all 164 books i read in 2021, reviewed in one sentence each

Tis the damn season. Got me feelin' festive, and that's about it.

A Little Life broke my heart into tiny pieces, and I am still recovering from this. It introduces you to these four people who you develop such an affection for, and then it just destroys them. So genius, so profoundly sad.

A Moveable Feast basically encouraged me to move to Paris. So, thank you, Earnest Hemingway.

A Passage North also has the longest sentences you'll ever read, but masterfully executed. It's a meditation on post-war Sri Lanka and how attitudes towards death and mourning change in a country so desensitized to it through years of conflict.

A Tale of Two Cities is one of those classic novels that I completely understand why it has its status as a revolutionary piece of writing, but I also just despised it. I hated reading this. I'm just not a Dickens fan, I'm sorry about it.

A River Dies of Thirst. This poetry is incredible. My favorite one was called Fame. Chefs kiss.

An Artist of the Floating World imagines post-war Japan and thinks about regret and remorse and redemption, and I enjoyed it.

And Then the End Will Come! flips the idea of doomsday on its head, and it's quite an uplifting message, but just executed in a really annoying way.

Another Time, I like you. Have a cupcake.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? Was the perfect book to read during the pandemic. To me, it's about how the last two years have exhibited to us that human connection and human communication are the most fundamental things in our lives.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is the biggest chef's kiss of all time. Really emotional and beautiful. People can basically go back in time to have one last conversation with lost loved ones. And she wrecked me. She really did.

Bluets is a series of vignettes, all about the color of blue, which inspires a lot of meditations on life in general.

Burnt Sugar I hated reading, but because it's about mourning a family member kind of before they've actually passed away, which is something I try not to think about much, but that aside, I thought the writing was okay, but just not for me.

Yearning, intensity, peaches. Need I say more?

Celestial Bodies I was excited about 'cause it's set in Oman, but I didn't really enjoy it. There's so many characters and we get so many perspectives and it just becomes really disjointed and hard to actually focus on. So it missed the mark a little bit for me.

Charlotte's Web. Man, I loved this. It's so pure and sweet.

Usually I don't like when people clap when they land, but this is an exception. Two girls lose their fathers in a plane crash and have to navigate grief and family secrets.

This book is immense. There are like six different plot lines going on. It's bittersweet, it's epic, it is so sweeping.

Convenience Store Woman. I think about this regularly. Packed with commentary about social expectations and capitalism, but also funny in a really depressing way. If that doesn't sell it, I don't know what will.

Conversations With Friends. I would read Sally Rooney's to do list, but thankfully instead of publishing those, she writes absolute bangers like these. Conversations With Friends is all about communication and it's not my favorite of her works, but it's still so solid and enjoyable to read.

My biggest shock of the year is that I did not expect to love this as much as I did. This was my first Russian classic. It's about nihilism and guilt and pride, being alienated from society and it's intense, but so worth it.

Curtain is the last ever Poirot novel. He goes out with a great bow and there's this huge crescendo of action at the end.

Daisy Jones & The Six follows the peaks and troughs of a Fleetwood Mac sort of band, and I think this is best consumed in audio book format.

Dead Poet's Society is a novelization of the movie and you should just watch the movie.

Demian inspired the BTS Blood Sweat & Tears music video. Need I say more?

Diary of an Oxygen Thief is like someone read Lolita once and thought, Pfft I could do that, and then did it terribly. I too would publish this anonymously because it's embarrassing.

Dreaming in Cuban follows three generations of Cuban women and their relationships to each other and the diaspora and it's vibrant and rhythmic.

I was underwhelmed. From the very fast pages you're plunged into an absurd amount of overly complex world-building. I hated it.

Eat, Pray, Love is the privilege manifesto. But that aside, it's essentially one woman's journey to self discovery across Italy, Indonesia and India. Some interesting insights, but also zero self-awareness. Just vibes.

Educated is a book lots of people love, and I didn't. It's about a girl who grows up in a very radical survivalist family. I found it a little slow and repetitive, and it also didn't focus on the things that I thought were most interesting.

Empowered is another book written by a friend of mine. This is these deeply inspiring and thought provoking memoir meets self-help book. It gave me goosebumps.

Empress & Aniya is basically the same plot as Freaky Friday, but set in South London.

Exciting Times is a book that I totally understand why some people hate it, but I loved it and maybe that says more about me than them. Again, it's a book with a minimal plot, but I really enjoyed its cultural commentary and its introspective tone and I felt like I learned a lot as a wannabe writer from this book.

First Person Singular is okay, but not excellent. Murakami in his flop era, I fear. It kinda feels like an AI was given the task of writing a Murakami book, and this is what it came up with, which isn't necessarily a good elevator pitch.

Fly on the Wall, which is a retelling of The Metamorphosis, in which a high school girl wakes up as a fly and uses this to fly into the boys' changing room and spy on them. I would say this is un-essential reading that no one should read in their lives.

Frog Music. Imagine making murder boring. That's what this book does.

Gold Dust. Someone tell me why I cried at a book about a camel. Moving on.

Oh my Lord! The most exquisite book shifting the focus and the spotlight from Shakespeare onto his wife and his children, the people who history often glosses over. And if any book on this list is gonna become a modern classic, it's this one.

Helium is a nice debut poetry collection about masculinity and race.

Heroes. Stephen Fry injects so much personality and humor into classic Greek mythology.

The Housekeeper and the Professor. Wow, I was really on a roll at this point because this was also great. Charming, endearing, actually made me interested in maths and I hate maths.

How to Cure a Ghost is so beautiful that I missed my train stop twice 'cause I was reading it and didn't notice. I was so enraptured, I just didn't even notice that I'd gone past my destination.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is a very misleading title because you think this book is gonna be about unplugging from the digital world, and then it's actually a book about bio regionalism, which isn't anywhere near as interesting.

It's about a woman who plots to kill six members of her family in very elaborate ways. And it's perfectly paced, witty and gripping.

A great Portuguese poet. It kinda takes these really profound and complex philosophical ideas and distills them into really thoughtful little poems.

This is literally Jane Eyre copy and pasted, and then just with a few added erotic scenes here and there, and just in the most random way. At one point we have a scene where Rochester shaves Jane Eyre's pubes. I lost brain cells, my English lit degree shredded itself.

Kafka on the Shore is about a child who runs away from home, fish falling from the sky, cats which can talk, and it's completely insane, but magnificent.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. This is an illuminating insight into the experience of being a woman in South Korea, but also in the world as a whole and the endemic of misogyny, which can slowly wear someone down and drive them a bit insane.

Klara and the Sun wasn't quite the book that I hoped it would be from Ishiguro and I felt like it could have gone one step deeper, but I do still think it was great. And maybe we as the reader are meant to take that extra step forward. So, mixed feelings.

Lady Susan is Jane Austen's lost classic, and she wrote it when she was 17. Man, more talent in that woman's little finger than I have in my whole body.

Letter To My Daughter. Maya Angelou, what an absolute legend. It's like a hug in a book, and Maya Angelou never had a daughter so this is her love letter to the women of the world, and where she shares her enormous wisdom.

Literally Show Me a Healthy Person is the closest a book has ever brought me to wanting to jump out a window.

Living and Loving in the Age of AIDS. Now, I feel awful giving this a bad review 'cause I thought it'd be interesting, but it's basically just a 300 page tribute to all of the people this man knew in his life. And if you didn't know them, you can't really connect with it.

This has some great twists, but also terrible pacing. Way too long and slow.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is about being kind of a cool party girl in Tokyo, but also it spends far too long poking fun at non-native English speakers, which I just thought was really uncool and unnecessary.

Love Again is quick and forgettable with one dimensional characters. Also, someone please explain to me why this book features a grown man referring to his future mother-in-law whose name is Natasha, as Nata-trash.

Love in Color has re-tellings from a range of cultures and countries, but in a modern context. And it's so vivid and brilliant.

Loveless is an ironic title 'cause I fell in love with this book. I have so much love in my heart for this little book. It's about Durham University. So, I am completely biased, unashamedly so, but it's also a fantastic introduction to asexuality and being a-romantic, which I think will make me a better ally and friend in the future.

Luster is another book I just haven't been able to shake from my mind. It's a stunning character study and the writing is gorgeous.

So the author basically said that in India, all you have to do is look out of your window and you'll find an interesting character with a story to tell, and that's exactly what he does and he does it superbly.

Malibu Rising is a must read for anyone who loves celebrity culture and gossip. About a famous family who host a party for anyone who's anyone in Malibu. And there's all sorts of scandals and drama. Pure escapism in the best way.

Many Lives Many Monsters is literally one of the worst pieces of nonfiction I've ever read 'cause it's literally one big lie, and just sold as fact.

Me Before You is a questionable representation of disabled life, which I think is important to acknowledge. But aside from that, it's a very well-written and tragic and endearing love story.

Men Without Women, but this time his observation skills are just out in full glory. He is like the epitome of the male gaze. He always writes from a very masculine perspective and his female characters are ridiculous.

The Metamorphosis is Franz Kafka's bizarre tale about a man who wakes up one morning as a bug. And for some reason, the first thought that comes into his head is like, How am I gonna go to work today? I feel like this is essential reading at some point in your life 'cause it's cultural impact is huge.

Middlemarch was long. I have no other feelings towards this book.

Misery builds tension and suspense. I was on the edge of my seat. About a famous writer who is captured by his number one fan.

Emily Ratajkowski is a brilliant writer and this explores what it's like to be really, really famous for your beauty. It's something I could not relate to at all, but I still found it really fascinating to get this grueling insight into the modeling industry.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is completely unlike any book I've ever read. It's this darkly funny and shocking look at depression and someone removing themselves from society, and it's tangible like, how pointless everything feels to her.

My Sister, the Serial Killer is also really darkly funny. Anyone with a sibling will love this. It basically follows a girl who is just constantly having to clear up the mess of her sister, except that mess is killing her boyfriends.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, my favorite up-and-coming writer. I cannot wait to see what he does in his career 'cause he's so talented. And this collection is just, wow.

I read some really awesome short story and essay collections. So, we had No One Belongs Here More Than You, The Houseguest, and also Tonight I'm Someone Else.

No One Is Talking About This is the book that stuck with me the most this year. I keep coming back to it. And that's interesting because I didn't necessarily enjoy the process of reading it.

Northanger Abbey smack my ass like a drum. Jane Austen just writes characters that you absolutely despise with every part of your body, perfectly.

Notes of a Crocodile was big brain energy. So complex, but it explores queerness and friendship and arts at a top Taiwanese university in a very experimental way.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is the most lyrical, poetic writing. Every sentence is exquisite and completely packed and bursting at the seams with meaning.

Only Love Is Real is exactly the same book, but just slightly repackaged. It's the remix. It's also a scam.

This is a book I just finished, and I already know it's an absolute favorite. It exposed masculinity, trauma, racial profiling, and also the black body in modern Britain, and not a word is wasted. It's a masterpiece.

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World is aggressively average. I expected more.

Piranesi is a study in solitude, and one of the best things I read in 2021. So unique, so strange, but so brilliant, and I'm very jealous of anyone who gets to read this for the first time.

She wrote about 60s LA and this book explores the idea of fleeting youth and beauty, and also fame and seeing life as a game, not one that you're winning, but one that you're just sort of playing and participating in.

Preludes & Nocturnes. I love Neil Gaiman, but I have loved him more elsewhere.

Queenie on the other hand is just exploding with personality and a brilliant and memorable cast of peripheral characters who are just written in screaming Technicolor. This is how you write characters. Yes!

Rebels, which was written by the Jenner sisters made me lose the plot because it didn't have one.

Red, White & Royal Blue is the fluffiest romance novel, which is very wholesome and warm and fuzzy if you're looking for pure escapism. I do think it was a little too idealistic, only because it's talking about political figures. So, it's about the Prince of England and the son of the president of the U.S.A.

Reef is this marvelous and compact story all about servitude. It has mouthwatering prescriptions of food, and I think that Reef is actually a detrimentally misleading title for this book, which I think is a shame.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad makes several interesting points about the economy and loads of really bad ones.

Rodham is Bill and Hillary Clinton fanfiction and features sex scenes. So I'm scarred for life.

The Sea of Strangers, which is the most three-star book to ever three star.

Season of Migration to the North, however, is awesome. It's fast paced with loads of twists and it's essentially Heart of Darkness in reverse, in which a colonized individual travels up the Thames to London, and it's a great piece of translated Arabic literature.

Self-Help, I accidentally left on a park bench in Paris, and I'm still gutted about it, but it's a really experimental idiosyncratic guide to life and super super irreverent.

Seven Days in June, a joyous black love story. Two writers reunite and realize that for years they've been each other's muses in everything they've ever written. There's great twists, misunderstandings and believable emotions.

It has fascinating insights into the world that Shakespeare inhabited.

Silas Marner is also by George Eliot, and is a much more manageable length. And I liked both to be fair. They are both just masterclasses in symbolism.

Like the title suggests this focuses on the little things in life that are so ordinary but so special. We follow a woman who was working for a local newspaper, which is covering the story of a virgin birth. And if I could just snip off the last five pages of this book, it would be great because what the heck was that mess?

So Good They Can't Ignore You was so bad, I wish I had. It's the weirdest book because the author basically argues that passion will get you nowhere in life and you just have to be good at things to succeed, and to be happy and fulfilled. Like, even if you hate something, if you're good at it, your life will be great.

So Sad Today did more than what it said on the tin, 'cause it didn't just make me so sad today, it also made me so sad for the rest of the year that I spent money on this book.

Star Girl. Okay, this is gonna sound terrible, but this is supposed to be an anti-bullying book, but the main character to me was just so annoying, that I was kinda like, yeah, I can kinda see why you're being bullied. That's a terrible thing to say, and I don't think it was the point of the book, but she is annoying.

Such A Fun Age is about the messy dynamics of privilege. And I liked the way that it presented things as they're not always being a right answer. It grapples with the idea that sometimes two individual people can try to do the right thing and both be wrong, or at least sort of damage each other in the process.

The High Window is just your classic detective novel, and the main character just hates everyone, really.

The 4-Hour Workweek taught me a fair few good tricks about time management and prioritization of tasks, but you have to get around the author's massive ego, which is pretty unbearable. And also, the last quarter of the book becomes like a cheap travel guide, which was so random.

5am Club is such a strange self-help book because it's told as a story, like as fiction. So, I tried getting up at five a.m., and I hated it and I would not like to be part of this club. Thank you.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo has stunning prose. It's about migration and loss and asylum seeking. I wish I could write like this.

The Bench is Meghan Markle's very pleasant and diverse children's book, which the media wants you to think is terrible, but is actually really empowering and harmless.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is an Argentinian collection of short horror stories with weird and wonderful characters, and also the city of Buenos Aires is a character in itself.

The Duke & I is the first Bridgerton book, and it's so dumb. It's a book of two halves because the first half is written like a Jane Austen parody, where it seems like she used the thesaurus for like every other word. And then the second half is written in the most basic language you've ever encountered in your life.

The Four Agreements make sense, and I think that four points it makes are good, but the execution is terrible and the evidence it gives doesn't work. It's like reading a parody and any self-help book that claims it can cure cancer is immediately losing a star from me.

The Girls is cult vibes. Not especially good, but not especially bad either. The book I mean, not cults in general.

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, I like you. Have a cupcake.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is sci-fi which is not normally my thing, but this is a masterclass in how to do it. It's the blueprint, honestly.

I read some really awesome short story and essay collections. So, we had No One Belongs Here More Than You, The Houseguest, and also Tonight I'm Someone Else.

The Hungover Games is full of this really sardonic wit, and basically a book that says, Oh, whoops, I'm pregnant. That wasn't the plan. What the hell are we gonna do now?

This is literally not worth the paper it's printed on. The Life of a Wannabe Mogul. So bad, I wanna give you a zero, but that's not possible so I give you a one.

The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. I mean, there's a massive mess on my floor just here, so clearly this didn't work.

The Marvels is half graphic novel and half novel. Very meta, but not in like a Facebook way. Clever and sweet. Just a really enjoyable reading experience.

The Master & Margarita is a Russian classic that is just impossible to explain in one sentence, because it's so philosophical and supernatural and satirical and wild, where the devil basically visits the Soviet Union.

The Memory Police is a Japanese dystopia, which I found strange to read because it basically feels like it's building up to this huge moment that never comes, and so as a reader, it's kind of disappointing having that huge anticlimax, but as a piece of art, it's genius.

The Midnight Library is a self-help book disguised as a novel. And I think that it's an okay novel, but a terrible self-help guide. Like, great escapism, pretty fun, loved the concept, but the overall message is way too oversimplified for the huge theme of mental health that it tries to dissect.

The Night In Question and also What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. They're both so unique and perfect if you just want to read weird and wonderful snippets of stories.

This is a book that I actually contributed to, and it's by my friend Jade, who is just sunshine encased in a human body. And she shared all her genius study tips.

This also has a serious pacing problems, which is pretty ironic for a book all about book editors, 'cause this book needed one. It's eventually genre defying and so peculiar. I just think it could have been executed a little bit better.

Stephen King's The Outsider is proof that sometimes really famous authors are given too much creative control and license, and maybe need an editor to tell them when to stop. Halfway through would have been good for this one.

The Owl and the Pussycat is a collection of nonsense poetry, which is good in small busts but quite tiresome if you read it all in one go.

The Secret claims that can cure cancer and poor eyesight with manifestation, which is not true, so.

The Secret History is the dark academic classic. Donna Tartt just runs academic rings around you. You will feel dumb as hell.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which started my love affair with Taylor Jenkins Reid. Everyone is talking about this book, and that's because it's superb. In my opinion, it completely lives up to the hype and you should read it.

The Song of Achilles. I spent a whole year raving about this book and I read it in week one of 2021. So, this broke my heart. It's the perfect book. I would invent a sixth star to describe this.

The Stranger is a masterclass in writing a unique character, especially one who is the narrator of the book.

The Underground Railroad is one of the biggest surprises for me because I expected to love this, and I was so underwhelmed. I hated the writing style. I thought the characters were forgettable and it's such a shame because it's about such an important topic, which is slavery, but I think there are better alternatives out there.

I absolutely loved The Vanishing Half, one of my favorite books of the year.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is obviously great, as were the creepy stories of Edgar Allan Poe, because I'm an Edgar Allan ho. We know this.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is this lovely little allegory about the marginalization of things we don't understand and how people are outcast from society and made outsiders when all they want to do is live and love and maybe even laugh. It's quite charming and wholesome, but sometimes just a little too cheesy for me 'cause I'm lactose intolerant.

They Both Die at the End builds this brilliant story world and then just does nothing with it. Such a let down. Honestly, my hopes for this book also died at the end.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is deranged and twisted and horrifying, but in the best way. It's about two people who get into an online relationship and just bring out the absolute worst in each other.

Think Like A Monk is just regurgitated self-help that is either really painfully obvious, or something you've definitely heard somewhere else before, just repackaged. Also quite good at convincing me not to be a monk, which I don't think was the intention.

This is how you write a slow burn book. It is mind-boggling in the first half. I didn't have a clue what was going on, but it becomes this beautiful sapphic love story written through these lyrical and gorgeous letters to each other.

Time of White Horses is a big, fat book, but so vivid and vibrant with really memorable characters who are so believable, and it's all about rural life in Palestine.

I read some really awesome short story and essay collections. So, we had No One Belongs Here More Than You, The Houseguest, and also Tonight I'm Someone Else.

Topics of Conversation has the longest sentences you'll ever read. Like, more clauses than Santa's family over here, but it's terribly executed.

Trick Mirror opens with an absolutely phenomenal essay about internet culture and how it's an attention economy. And that is then followed by a couple of other interesting essays and a load of boring ones, which just regurgitate things you probably already know.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an interesting story for the first 200 pages and then just so damn long. It felt like I'd been under the sea for 20,000 years.

Two Weeks Notice was horrible. I had a terrible time.

I read this because Adele said it would change my life, and it didn't.

We Were Liars is about a girl who has lost her memory as a result of a traumatic event. And this book gets a lot of stick online for the writing style, which has a lot of line breaks. But I personally thought it was deliberately fractured to reflect the way her mind was working and how she was perceiving events.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is decent and gives an insight into Murakami's creative process, but also if you're already really into running, I don't think this will teach you anything new.

They're both so unique and perfect if you just want to read weird and wonderful snippets of stories.

Winter in Sokcho is about the town on the border between North and South Korea, and the receptionist of a small hotel there who has a very limited life, but still lives with intention and appreciates the beauty of what she does have and the desolate landscape around her. So this is a very special and haunting and strange book.

Grace Beverley is the blueprint when it comes to turning a YouTube channel into a career, but this book just didn't give what needed to be gave. My personal theory is that because she is an internet personality, Grace was so nervous about being dismissed as rich and privileged that she wrote a book which feels too calculated and over edited. It reads as though every sentence has been redrafted about five times to the point where each sentence is so convoluted that the book just doesn't really flow.

Queen Joan Didion.