The Best Books I've Read in 2021

2021 has been a strange year. Following the disaster of 2020, 2021 had some standards to uphold from the years before the new plague broke out. As we have all pretty much still been stuck inside with various liftings happening around the world, some of us have gotten even more reading done. Some of us have done less reading because we have been stressed. Some of us have done more learning of new languages, ways to cook, things to make. And some of us have been sitting, nesting ourselves day by day. And all of that is perfectly okay. It is perfectly fine if reading is not your coping mechanism.

But this year, I have to say, I have been trying to turn my reading into more of a source of enjoyment for others as well as myself. I love recommending people books to read and whether they read them or not is always interesting. Even if they say ‘it didn’t sound like my thing’ - I always want to hear why. If they read it and didn’t like it, I still want to know why. And of course, I would love it if you read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. So with that being said, here are the best books I read in 2021. If you want to talk to me about them, don’t hesitate to contact me using the Instagram handle in my bio.

I'll also be including some reviews that I wrote for the books but only the ones that give you more of a taste of my writing. Many of them have been reviewed and you can check them all out on my Vocal page.

These will be split up into months and be in no particular order:

January 2021

1. Sunday’s Children by Ingmar Bergman
2. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
3. The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs
4. Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino
5. Ethics by Michel Foucault
6. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
7. On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Friedrich Schiller
8. Selected Poetry and Prose by Edward Thomas
9. Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago
10. Culture and Society by Raymond Williams
11. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote
12. A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants
13. The Memorial by Christopher Isherwood
14. A Good School by Richard Yates
15. Existential Dialogues by Daniel Chechick
16. Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer
17. Drugs for Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl Hart

February 2021

1. Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates
2. Selected Essays by George Orwell
3. The Chill by Scott Carson
4. The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd
5. Bob Dylan in London: Troubadour Tales by KG Miles and Jackie Lees
6. The House of a Thousand Whispers by Graham Masterton
7. The Other Passenger by Louise Cavendish
8. Little Bones by NV Peacock
9. Watching from the Dark by Gytha Lodge
10. The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn
11. Killing for Comfort by Brian Masters
12. The Dilemma by B.A Paris
13. Love as Always, Mum by Mae West
14. The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben
15. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
16. The Other Wife by Claire McGowan
17. The Wake by Vikki Patis
18. Playing Nice by JP Delaney
19. The Heartwarming by S.E Lynes
20. The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
21. Voices from the Punjab by Anita Goyal and Aastha Singhania

March 2021

1. Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertesz
2. My Michael by Amos Oz
3. Augustus by John Williams
4. The Lonely Life by Bette Davis
5. Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham
6. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
7. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
8. Bogart by AM Sperber and Eric Lax
9. Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah
10. The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth
11. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
12. A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
13. The Fall of the House of Byron by Emily Brand
14. Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

April 2021

1. The Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
2. A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
3. Three by Ann Quin
4. House of Glass by Hadley Freeman
5. The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi
6. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E Schwab
7. The Arsonists’ City by Hala Alyan
8. The Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
9. The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan
10. The Apple Orchard by Pete Brown
11. The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
12. Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
13. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
14. The Book of Tokyo: A City in Fiction by Michael Emmerichs, Jim Hinks and Minashi Matsuie
15. Reborn by Susan Sontag
16. The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex
17. The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
18. The Familiars by Stacey Halls
19. Pilgrims by Matthew Kneale
20. The Midnight Library by Matt Half
21. Lore by Alexandra Bracken
22. People from My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami
23. Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
24. Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee
25. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
26. The Sleeping Beauties by Suzanne O’Sullivan
27. Men Who Hate Woman by Laura Bates
28. The Hair Carpet Weaves by Andreas Eschbach
29. Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

May 2021

1. Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki
2. Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky
3. Think, Write, Speak by Vladimir Nabokov
4. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
5. Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
6. Selected Poetry by Arthur Rimbaud
7. Mercies by Anne Sexton
8. The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
9. You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann
10. Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
11. The Red Prince: John of Gaunt by Helen Carr
12. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
13. The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton
14. Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alexander Radishchev
15. Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani
16. Keats by Lucasta Miller
17. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin
18. Fremder by Russell Hoban
19. The Artful Dickens by John Mullan
20. Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes
21. Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare
22. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
23. The Europeans by Orlando Figes
24. Burning Man by Frances Wilson

June 2021

1. The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner
2. In America by Susan Sontag
3. Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
4. 34 Patients by Tom Templeton
5. The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
6. Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
7. Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata
8. Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz by Gail Crowther
9. The Masterworks of Paul Thomas Anderson by Adam Nayman
10. Beautiful Things by Hunter Biden
11. Nowhere City by Alison Lurie
12. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
13. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
14. The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
15. Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate
16. Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
17. Decadence: A Literary Anthology ed. By Jon Crabb
18. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
19. The Chianti Flask by Marie Belloc Lowndes
20. Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado
21. The Hollow Ones by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan
22. American Supernatural Tales ed. By S.T Joshi
23. American Scenes by Henry James
24. Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley
25. The Marquise of O- and Other Stories by Heinrich Von Kleist
26. Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield
27. A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
28. Forever Home by Sue Watson
29. Continental Drift by Russell Banks
30. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
31. If We Were Villains by ML Rio
32. For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten
33. You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce
34. Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink
35. Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy
36. The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee

July 2021

1. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
2. The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers
3. The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates
4. An Anthology of the Works of Simone Weil
5. Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
6. One, Two, Three, Four by Craig Brown
7. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
8. Betty by Georges Simenon
9. The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White
10. The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
11. Who the Hell’s In It? By Peter Bogdanovich
12. Hello Americans by Simon Callow
13. Cash by Johnny Cash
14. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell
15. Women by Mihail Sebastian
16. The Man from London by Georges Simenon
17. The Interest by Michael Taylor
18. The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese
19. Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

August 2021

1. Light Years by James Salter
2. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do
3. Ninety-Six: Cleveland’s Story by James A Carter
4. Nuns and Sisters by Iris Murdoch
5. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
6. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
7. The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza
8. The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
9. The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Inhuman Land by Józef Czapski
11. The Flint Anchor by Sylvia Townsend Warner
12. The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
13. Untouched by Human Hands by Robert Sheckley
14. O Pioneers by Willa Cather
15. To Cook a Bear by Mikael Niemi
16. Machiavelli: His Life and Times by Alexander Lee
17. The Therapist by B.A Paris
18. Dostoevsky in Love by Alex Christofi
19. Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett
20. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey
21. The Binding by Bridget Collins
22. Victoria: A Life by A.N Wilson
23. Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim
24. Complete Short Fiction by Oscar Wilde
25. Bombshell by Mike Rothmiller
26. The Mountbattens by Andrew Lownie
27. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
28. Murder by the Book Ed. by Martin Edwards
29. Come Closer by Sara Gran
30. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
31. Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
32. The Break Down by B.A Paris
33. The Au Pair by Emma Rous

September 2021

1. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
2. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
3. The Hollows by Mark Edwards
4. Out by Natsuo Kirino
5. The Troop by Nick Cutter
6. The Bird Eater by Ania Ahlborn
7. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
8. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
9. The King is Dead by Hugh Morrison
10. The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale
11. The Sallow Scourge by E. Stuart Marlowe
12. Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology edited by Richard Wells
13. In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
14. We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker
15. The Ghost Tree by Christina Henry
16. Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima

October 2021

1. The Children Act by Ian McEwan
2. Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
3. Tenderness by Alison Macleod
4. Most Secret by Nevil Shute
5. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
6. Ghostland by Edward Parnell
7. Night. Sleep, Death. The Stars by Joyce Carol Oates
8. Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
9. Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh
10. The Lighthouse Witches by C.J Cooke
11. Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
12. A Burning by Megha Majumder
13. The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig
14. The Whistling by Rebecca Netley
15. When Things Get Dark ed. By Ellen Datlow
16. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
17. The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
18. Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
19. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
20. Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda
21. The Madman’s Library by Edward Brooke-Hitching
22. The Nesting by C.J Cooke
23. Storyland by Amy Jeffs
24. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
25. Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

November 2021

1. Dead Relatives by Lucie McKnight Hardy
2. The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
3. Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
4. The Matter of Black Lives ed by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
5. Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher
6. Will by Will Smith
7. A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel
8. Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer
9. Her Heart for a Compass by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York
10. Her Diaries and Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith
11. Bookworm by Lucy Mangan
12. Memoirs by Lorenzo Da Ponte
13. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung
14. Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch
15. Hyde by Craig Russell
16. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

December 2021

1. The Lover, Wartime Notebooks and Practicalities by Marguerite Duras
2. Selected Poems by Paul Celan
3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
4. Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gaultier
5. Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
6. The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas
7. W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec
8. Edward the Confessor by Tom Licence
9. London: The Illustrated Companion by Rosemary Gray
10. Paris on the Brink by Mary McAuliffe
11. Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
12. The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
13. Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales by KG Miles
14. The Poems 1962-2020 by Louise Gluck
15. The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler
16. The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence by Baltasar Gracián
17. Aesthetics by Michel Foucault
18. Warlock by Oakley Hall
19. Don't Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne Du Maurier
20. The Little Demon by Fyodor Sologub
21. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
22. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
23. Dante by Alessandro Barbero
24. Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

And there's the list!

Here's to next year when hopefully, I can revisit some books from here and take you on a whole new ride through my reading schedules and book reviews. Remember to get reviews on other books from my public page if you wish.

Have a great new year guys, it's been really interesting.