As we were saying goodbye to 2021, one of the top thoughts in my mind was that. I needed to narrow down my top reads of the year list for 2021. …which was tougher this year than other years. If you’ve read my past posts like this one, you’ll see that I narrowed it down quite a bit (to like 10 books or so). This year, I decided that rather than stressing about which books to keep and which to remove, I decided to go with a more expanded featuring my top 21 books of 2021.
Please let me know in the comments whether you prefer longer lists like this or if in the future you’d like to see my lists be more narrowed down! I also hope you had a good reading year in 2021 and a wonderful reading year ahead!
⤖ One ⬻
“You don’t think monster girls
and wicked boys deserve love?”
– Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
⤖ Two ⬻
“I know that existing as a human on this Earth should be enough to deserve respect and justice.”
– Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, One of the Good Ones
⤖ Three ⬻
“Grief is a right bastard. Sneaks up on you, blasts you, hits you, pounds you, leaves you wrecked. There’s a moment of peace. You never know how long it could last. Minutes. Hours. Days. You’re starting to believe you can ‘do this’ and the bastard comes back…”
– Tijan, Enemies
⤖ Four ⬻
“But in anything you love, isn’t there always some bit of sadness, some essence of suffering? That, to me, is what makes art worth it. Suffer through it—mine the emotions you keep inside yourself, face whatever’s emotionally burdensome, take control of it—then emerge reborn in the end.”
– Loan Le, A Pho Love Story
⤖Six ⬻
“The Rook. A mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside a coat she dearly wanted to rip off–to lay him open the same way he’d done to her. Not to expose him to others; just to know. To restore some kind of balance between them, so she didn’t have to rely on his word alone.”
– M.A. Carrick, The Mask of Mirrors
⤖ Eight ⬻
“When I was younger, the holidays promised freedom. No school. No early mornings. Nothing but heat, the beach, sunburned lips, sweat-soaked clothes, and sea-scented hair. There were lazy morning lie-ins with nowhere to go, nothing to be done, the hours of the day allowed to unravel without aim or urgency.”
– Sarah Dass, Where the Rhythm Takes You
⤖ Nine ⬻
“A home isn’t always the house we live in. It’s also the people we choose to surround ourselves with.”
– T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea
⤖ Ten ⬻
“When they ask how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was uprooted like the palm trees and shot down like the birds from the stormy skies. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster.”
– Asha Bromfield, Hurricane Summer
⤖ Eleven ⬻
“Sometimes people sneak up on you and suddenly you don’t know how you ever lived without them.”
– Elle Kennedy, The Deal
⤖ Twelve ⬻
“I don’t have an American half and a Japanese half.
I am a whole person.”
– Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After
⤖ Thirteen ⬻
“Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are…”
– Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
⤖ Fourteen ⬻
“Girls are given the weight of the world, but nowhere to put it down. The power and magic born in that struggle? It’s so terrifying to men that we invented reasons to burn y’all at the stake…”
– Tia Williams, Seven Days in June
⤖ Fifteen ⬻
“The underworld appears the same as I remember it… Like before, the ground rises slowly, drifting like a reverse snowfall until it funnels up into the gloomy sky in twisting clouds. But I’m not thinking about the stark unearthliness of the landscape as I scan the dark dunes before me…”
– A.M. Strickland, In the Ravenous Dark
⤖ Sixteen ⬻
“Change always comes with a closing cost. But it’s still worth trying. Not because the odds are particularly good, mind you, but considering the alternative. There’s value in the struggle. Value in touching the raw and bloody parts of our souls, opening them up to the sunlight, and hoping they heal.”
– Rosie Danan, The Roommate
⤖ Seventeen ⬻
“If I were the praying type, I would have been praying, but what was the use? Miracles had stopped working for the likes of us a long time ago.”
– Nandini Bajpai, Sister of the Bollywood Bride
⤖ Eighteen ⬻
“It’s weird how a human being can change so fast. I feel like I’ve cast off all my flowers, but now they’re busy making seeds. Like I can become brand-new, pure, over and over again.”
– Raquel Vasquez Gilliland,
How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe
⤖ Nineteen ⬻
“Trying to figure out what to do when no one is watching. And wondering if maybe that’s the stuff that actually matters.”
– Tessa Bailey, It Happened One Summer
⤖ Twenty ⬻
“The best way to get to know someone,
to get beneath their skin & into the bone,
is to tell a story & offer music.
A story explains who you want to be;
the other shows who you are.”
– Amber McBride, Me (Moth)
⤖ Twenty-One ⬻
“All Sisters feared three things, and the first was falling pregnant.”
– Kerstin Hall, Star Eater
⤖ Let's Chat ⬻
Thank you so much for checking out my top 21 reads of 2021! Do we share some of the same books on our top lists? Are any of the books on my list on your TBR? Let me know in the comments!
Love seeing this list! The House in the Cerulean Sea is also on my list!
Thank you!!! And yesss that one was so goooooood
Love Tijan! Also House in the Cerulean Sea was on my list too!
Yessss! I need to read more Tijan. And so happy to hear about Cerulean Sea. It was so good right?!
Wow, what an incredible list! There are so many books I want to read on this list and it makes me even more excited for them, knowing you loved them so much! ♥
Gah thank you so much Destiny! And I’m so excited for you to red them! And honestly I hope that you love them as much as I did 😀 <3