All The Books I Read in 2021

Phew, what a year, huh?! I don’t need to remind you of the shitshow that was 2021. I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for my love of books for allowing me to find an escape hatch in a sometimes hellscape of a world.

In 2019, I decided that I wanted to read more nonfiction. More meaning… more than zero. To bribe myself, I made a plan that for every nonfiction book I read, I’d get to read a fiction book. It worked amazingly and I read so many interesting things. I’ve continued that trend for the last 2 years and am on track for it again in 2022.

In the last year, I read some fantastic stories and learned a lot. (I also got sober, as evidenced by that streak of quit lit!)

Here are the books that got me through the year, beginning with my top 5. (NF = nonfiction, F = fiction)

All links go to my favorite local bookstore, Black Pearl Books:

Quit Like A Woman
by Holly Whitaker

“When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular… Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people — who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives.”

The Gilded Razor
by Sam Lansky

“By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos — until finally, he began to face himself.”

Long Division
by Kiese Laymon

“Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson — but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called…Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.”

Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.

Untamed
by Glennon Doyle

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

1. Devil in the White City — Erik Larson (NF)
2. Lies You Wanted to Hear — James Whitfield Thomson (F)
3. She Always Knew How (Mae West) — Charlotte Chandler (NF)
4. The Immortalists — Chloe Benjamin (F)
5. The Night Watch — Sarah Waters (F)
6. The Alcohol Experiment — Annie Grace (NF)
7. Quit Like A Woman — Holly Whitaker (NF)
8. Blackout — Sarah Hepola (NF)
9. High Achiever — Tiffany Jenkins (NF)
10. The Gilded Razor — Sam Lansky (NF)
11. What I Had Before I Had You — Sarah Cornwell (F)
12. The Tattooist of Auschwitz — Heather Morris (F)
13. We Are The Luckiest — Laura McKowen (NF)
14. Long Division — Kiese Laymon (F)
15. Death in the Air — Kate Winkler Dawson (NF)
16. Delirium — Lauren Oliver (F)
17. We Stand Divided — Daniel Gordis (NF)
18. House of Sand and Fog — Andre Dubus III (F)
19. Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight — Julia Sweig (NF)
20. As Night Falls — Jenny Milchman (F)
21. Reinventing Organizations — Frédéric Laloux (NF)
22. Blood in the Water — Heather Ann Thompson (NF)
23. Broken People — Sam Lansky (F)
24. Running is a Kind of Dreaming — J.M. Thompson (NF)
25. Creativity, Inc.— Ed Catmull (NF)
26. Reasons to Stay Alive — Matt Haig (NF)
27. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig (F)
28. The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober — Catherine Gray (NF)
29. Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi (F)
30. How The Word Is Passed — Clint Smith (NF)
31. The Fortress — S. A. Jones (F)
32. No Hiding in Boise — Kim Hooper (F)
33. A Dark and Secret Place — Jen Williams (F)
34. Emotional Sobriety — Tian Dayton (NF)
35. Untamed — Glennon Doyle (NF)