The 100 Books I Read in 2021
You heard it here first, but I think books are going to be big.
In January 2021, faced with a(nother) lockdown in London, and a good bout of the existential dread/depression/ennui/anxiety that comes with that, I picked up a hobby I hadn’t touched in years: reading.
I’d gone from reading hungrily as a child (and writing, too — I once sent a manuscript to publishers around the age of 12) to reading less than a handful of books a year, all of which would be business or self help books.
But as I ticked off the first book (on my iPad — my postcode was in a particularly bad Royal Mail black hole, so ordering books online would be fruitless for a good few weeks), I remember feeling a sense of relief, of homecoming. Over the last decade, on the few occasions that I’d attempted fiction, it had been largely an act of forcing myself. But this time round, I’d regained that magical ability to fully succumb to a different world, to immerse myself in the fictional narrative in the same way I had with the bathwater in which I read a lot of them.
For VORACIOUS last year, I interviewed the brilliant Elisa Sunga, the patron saint of projectification. One of her many brilliant projects was Library, where she ran the numbers on the words she’d read in the year previous. Full of beginner’s bravado, I thought I’d do the same! But, as it turns out, I couldn’t get anywhere near the level of analysis she managed. So instead, to accompany the list of titles — finally put together in a format that’s not an instagram highlight! — here’s some very rudimentary facts about my 100 Books in 2021.
Some book stats
73% fiction, 27% non fiction
11% memoir/biography (by which I mean — a non-fiction book that wasn’t entirely instructional, aka had elements of storytelling too)
The shortest book I read was 80 pages (Whites, by Otegha Uwagba); the longest was 736 (Free Food For Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee)
The average book length I read was 270 pages
I kept track of them on Goodreads, which informed me that my most popular book on the list was Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, which had been shelved by 1,851,079 people. The least popular was On Hampstead Heath by Marika Cobbold, which had been shelved by 338 people
Where they came from
3% were Advanced Reader Copies from Netgalley, in exchange for unbiased reviews
53% were bought (from indie retailers)
5% were via the Bookbar Bookclub
2% were from friends (or, as I like to call them, ‘enablers’)
8% were read on my iPad
29% were borrowed from my local library (if you’re not signed up to yours, get on it!)
And now, my 100 books in 2021
a note: I have stewed over which were my favourites for ages now, but I can’t decide on a final selection so I’m simply refusing! The majority of these I enjoyed; some I absolutely ADORED, some I wouldn’t recommend. Does that help? I’ve put asterisks on the ones that I keep thinking about, but that’s not to say the un-asterisked ones weren’t incredible too. It just means I’m fickle and forgetful.
Also, I’ve compiled them all into a list on bookshop.org if you fancy buying them for yourself (and earning me some kickback in the process, thank ya very kindly #afflinks. Alternatively, head here to see some other places you could buy them)
This Time Next Year - Sophie Cousens
In Five Years - Rebecca Serle
Year of Yes - Shonda Rhimes
City of Girls* - Elizabeth Gilbert
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo* - Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
So We Can Glow: Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith
The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin
If I Don't Have You (Twenty in 2020)* - Sareeta Domingo
How To Break Up With Fast Fashion* - Lauren Bravo
Dominicana - Angie Cruz
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
Adventures in Opting Out: A Field Guide to Leading an Intentional Life - Cait Flanders
Love and Other Thought Experiments - Sophie Ward
The Sun Is Also a Star* - Nicola Yoon
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)* - Robin Sloan
Writers & Lovers - Lily King
Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1) - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another (MAD Dispatches, Volume 1) - Chris Ying
Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson
Who’s Loving You - Sareeta Domingo
Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them - Edan Lepucki
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot - Marianne Cronin
Insatiable* - Daisy Buchanan
His Only Wife - Peace Adzo Medie
The Tenth Muse - Catherine Chung
The Mothers* - Brit Bennett
Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
Detransition, Baby* - Torrey Peters
All Adults Here - Emma Straub
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Hungry Hearts: Essays on Courage, Desire, and Belonging - Jennifer Rudolph Walsh
Hungry, the Stars and Everything* - Emma Jane Unsworth
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters - Priya Parker
Last Night at the Telegraph Club* - Malinda Lo
The Vanishing Half* - Brit Bennett
My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite
Pizza Girl - Jean Kyoung Frazier
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power* - Deirdre Mask
Sex and Vanity - Kevin Kwan
Memorial - Bryan Washington
You Exist Too Much - Zaina Arafat
Supper Club - Lara Williams
Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Cherry Robbers - Sarai Walker
Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher
Rodham* - Curtis Sittenfeld
Another Brooklyn - Jacqueline Woodson
A Love Story for Bewildered Girls - Emma Morgan
We Need to Talk About Money* - Otegha Uwagba
Pride* - Ibi Zoboi
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande
Homegoing* - Yaa Gyasi
Scenes of a Graphic Nature* - Caroline O'Donoghue
The End of Bias: A Beginning - Jessica Nordell
Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould
America Is Not the Heart* - Elaine Castillo
Malibu Rising - Taylor Jenkins Reid
You Think It, I'll Say It - Curtis Sittenfeld
The Hungover Games: A True Story* - Sophie Heawood
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World - Elif Shafak
The Liar's Dictionary - Eley Williams
What's Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing* - Merve Emre
Instructions for Dancing - Nicola Yoon
Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi
Ghosts - Dolly Alderton
Free Food for Millionaires* - Min Jin Lee
The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
Heatstroke - Hazel Barkworth
The Wife - Meg Wolitzer
How to be Famous (How to Build a Girl, #2) - Caitlin Moran
Taste: My Life Through Food - Stanley Tucci
Honey Girl - Morgan Rogers
Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai - Nina Mingya Powles
American Spy* - Lauren Wilkinson
A Kind of Spark* - Elle McNicoll
The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free* - Paulina Bren
Women - Chloe Caldwell
On Hampstead Heath - Marika Cobbold
The Good Ally* - Nova Reid
The Magnificent Sons - Justin Myers
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love* - Valarie Kaur
An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional* - Rainesford Stauffer (read more here)
Hot Stew* - Fiona Mozley
It Ends with Us - Colleen Hoover
Swan Song* - Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
Nothing Can Hurt You - Nicola Maye Goldberg
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges - Nathan Englander
The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice* - Shon Faye
Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods - Otegha Uwagba
Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid
Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits - Raven Smith
The World I Fell Out Of - Melanie Reid
Bonjour tristesse - Françoise Sagan
84, Charing Cross Road* - Helene Hanff
Ghachar Ghochar - Vivek Shanbhag
Evidence of The Affair - Taylor Jenkins-Reid
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
Also, final caveat should go to the fact that this photo is by Анна Галашева from Pexels. To claim that my reading escapades this year were this aesthetic would be a bold-faced lie — it was mostly spent under my anxiety blanket