The Best Books I Read in 2021

I used to read a couple of books a week, which meant that over a year I would read around 100 books. It was easy. If I had to commute to work it would be on public transport giving me a couple of hours of reading time each day. My free time was spent reading. When I was travelling long-term I’d have days at a time where I’d be sitting on a bus, plane or train or hanging around waiting to get on a bus, plane or train. All extra reading time.

I thought it was normal to get through that many books a year. Then my lifestyle changed. I wasn’t travelling so much. When I was commuting I’d be driving. Now I mostly work at home. My free time is taken up with reading blogs, scrolling through social media and watching Netflix. My reading rate dropped to between 30 and 40 books a year. I’ve not been happy with this. I’m not so bothered about hitting targets as being frustrated that I have so many books to read and even if I live to be 500, I won’t get through them all.

This year, I decided to try to remedy it. I decided I was going to aim to read 100 books. I finished book 100 on New Year’s Eve.

I’ve read some very short books but I’ve also read some really chunky tomes. I’ve read a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, discovered new authors and caught up with old favourites. I’ve been reading physical books as well as books on my Kindle and books I’ve borrowed from the library on my tablet. Best of all though? I’ve read some amazing books. Books I might not have got round to if I hadn’t aimed so high.

When I look back over the list of books I read in 2021 I get a real feeling of pleasure remembering the ones I most enjoyed. And so I’d like to share some of them with you.

These are my favourite 15 from the 100 books I read this year.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

This is a book about trees. At least that’s the theme running throughout. The book is divided into sections with titles like ‘roots’ and ‘branches’. The first section seems like a series of short stories. The characters are all very different and the only thing they have in common is something to do with a tree. As the book continues the characters start to come together and the short stories become a novel. The lives of the characters (both human and tree) are explored over decades (and generations) and the trees live and die, people become environmentalists, big corporations fight the environmentalists. And depressingly the big corporations often win.

I’m still thinking about this book several months after finishing it. It’s not just a good story that you enjoy and then forget about, but one of those books that seeps into your insides and leaves an almost physical impact.

(493 pages)

Autumn by Ali Smith

This is the first in a quartet with each book given the name of a season. It starts quite strangely with a man on a beach, not knowing how he got there, realising he is naked and running to hide in trees when he sees people coming. The story then switches to a young woman getting frustrated in a post office (I could so relate!) The story becomes one of an unlikely friendship. As it develops we learn that the man was already elderly when he moved in next door to the woman (who was a child at the time) and her mother. We follow them throughout the next 20 plus years until the man is 99 and the woman is 32. Then it becomes clear who the man on the beach is and why he is there. The ‘in the present’ part of the story is set in the weeks following Brexit and has a state of the nation theme running alongside the relationship story.

It’s the first Ali Smith book I’ve read. I’m hoping to read the rest of the quartet this year and I’m interested to find out if each book is a standalone story with just a common theme or if the original story continues.

(243 pages)

The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters

Ever been in two minds about something? Ever really wanted to get on and do something but couldn’t find the motivation to get started? It’s because you have two brains – one human and one chimp. Your human brain is the rational, motivated one and your chimp brain is the chaotic, procrastinating one. Reading this book I felt things suddenly made sense for me. Fortunately the author doesn’t just explain things but gives plenty of ideas about what you can do to get your chimp under control.

If you’re a really organised, calm, do things straight away type of person you probably don’t need to read this book as you’ve already got your chimp under control. But if you’re like me and procrastinate and put things off or if you’re the type of person who loses control easily then this should be a must-read.

(368 pages)

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

What would Hillary Rodham’s life have been like if she’d never married Bill? This is the fictional account of ‘that’ Hillary’s life. The story weaves real events in with the fiction and I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t a real autobiography. There are a few strange twists one of which involves Trump (spoiler alert: no she doesn’t marry him instead).

(426 pages)

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Wow! was my feeling when I finished this book. It’s a saga that covers four generations over a period of about 80 years. It starts in a small Korean fishing village and then moves to Japan for the bulk of the story. I knew nothing about the Koreans living in Japan before reading this book. Japan is hostile to the Korean immigrants and they face many difficulties though they do have successes as well. The title refers to the Korean pinball game of the same name that was popular in Japan. Pachinko parlours tended to be run by Koreans and that was one area where they could do well for themselves in Japan.

This book told a captivating story as well as teaching me about a part of culture and history I knew nothing about.

(461 pages)

The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

Do you ever think what it would be like to not have an address? The difficulties you would face? I’ve heard it said that being addressless is worse than being homeless. You can be homeless but still have a place to stay and even if you don’t, so long as you have an address you can use, you have a chance to change your situation. If you’re addressless then it can be almost impossible to pull yourself up as you usually need to already have an address to get a home as well as a job, car, bank account, to vote and well, just about anything really.

In this book Deirdre Mask, an American academic, looks at how addresses came about in different countries and at different times, the politics surrounding addresses and the difficulties faced by people living without addresses in the modern world even if they have homes. Each chapter covers a different theme and a different part of the world. It’s fascinating. I read this on my library app, but it’s a book I’d like to have on my shelves so I could dip into again in the future.

(336 pages)

All That Remains by Sue Black

Sue Black is an anatomist and forensic anthropologist. In this book she explains what happens to our bodies after death. Gruesome? Ok, it is a little, but it’s also very, very fascinating. She talks about the procedure for donating your body to science and what happens when the lab receives a new body. She goes on to explain how each part of our anatomy gives clues to how a person lived, what they looked like and how they died. She uses examples of real cases to illustrate her points. The book is also autobiographical and she talks about her work as the lead anthropologist with the British Forensic Team investigating war crimes in Kosovo as well as her work in Thailand following the tsunami.

I enjoyed this book so much I also read the sequel, Written in Bone, this year too.

(368 pages)

Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo

This is a novel about slavery. In it slavery happens just the way it actually did, with raids to capture people to use as slaves, slave ships, slave auctions, cruel slave masters, pampered ladies of the house and all the other horrible stuff you already know about slavery and the slave trade. Buuut … it’s been flipped. In Evaristo’s book the black people are the slave traders and masters and the white people are the slaves. It’s as horrific as any book about slavery but is also thought provoking. So many what ifs.

I’ve been told that the premise is similar to that in Malorie Blackman’s books so I’ll have to give them a try in 2022.

(272 pages)

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

This is a fairly predictable horror story but there’s a twist. Instead of a haunted house, the story is set in what is obviously meant to be Ikea. The names of the products are reminiscent of the names used by Ikea. The store is a maze which consumers flock to. The cover of the book is designed to look like an Ikea catalogue. Even the inside of the book is like the Ikea catalogue with pictures and blurb you’d expect to see in a catalogue set between the sections of story text. It’s not just a horror story but a satire on consumerism and how some of these big companies can be almost like cults in the way they build this whole happy, smiley world around their ultimate aim of world domination and getting as much money out of people as possible along the way.

It’s not the sort of book I would usually choose and it was the satire aspect that attracted me more than the horror story, but now I’ve read it I’d like to read more by this author.

(256 pages)

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

I’m late to the party on this one. So many people have recommended it to me over the past couple of years, I really don’t know why it took me so long to get round to reading it. It’s basically the entire history of humankind condensed into less than 500 pages (there’s a big index which takes up a lot of pages). Of course with so much crammed into so few pages there’s no room for in-depth discussion and analysis. An expert in the subject would probably pick lots of faults with it (just see some of the reviews on Amazon), but then it isn’t aimed at them. This book doesn’t try to pretend to be an academic text, instead it’s a very readable overview for a lay readership who want their reading to give them something to think about without requiring they get a PhD first.

The book is the first in a trilogy. I’ve also read the third book this year, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which I also loved. I’ve read them out of order as I’ve borrowed them on my library app and the 2nd book has a long waiting list. Reading them out of order doesn’t seem to be a problem however.

(512 pages)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

I can’t tell you too much about this novel without giving it all away. So you’ll just have to believe me when I say it’s well worth reading. The basic synopsis is that the adult protagonist spends a lot of time thinking back her childhood and her seemingly dysfunctional family. We know something happened to her sister but it’s well into the book before we find out what that was. Once we know what happened we spend more time in the present as the protagonist comes to terms with what happened and how it’s affected her life.

(336 pages)

Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis

Gavin Francis is one of my favourite writers and if you haven’t read any of his books then you really should. He has written books on his travels to the Arctic and Antarctic as well as ‘medical’ books. Currently a GP in Edinburgh he’s also lived in Orkney, spent a year working as the doctor on the British base in Antarctica and worked as a doctor in East Africa. As well as his interest in travel and medicine he is also interested in the Classics and his writing includes lots of references to the ancient Romans and Greeks.

This book followed his travel books and was written in a similar style, except the journey is around the human body. I came across this review for it and just had to pinch it as it perfectly matches my own feelings about the book.

In Francis’s beautifully written, exquisitely thoughtful, and completely captivating cartography, the body is a superbly-lit museum filled with treasures, and Dr. Francis the perfect guide who deftly weaves together science and story to reveal the wondrous flesh-and-blood underpinnings of our daily lives. It’s a spellbinding view.

Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife and The Human Age

(272 pages)

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American botanist. Her book is autobiographical as well as being a book about plants and how and why we should look after them. As a scientist and university professor she is pulled in one direction whilst her Native American knowledge pulls her in another. Throughout her career she has tried to meld the two but it is only in recent times that the scientific world has started to even think about acknowledging the wisdom of ancient ancestors and cultures.

It took me a while to read this one as I kept putting it down to mull over what I’d learnt. Not just about plants, but about Native American culture, history and mythology too.

(400 pages)

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

Set in 1890’s Malaya, this is the story of a 17 year old girl, Li Lan. Her impoverished father agrees for her to be married to the son of an extremely wealthy family. Once married Li Lan will want for nothing. The only problem is that the son the family want her to marry is dead. After visiting the family’s mansion she finds herself being haunted by the son and drawn into the underworld that is the Chinese afterlife. It’s a beautiful told story that draws on the traditional folklore and superstitions of Chinese Malayans at this time.

Apparently Netflix turned it into a drama last year so I’ll have to try to find it. It’s in Mandarin but hopefully will have subtitles and be available on the UK Netflix.

(400 pages)

Intensive Care by Gavin Francis

This is the second Gavin Francis book to have made my 2021 favourites list. I’ve counted it separately as it’s not a sequel and is quite different to Adventures in Human Being. In this book Francis documents what it is was like to work as a GP during the first year of the pandemic. From the very early days when there were just rumours about it through to the full impact of it with the hospitalisations, deaths, lockdowns and everything else we now know about.

He doesn’t just work in his GP practice in Edinburgh, but also does shifts working with drug addicts and the homeless and spends time in Orkney as a locum doctor, so you learn how the pandemic has affected people in all walks of life.

(224 pages)

Books that came close but didn’t quite make my top picks include:

• Pine by Francine Toon
• Beyond the Volcano by Julie Lamin
• Enola Holmes by Nancy Springer
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J M Barrie
• Journey to Jo’burg by Beverley Naidoo
• The Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson
• Candide by Voltaire
• The Silk Factory by Judith Allnatt
• Hijab and Red Lipstick by Yousra Imran
• Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups by Anna McNuff
• Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria
• Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharti

What were your best reads of 2021? Have you read any of the books I’ve listed? Share your recommendations and your thoughts on my choices in the comments below.

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• Evaluating the Books I Read in 2019 for Diversity
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