5/5)
Maybe it’s because things sound more profound coming from the young. Maybe it’s because authors and publishers feel like they owe a younger audience more responsible and high-caliber fiction. Maybe it’s my own (deeply misplaced) nostalgia for my teens. Whatever the reason, The Hate U Give is a nuanced, empathetic and compelling portrait of a community essentially under all sorts of pressure. I think it’s a shame that this has been categorized and marketed as a YA novel because this should really be up there with all the lit-fic type novels. Certainly, I don’t think this book did anything terribly differently from Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections, in terms of introducing a group of people dealing with the fallout of a major and devastating shift, except maybe that the characters in The Hate U Give behave more like ordinary human beings and not literary fiction characters. This should be prestige fiction.
50. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Nam-Joo Cho (5/5)
Of all the alienated-empty-woman stories, this is one of the most obvious. Kim Jiyoung (which is the Korean equivalent of ‘Jane Doe’) is taken to a psychiatrist by her husband when she begins to assume the personalities of other women in her lives, some dead, some alive. What emerges is a portrait of misogyny that is so deeply entrenched in society, that it basically is society. If you’re a woman from Korea or a culture as patriarchal, nothing you read here will be new. We’ve all seen the myriad of ways that women in our families and societies have been pressured to give up their personhood, from the life-altering (not being able to pursue an education) to the quotidian (making sure the men in the family come first when it comes to food). But having a multi-generational exploration of the way this kind of utter disregard and contempt for women manifests in pretty much every facet of life makes it so clear how inescapable it all is, something that’s portrayed in the way that Kim Jiyoung is slowly losing her sense of self. Is there any hope for change in our lifetimes? This book says ‘No’ and I’m inclined to agree.
51. People We Meet on Vacation, Emily Henry (3/5)
In retrospect, reading a romance novel right after the previous book was never going to end well. Having said that, I definitely don’t agree with the effusive praise this book’s been getting. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it was better than Beach Read. This isn’t the book’s fault, but the focus on travel through this book (the main characters only meet up once a year to take a trip) just made me envious. I liked the conflict between the two leads, especially that it went way beyond silly misunderstandings, and was a fundamental mismatch in what they wanted, but I did feel like the resolution was too neat (or maybe by the time it happened, I was so sapped out that I wanted some sadness Just Because). Emily Henry is a writer I really want to like, and there is enough here for me to give whatever she writes next a go.
52. Don’t You Forget About Me, Mhairi McFarlane (3.5/5)
There is only one plausible reason this book was categorized as a contemporary romance: the standard contemporary romance cover design. The thing this book reminds me most of is Fleabag. It’s about a woman who seems directionless in life, is grieving the death of a parent, has a complicated relationship with the surviving parent and an antagonistic one with their step-parent, and is often contrasted with her more stable and conventionally successful sister. It’s also really funny most of the time, which I really appreciated. The worst thing about the way this book was mismarketed is that there is a pretty graphic description of sexual assault that essentially comes out of nowhere and is really upsetting. So if you’re reading this: be warned. I think that if this book had a different cover, had a more accurate summary on the back cover, and the romance at the end had an ambiguous ending, I’d have come across this book on LitHub as an underrated gem.
53. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick (5/5)
This book offers a look into North Korea that you don’t often see. It draws primarily from interviews with six defectors from the same northern industrial city in North Korea, and ties the rising and then death-spiral plummeting fortunes of the city with North Korea as a whole. I’ve often felt that mainstream perceptions of North Korea can lapse into treating the country like a joke, mocking the bombastic tone of the propaganda and its citizens for being clueless and brainwashed. I think every late night host and newspaper editor who’s made a joke or tried to pass off North Korea news as ‘weird news’ should read this book. It’s well-researched, respectful of its subjects, and is able to convey the horrors of living somewhere like North Korea, and what it does to the psychology and physiology of a person. The accounts of life during the famine of the 90s is among the most harrowing things I’ve ever read and will stay with me for a very long time.
54. The Switch, Beth O’Leary (3/5)
I think in 2021, my tried-and-tested strategy of following up heavy reads with something light and fluffy just hasn’t been working out. Mainly because the dark stuff was too dark, and the comfort reads just weren’t comforting enough. This one especially disappointed me because The Flatshare, O’Leary’s first book, is one of the best romance novels I’ve read, and has served me well as a comfort read. Like Don’t You Forget About Me, this book isn’t really a romance novel. The premise is that a young woman burning out from her job in London will switch places with her nearly 80-year old grandmother so she can catch her breath, while grandma Eileen can experience single life in London, something she was unable to do in her twenties. Like Don’t You Forget About Me, it is also a stealth exploration of grief with the romance sidelined (and honestly it felt extraneous here), but the sad parts don’t hit as hard, and the funny parts don’t either. The best thing about this book is the way Eileen is written; I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping I turn out just like her when I’m her age. You just can’t help warming up to her. Beth O’Leary has built up massive goodwill in my book, so I will still give her next book a shot, but it hurts to be disappointed.
55. Beautiful Country: A Memoir, Qian Julie Wang (3.5/5)
It can’t have been easy to write this one. This memoir of Wang and her family’s time in the US as undocumented migrants when she was a child is deeply, and often for me uncomfortably personal. A lot of it, especially the portrayal of her parents’ dynamic with each other, felt like I was eavesdropping on family secrets that weren’t meant for me, like an invasion of their privacy. Needless to say, Wang and her family did not have a very nice or easy time in New York, and you really feel for Wang in all of this because she’s so young. Although things eventually worked out when the family became legal Canadian citizens, and Wang entered the US legally to pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer, it’s clear that some scars won’t fade away.
56. We Were Liars, E. Lockheart (1/5)
The only 1/5 book on this list and further proof, as if any was needed, that the Goodreads Choice Awards are a large-scale practical joke. Normally if a book is bad, I simply stop reading, which is why there aren’t any other books I’ve rated so low on this list. But We Were Liars has the distinction of being mercifully short and appallingly bad in an entertaining way. Some times a book is so bad, you just have to see for yourself how it ends (looking at you, Fates and Furies). I initially thought the book was an attempt at satire. If you tell me you predicted exactly how the events of “Summer 15” went down before the reveal, there’s something wrong with you. I read most of this book while in a doctor’s waiting room because of a migraine, and the plot twist made me think I was hallucinating. Having said all this, unlike the other bad/disappointing books on this list, I would actually recommend this one because it’s a laugh and it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
57. The Vegetarian, Kang Han (4.5/5)
The Vegetarian is a story told in three parts, by three different people about a woman, Yeong-hye, who decides to become a vegetarian (actually a vegan, since she refuses animal products as well, but the term is never used) and the fallout it has on her family. The book isn’t really about vegetarianism, or even strictly about the difficulties associated with making that kind of dietary change. Although Yeong-hye becomes much more detached from reality in the second and (especially) third parts, it was the first part, narrated by her husband that I found the most unsettling. At first the man seems fairly average, but as Kim Jiyoung so indubitably explained, to be average is to be a victim of misogyny or a perpetrator of it. The entitlement the family feels to force Yeong-hye to consume meat and the lengths they, and especially her husband go to to break her will are chilling. Another manifestation of this is Yeong-hye’s rape by her husband, something that happens repeatedly, that isn’t mentioned in many reviews of the novel that I read, and most depressingly, is an act that’s legal in several countries. I highly recommend it, but this one definitely isn’t for everyone.
58. Twice Shy, Sarah Hogle (4/5)
I came across this book on a LitHub article recommending books with a ‘Cottagecore’ vibe. Now, I’m no expert on cottagecore, but even I’m pretty sure this book has nothing to do with it. So I read it out of morbid fascination, having at this point, given up hope for a good comfort read, and instead simply expecting to laugh at a mediocre book. It’s fitting then, that I had a very romance novel-esqe experience of finding my one true fluffy comfort read of 2021 when I was least expecting it. What I like out of these kinds of reads is to feel engrossed, invested and comforted by the low-stakes premises that these books tend to have, and then eventually become so cringed out by the sappiness (in a good way, I promise!) that I feel ready to read something more dark again. This book did exactly that for me, and is proof that you will find the perfect romance novel for you when you least expect it.
59. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, Deborah Feldman (4/5)
I was surprised to learn about the controversy surrounding this book with regards to how authentic and autobiographical it really is, but I don’t think it’s taken away from what I got from this book, which was a look into a community you don’t often get this kind of insight into. While I don’t have any first-hand information to verify Feldman’s accounts, supplemental reading confirms that Feldman hasn’t grossly misrepresented the community. I do think however, that one drawback of this memoir being written so soon after Feldman leaving the community is that we don’t get as much insight into how her acclimatization into wider society went, which was a glaring omission considering how detailed the rest of the book was.
60. You Deserve Each Other, Sarah Hogle (4/5)
Sarah Hogle seems to be a good bet for comfort reads. Special props to this book for having a male lead who isn’t stoic and gruff and emotionless. Instead he was manic, and deranged and prissy and I loved that so much. He feels like a character from NBC’s Hannibal who’s broken out of the hypnotic stupor. The writing could be a little too flowery for my liking, but as with Twice Shy, I came away from this feeling refreshed.
61. Convenience Store Woman, Sakaya Murata (5/5)
Of all the alienated woman stories I read in 2021, this one resonated with me the most. Keiko is a woman who always had trouble fitting in as a child. When she was 18, she found part-time work as a convenience store and latched onto the employee handbook as a way to interact with people. Fast-forward to the present, and Keiko still works at the same store because her sense of self is intrinsically linked to her identity as a convenience store employee. The premise is absurdist and the prose is often humorous. The discussions of societal expectations, especially for women, and how fragile our connections to people who we are close to can be if we don’t eventually perform what is expected of us really got to me. What’s better — to sell out your sense of self to feel like you’re a part of a community, or staying true to your wants and needs even if it means being detached from the wider world? Convenience Store Woman goes with the latter, but I didn’t leave this one feeling at easy.
62. Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan (5/5) (Objective Score: 3/5)
Yes it’s pretentious. Yes, the characters are all insufferable. Yes, it’s problematic. But I still loved it. Exciting Times is at its core a love triangle story in which 22 year-old Irish Ava is caught between cold, detached Brit Julian, and warm, Hong-Kong-native-British-educated, same-aged Edith. When I went to log this in as ‘read’ on Goodreads, the flood of 1-star reviews did not surprise me at all, so let me do my best to defend it.
I think this is the best Sally Rooney novel so far. I think the comparisons between Exciting Times and Rooney’s two novels are completely justified; they both focus on the romantic travails of young people who have a melancholic emptiness in them and who insist on making things as complicated as possible. I think this is a little better because it’s funnier and I think it does a better job of explaining at least a part of why Ava does the things she does. Exciting Times worked kind of like a cipher for Sally Rooney’s work for me; I feel like I understand Normal People and Conversations With Friends better. (This is the most cringeworthy thing I’ve said all year)
It’s a lot less subtle than Rooney’s work and I like that. Characters frequently deliver book-club analyses of each other, which I found weirdly endearing even people who talk like that in real life would be insufferable. It’s very obvious that Julian and Edith present diverging and conflicting paths that Ava could take, both in romance or life. Unlike the end of Normal People, I really felt a sense of melancholy when finishing this book, because I had the sinking feeling that none of these characters were ever going to find any semblance of peace or happiness in their lives, and I’ve rarely felt so moved after reading a book.
What objectively ruined this book for me though is the way that Hong Kong is used as a setting. Ava’s work as an English teacher, which is regularly called out as neocolonial by various characters, is used to regularly point out how Irish English doesn’t count as ‘proper English’ there. There is no other intersection with the city of Hong Kong as even Edith, who is from the city is treated as an outsider to it. All the characters seem to exist in their own bubble, making it feel like the book could have been set in literally any major city in the world. This is especially glaring considering that almost no references are made to the protests in Hong Kong when you have Ava saying something vaguely socialist and pro-revolutionary every 20 pages, and you have characters self-aware enough to do literary critiques of each other. It’s truly disappointing and has been rightly called out for that. This book is trash. I’ll always love it at least a little
And that’s all of them. I’m really proud of how much I managed to read this year, and also of the relative diversity in genres. On the whole I think I’ll always be more fond of books that I have more to say, even if they are flawed, than books that are good but don’t leave much of an impression. I am probably still going to read a few more books before the end of the year, and I may do a piece like this for all the books too awful for me to finish (and there are quite a few of those). Watch this space.
