The best books I read in 2021
Dec. 31st, 2021 02:53 pmI read 240 books in 2021, which is not quite one and a half times as many as I read last year. I managed to read so much because I'm a fast reader, I gave up on doing anything but read this year, I read a lot of fast-read romance novels, and I read significantly less fan fiction than usual. Only ten of those are books I reread (two of them for book club reasons), which continues the trend of the last few years of reading more new books. The large number of books I read this year again made it difficult to narrow down a small number of the best ones, which is why this is a long list. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.
Top 10 fiction books/series I read for the first time in 2021
Note: I made a choice to take a handful of things I greatly enjoyed out of this list because they were written by people in the later section of authors I read most, so you can look there for more recommendations of things I particularly loved.
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave - I found this in a thriller/suspense category of the library's ebook selection, but I would call it more of a family mystery/drama. I thought it was really well written, and it has one of the best last lines I've ever read in a book, in that it's an understated line that also sums up the entire theme of the book.
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson - You can travel to any of the parallel worlds close enough to reach only if your counterpart there is already dead. Cara can travel to all but eight. This was a fascinating premise and a good story, and the only thing I was disappointed about was that I read it on my own because it would have made for some really interesting discussion with my sci fi book club.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell - Super tropey and super enjoyable m/m space romance. It does a particularly good job with having the key relationship conflict be well done/non-annoying miscommunication where both of them think in truly good faith that they are communicating and understanding clearly. In terms of the non-romance elements of the plot, the if you like you'll likes for this are Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Content notes from the author.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern - This is such a good fairy tale-ish book about the nature of stories. Last year a friend said it paired well with The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which my book club read last year, and it was interesting to think about that as I read it. This was a fairly polarizing book for my sci fi/fantasy book club - people either really liked it or really didn't.
Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This is an amazing slow burn enemies to lovers m/m romance trilogy set in an Ancient Greece-ish world. (While not an entirely accurate comparison, think Queen's Thief but make it gay.) There were something like six places where I thought, "This is where they have sex, right?" before they finally did, and I deeply enjoyed the slow burn of it all. The writing is excellent, and the friend who recommended it to me and I had an entire phone conversation where we just exclaimed back and forth about our favorite parts. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - I knew the instant I finished this book that it was going on this list, and in the months since then I still haven't figured out how to describe it in a sentence or two. It's a literary masterpiece without being pretentious. It does actually live up to its hype. If it sounds at all interesting to you, it is absolutely worth reading. The only disappointment is that it's the author's first book so I couldn't immediately go read everything else she's ever written.
Barbed Wire Heart by Tess Sharpe - In some ways The Girls I've Been, which I also read and enjoyed this year, is the better book, but this is the one that stuck with me more. Harley McKenna's father Duke runs a significant portion of the criminal underworld in North County (a fictionalized Del Norte County). There are rumblings of the power shifting and it's time for Harley to execute her plans to take down her rivals - those inside her father's organization as well as the ones outside. This is a very intense book that involves a lot of scheming, plotting, and violence. Content notes from the author.
An Ember in the Ashes series (An Ember in the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm) by Sabaa Tahir - This was an enjoyable and deeply satisfying fantasy series. It's a fairly standard high fantasy story, so if you like those at all, you will probably like this. Instead of a fictional Europe, it's set in more of a fictional Middle East setting (the author is Pakistani-American). It's apparently technically a YA series, which surprises me because it read much more like books for adults. Content notes for all kinds of war and death.
Magic in Manhattan trilogy (Spellbound, Starcrossed, and Wonderstruck) by Allie Therin - I read a handful of m/m romance series this year that were at heart basically the same story, and this was one of the most enjoyable ones. Two men, one with magic, one who protects the world from dangerous magic, work together to save the world and also fall in love. It takes place in New York City in 1925, so there are also speakeasies and bootleggers and it's all around a good time. It's not an exact analog, but I would be 0% surprised if this started life as Merlin fanfic. Content note: explicit sex scenes.
And Then There Were Four by Nancy Werlin - This is an excellent YA thriller. If you've ever read The Grounding of Group 6 (if you haven't, don't), this is basically that but much better written, modern, and in an urban setting. Five teenagers - and then four - find themselves in danger and come to realize that their parents are trying to kill them. There's a good mix of diverse characters, including some queer characters and a character with chronic health problems who both uses a cane and has to figure out what to do about her meds while they're on the run. This is another book I knew was going on this list as soon as I finished reading it.
Top 7 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2021
Family Man by Heidi Cullinan and Marie Sexton - This m/m romance novel is not what I would call a particularly good book; however something about the emotional journey of it stuck with me. I just really enjoyed Vinnie.
Mother May I by Joshilyn Jackson - I read this because I loved Joshilyn Jackson's previous suburban housewife thriller. This one is still fairly well written, but I had a much harder time with the suspension of disbelief required for the plot, and I wasn't sure how I felt about how one of the things at the end comes about. However, she was clearly wrestling with an interesting idea and I've thought about it off and on since I read it. Content notes: an infant in danger, discussion of past sexual assault.
When All the Girls Have Gone by Jayne Ann Krentz - Jayne Ann Krentz's books are bad as romance novels and mediocre as suspense novels and I don't recommend them unless, like me, you sometimes need a palate-cleansing mediocre suspense novel. I keep thinking about this one, though, because of one of the side characters. One half of the couple in this book is an activities director at a retirement home who runs an activity for people to write their memoirs. One of the women in the group starts with a chapter about her pillar of the community husband, and then ends the chapter saying that she murdered him. The main character tries to tell her that although embellishing might make the story more interesting, this is something their children will read and they should write the truth. Later, she runs into the older woman's adult children and forewarns them about this element of their mother's memoir. The children ask her if she says how she did it because they always wondered; their father was abusive and they were pretty sure their mother killed him. That scene was hilarious for the way it contradicted the character's expectations, and I keep thinking about it.
Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty - This was a very strange book. I don't know if I think it was good, but the oddness of it definitely stuck with me.
Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty - In some ways, this is fairly standard for a Liane Moriarty book. I think what made me keep thinking about it was the excellent, and frequently funny, use of outsider points of view.
Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah - This is set in a dystopian city where women are required to take multiple husbands and have as many children as possible. The book is about women who live outside the system and provide intimacy without sex - for a price. It's an interesting premise, and I thought a lot about the implications of the ending. Content notes for all the kinds of things this variety of dystopia implies.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead - A friend recommended this to me in an email thread where we were talking about thrillers and mysteries, which is probably why I had no idea what the explanation for the mysterious things was until it's revealed in the book. I later heard someone else recommend it by noting what the explanation is as part of the what the book is about, and I might have had a different reaction to the book if I'd known what that was. This book feels more middle grade than YA, and it has a lot of short chapters, which is probably what kept me reading even when I wasn't sure if I liked it. I'm still not sure I liked it, but I have kept thinking about it.
Top 2 non-fiction books I read in 2021
The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jen Gunter - This is on this list, in part, by comparison; I read two books about menopause this year and found the other one greatly annoying. This is a straightforward walk through both the science and the history of the cultural meaning of menopause by a gynecologist who is herself going through her menopause transition. I like that her entire project is to provide accurate medical information and that this book really tackles the patriarchal/cultural reasons why we might not have/get accurate information. There are two strong caveats about this book: 1. Skip the weight section. She does a good job of decrying the medical practices of refusing to treat fat people and suggesting weight loss instead of addressing patients' actual issues earlier in the book, but this section is not good. I don't think she's skeptical enough about weight and nutrition science (which is, after all, both deeply complicated and frequently conducted through a lens of anti-fat bias). She also clearly has some disordered eating practices that she feels totally comfortable just putting out there as healthier than they used to be. 2. It takes her until almost the end of the introduction to note that the book primarily applies to cis women because the only science we have about menopause at this point is about cis women. If you are a person with a uterus who is trans/nonbinary and/or taking testosterone, this book may not be affirming and/or helpful to you.
The Path of Blessing by Rabbi Marcia Prager - I read this for a class led by my congregation's cantor. I both learned a lot and found it thought-provoking. I appreciated the way it led our class to talk a lot about gender, and especially appreciated that our cantor specifically pointed out that the book is from the 90s and we have a more expansive idea of gender now. This may not be interesting to you if you're not Jewish.
The 4 authors I read the most in 2021
All four of these authors write primarily or exclusively queer romance novels. (I told you I read a lot of romance novels this year.) This whole section has a blanket content note for explicit sex scenes.
Annabeth Albert - I read two of her series in full and some other miscellaneous books for a total of thirteen of her books. I particularly enjoyed the Out of Uniform series, which has a good mix of tropes, although you do have to be in the mood for "the military is good actually" attitudes to read them. The order of her books doesn't really matter, although Tight Quarters does make more sense if you've already read Wheels Up.
KJ Charles - I read seventeen of her books, one a novella co-written by Jordan L. Hawk. That's more than I would have guessed off the top of my head. I greatly enjoy KJ Charles; however, her books have a higher percentage of plot than I'm sometimes looking for when I want to read a romance novel, and I had the feeling I'd read them fairly haphazardly based only on what library ebooks were available. She's written a variety of kinds of books - mysteries, magic, country house parties - so there is probably something you will like if you're interested. My favorites were probably Any Old Diamonds, A Seditious Affair, and Band Sinister. Content notes for the first two of those for kink.
Jordan L. Hawk - I read my way through the Whyborne & Griffin series for a total of fifteen novels and novellas, one co-written by KJ Charles, in one long rush of needing to know what happened next. I really enjoyed it as a story that had an appropriate ongoing raising of the stakes (I recommend not reading about later books until you get there so you're not spoiled for the escalations), a really solid relationship, some very funny bits about how Widdershins is totally a normal place really, and a woman archeologist who is completely delightful.
Cat Sebastian - I read fourteen of Cat Sebastian's books this year, and the only reason I didn't read more is that she hasn't published more yet. The logo on her website says both "fall in love" and "eat the rich," which is a good summation of the values of her novels. I love that all of her books are about queer characters - even in the m/f books, at least one half of the couple is bi. I don't know why, but A Gentleman Never Keeps Score is the one I liked most (I read it more than once). A Delicate Deception was enjoyable for both the unconventional elements of the endings and a hilarious bit about one character's mother. I also found The Queer Principles of Kit Webb especially fun and charming.
Top 10 fiction books/series I read for the first time in 2021
Note: I made a choice to take a handful of things I greatly enjoyed out of this list because they were written by people in the later section of authors I read most, so you can look there for more recommendations of things I particularly loved.
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave - I found this in a thriller/suspense category of the library's ebook selection, but I would call it more of a family mystery/drama. I thought it was really well written, and it has one of the best last lines I've ever read in a book, in that it's an understated line that also sums up the entire theme of the book.
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson - You can travel to any of the parallel worlds close enough to reach only if your counterpart there is already dead. Cara can travel to all but eight. This was a fascinating premise and a good story, and the only thing I was disappointed about was that I read it on my own because it would have made for some really interesting discussion with my sci fi book club.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell - Super tropey and super enjoyable m/m space romance. It does a particularly good job with having the key relationship conflict be well done/non-annoying miscommunication where both of them think in truly good faith that they are communicating and understanding clearly. In terms of the non-romance elements of the plot, the if you like you'll likes for this are Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Content notes from the author.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern - This is such a good fairy tale-ish book about the nature of stories. Last year a friend said it paired well with The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which my book club read last year, and it was interesting to think about that as I read it. This was a fairly polarizing book for my sci fi/fantasy book club - people either really liked it or really didn't.
Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This is an amazing slow burn enemies to lovers m/m romance trilogy set in an Ancient Greece-ish world. (While not an entirely accurate comparison, think Queen's Thief but make it gay.) There were something like six places where I thought, "This is where they have sex, right?" before they finally did, and I deeply enjoyed the slow burn of it all. The writing is excellent, and the friend who recommended it to me and I had an entire phone conversation where we just exclaimed back and forth about our favorite parts. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - I knew the instant I finished this book that it was going on this list, and in the months since then I still haven't figured out how to describe it in a sentence or two. It's a literary masterpiece without being pretentious. It does actually live up to its hype. If it sounds at all interesting to you, it is absolutely worth reading. The only disappointment is that it's the author's first book so I couldn't immediately go read everything else she's ever written.
Barbed Wire Heart by Tess Sharpe - In some ways The Girls I've Been, which I also read and enjoyed this year, is the better book, but this is the one that stuck with me more. Harley McKenna's father Duke runs a significant portion of the criminal underworld in North County (a fictionalized Del Norte County). There are rumblings of the power shifting and it's time for Harley to execute her plans to take down her rivals - those inside her father's organization as well as the ones outside. This is a very intense book that involves a lot of scheming, plotting, and violence. Content notes from the author.
An Ember in the Ashes series (An Ember in the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm) by Sabaa Tahir - This was an enjoyable and deeply satisfying fantasy series. It's a fairly standard high fantasy story, so if you like those at all, you will probably like this. Instead of a fictional Europe, it's set in more of a fictional Middle East setting (the author is Pakistani-American). It's apparently technically a YA series, which surprises me because it read much more like books for adults. Content notes for all kinds of war and death.
Magic in Manhattan trilogy (Spellbound, Starcrossed, and Wonderstruck) by Allie Therin - I read a handful of m/m romance series this year that were at heart basically the same story, and this was one of the most enjoyable ones. Two men, one with magic, one who protects the world from dangerous magic, work together to save the world and also fall in love. It takes place in New York City in 1925, so there are also speakeasies and bootleggers and it's all around a good time. It's not an exact analog, but I would be 0% surprised if this started life as Merlin fanfic. Content note: explicit sex scenes.
And Then There Were Four by Nancy Werlin - This is an excellent YA thriller. If you've ever read The Grounding of Group 6 (if you haven't, don't), this is basically that but much better written, modern, and in an urban setting. Five teenagers - and then four - find themselves in danger and come to realize that their parents are trying to kill them. There's a good mix of diverse characters, including some queer characters and a character with chronic health problems who both uses a cane and has to figure out what to do about her meds while they're on the run. This is another book I knew was going on this list as soon as I finished reading it.
Top 7 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2021
Family Man by Heidi Cullinan and Marie Sexton - This m/m romance novel is not what I would call a particularly good book; however something about the emotional journey of it stuck with me. I just really enjoyed Vinnie.
Mother May I by Joshilyn Jackson - I read this because I loved Joshilyn Jackson's previous suburban housewife thriller. This one is still fairly well written, but I had a much harder time with the suspension of disbelief required for the plot, and I wasn't sure how I felt about how one of the things at the end comes about. However, she was clearly wrestling with an interesting idea and I've thought about it off and on since I read it. Content notes: an infant in danger, discussion of past sexual assault.
When All the Girls Have Gone by Jayne Ann Krentz - Jayne Ann Krentz's books are bad as romance novels and mediocre as suspense novels and I don't recommend them unless, like me, you sometimes need a palate-cleansing mediocre suspense novel. I keep thinking about this one, though, because of one of the side characters. One half of the couple in this book is an activities director at a retirement home who runs an activity for people to write their memoirs. One of the women in the group starts with a chapter about her pillar of the community husband, and then ends the chapter saying that she murdered him. The main character tries to tell her that although embellishing might make the story more interesting, this is something their children will read and they should write the truth. Later, she runs into the older woman's adult children and forewarns them about this element of their mother's memoir. The children ask her if she says how she did it because they always wondered; their father was abusive and they were pretty sure their mother killed him. That scene was hilarious for the way it contradicted the character's expectations, and I keep thinking about it.
Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty - This was a very strange book. I don't know if I think it was good, but the oddness of it definitely stuck with me.
Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty - In some ways, this is fairly standard for a Liane Moriarty book. I think what made me keep thinking about it was the excellent, and frequently funny, use of outsider points of view.
Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah - This is set in a dystopian city where women are required to take multiple husbands and have as many children as possible. The book is about women who live outside the system and provide intimacy without sex - for a price. It's an interesting premise, and I thought a lot about the implications of the ending. Content notes for all the kinds of things this variety of dystopia implies.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead - A friend recommended this to me in an email thread where we were talking about thrillers and mysteries, which is probably why I had no idea what the explanation for the mysterious things was until it's revealed in the book. I later heard someone else recommend it by noting what the explanation is as part of the what the book is about, and I might have had a different reaction to the book if I'd known what that was. This book feels more middle grade than YA, and it has a lot of short chapters, which is probably what kept me reading even when I wasn't sure if I liked it. I'm still not sure I liked it, but I have kept thinking about it.
Top 2 non-fiction books I read in 2021
The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jen Gunter - This is on this list, in part, by comparison; I read two books about menopause this year and found the other one greatly annoying. This is a straightforward walk through both the science and the history of the cultural meaning of menopause by a gynecologist who is herself going through her menopause transition. I like that her entire project is to provide accurate medical information and that this book really tackles the patriarchal/cultural reasons why we might not have/get accurate information. There are two strong caveats about this book: 1. Skip the weight section. She does a good job of decrying the medical practices of refusing to treat fat people and suggesting weight loss instead of addressing patients' actual issues earlier in the book, but this section is not good. I don't think she's skeptical enough about weight and nutrition science (which is, after all, both deeply complicated and frequently conducted through a lens of anti-fat bias). She also clearly has some disordered eating practices that she feels totally comfortable just putting out there as healthier than they used to be. 2. It takes her until almost the end of the introduction to note that the book primarily applies to cis women because the only science we have about menopause at this point is about cis women. If you are a person with a uterus who is trans/nonbinary and/or taking testosterone, this book may not be affirming and/or helpful to you.
The Path of Blessing by Rabbi Marcia Prager - I read this for a class led by my congregation's cantor. I both learned a lot and found it thought-provoking. I appreciated the way it led our class to talk a lot about gender, and especially appreciated that our cantor specifically pointed out that the book is from the 90s and we have a more expansive idea of gender now. This may not be interesting to you if you're not Jewish.
The 4 authors I read the most in 2021
All four of these authors write primarily or exclusively queer romance novels. (I told you I read a lot of romance novels this year.) This whole section has a blanket content note for explicit sex scenes.
Annabeth Albert - I read two of her series in full and some other miscellaneous books for a total of thirteen of her books. I particularly enjoyed the Out of Uniform series, which has a good mix of tropes, although you do have to be in the mood for "the military is good actually" attitudes to read them. The order of her books doesn't really matter, although Tight Quarters does make more sense if you've already read Wheels Up.
KJ Charles - I read seventeen of her books, one a novella co-written by Jordan L. Hawk. That's more than I would have guessed off the top of my head. I greatly enjoy KJ Charles; however, her books have a higher percentage of plot than I'm sometimes looking for when I want to read a romance novel, and I had the feeling I'd read them fairly haphazardly based only on what library ebooks were available. She's written a variety of kinds of books - mysteries, magic, country house parties - so there is probably something you will like if you're interested. My favorites were probably Any Old Diamonds, A Seditious Affair, and Band Sinister. Content notes for the first two of those for kink.
Jordan L. Hawk - I read my way through the Whyborne & Griffin series for a total of fifteen novels and novellas, one co-written by KJ Charles, in one long rush of needing to know what happened next. I really enjoyed it as a story that had an appropriate ongoing raising of the stakes (I recommend not reading about later books until you get there so you're not spoiled for the escalations), a really solid relationship, some very funny bits about how Widdershins is totally a normal place really, and a woman archeologist who is completely delightful.
Cat Sebastian - I read fourteen of Cat Sebastian's books this year, and the only reason I didn't read more is that she hasn't published more yet. The logo on her website says both "fall in love" and "eat the rich," which is a good summation of the values of her novels. I love that all of her books are about queer characters - even in the m/f books, at least one half of the couple is bi. I don't know why, but A Gentleman Never Keeps Score is the one I liked most (I read it more than once). A Delicate Deception was enjoyable for both the unconventional elements of the endings and a hilarious bit about one character's mother. I also found The Queer Principles of Kit Webb especially fun and charming.