My 35 favorite books of 2021 (so far)

A mid-year check in!

We’re 50% of the way through 2021, so time for a quick roundup.

Here are some of the best books I’ve read this year (most of which came out this year, probably?), in alphabetical order.

Fiction

Black Buck - Mateo Askaripour - very funny/dark satire about ~corporate diversity~ centered around a Black man who reinvents himself as a salesman

The Girl With Stars in Her Eyes - Xio Axelrod - slightly hot romance about a badass guitar player who ends up in a band managed by her childhood love

Yolk - Mary HK Choi - two sisters in NY living wildly different lives barely overlap until the elder one gets cancer

What’s Mine and Yours - Naima Coster - integrated bussing in a NC town causes two families to overlap and sets off intergenerational drama/trauma

The Intimacy Experiment - Rosie Danan - a former sex worker-turned-entrepreneur gets hired to teach adult ed at a failing synagogue & falls in love with the hot rabbi. Warning: very hot!

Infinite Country - Patricia Engel - a beautifully told story of how a family got split apart by U.S. immigration (with a dash of coming-of-age)

The Four Winds - Kristin Hannah - a woman and her kids have to cross the United States through the dustbowl, end up in CA, and get involved in union organizing

The Wife Upstairs - Rachel Hawkins - a very spooky modern take on Jane Eyre

People We Meet on Vacation - Emily Henry - sweet romance inspired by When Harry Met Sally with a dash of wanderlust

The Soulmate Equation - Christina Lauren - an analytics-nerd-single-mom gets suckered into using a DNA-testing dating app, then told she’s a perfect match with the app’s founder

No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood - like injecting a novel of Twitter into your brain but fun/thought-provoking instead of painful

Too Good to Be True - Carola Lovering - three narrators: Skye, Burke, and Burke’s other wife that Skye doesn’t know about :eyes:

God Spare the Girls - Kelsey McKinney - the daughters of a mega-church pastor figure out who they are and what they have faith in after it turns out their father cheated on his wife

One Last Stop - Casey McQuiston - a cynic falls in love with a girl she meets on the Q train, which gets complicated when it turns out said girl is from the 70s and quite literally stuck on the Q train

Outlawed - Anna North - a gender-bendy western about an all-girl/non-binary/gender-queer gang of outlaws

Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters - a beautiful dissection of gender and love and relationships; just trust me

Malibu Rising - Taylor Jenkins Reid - the four kids of a mega-celebrity throw a house party and burn the place down; how did it get like this!?

What Could Be Saved - Liese O’Hallaran Schwarz - alternating timelines between 2019, when a woman goes Thailand to find the brother she thought she’d lost forever and 1972, when said family moved to Thailand in the first place

The Ex Talk - Rachel Lynn Solomon - an aspiring radio host gets her professional dream come true with a twist- she has to fake being exes with her arch-nemesis

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev - Dawnie Walton - a sort-of-oral history of a (fictional) Afropunk star in the 70s and her complicated legacy, as told to the (fictional) journalist who’s father cheater on her mother with aforementioned star

Imposter Syndrome - Kathy Wang - what if Sheryl Sandberg was a Russian spy?!?!?

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir - an astronaut wakes up on a space ship with no memory of how he got there but quickly realizes he’s the last hope for saving Earth

Revival Season - Monica West - the daughter of a famous Southern Baptist preacher sees her dad getting violent, questions her faith, and realizes she herself has healing power

Seven Days in June - Tia Williams - a bestselling romance writer and a reclusive literary darling secretly knew and loved each other as wild teens; they reconnect for a week as adults

The Fourth Child - Jessica Winter - a messy-and-beautiful story on Catholicism, abortion, adoption, parenthood, and marriage

Instructions for Dancing - Nicola Yoon - a teenage girl stops believing in love and then starts seeing visions of how romances start & end when she sees couples kiss (and also falls in love herself) - the premise is silly but it’s great

Non-fiction

Turning Pointe - Chloe Angyal - how ballet is broken and probably can’t save itself

The Secret to Superhuman Strength - Alison Bechdel - a graphic memoir of her life through fitness (with a dash of philosophical existential crises)

Somebody’s Daughter - Ashley C. Ford - beautifully written about growing up in the midwest, poverty, sexual abuse, living without a father who’s incarcerated, and discovering why he was incarcerated

Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong - an exploration of Asian American identity through a mix of cultural criticism and personal memoir

Between Two Kingdoms - Suleika Jaouad - one part cancer memoir, one part post-cancer survival road trip memoir

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us - Mariame Kaba - the quintessential text on abolitionism

Empire of Pain - Patrick Radden Keefe - an absolutely enthralling biography of the Sackler family and how they perpetuated the opioid epidemic

Cultish - Amanda Montell - how cults and religions and influencers and fitness companies and politicians all use language to bring people in and keep them in

Thanks for Waiting - Doree Shafrir - a funny & vulnerable memoir of finding yourself later in life

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For an exhaustive full reading list, check out the spreadsheet. If this was forwarded to you, sign up! Maybe I’ll send an email more than once a month? TBD.