Holiday Book Guide 2021
Oh, hello! Thanks for stopping by. Life is still a little weird, not quite sure how I'm feeling about things these days. How about you? Are you thriving or just surviving? Are you hoping for an epiphany in 2022, or really only care about making it through to the next day? I feel you, my friends. I sincerely hope you are able to find some peace and joy this holiday season.
On that note--I find the best way to regroup and reset is to get lost in a good book. As per my holiday tradition, I've assembled what I believe to be some of the best books of this past year. So pull up a chair, grab some cocoa (or wine, whatever works), kick back by the fire and have fun perusing .
How It Works
I've gathered some of my favorite reads from the year, as well as some that come highly recommended by trusted fellow readers.
I should also clarify that the little italicized blurbs next to these books are NOT my own creation--I'm flattered that many of you in the past have thought that these were my succinct plot summaries. No, dear reader, these are taken straight from the publishers--I mean I love creating this guide but I still have a life.
I've included an "A" next to some titles to indicate that these reads are also fantastic on audio.
Enjoy!
Previous Guides
Did you miss last year's guide? Or maybe there just aren't enough books on this list and yo're searching for more, more , MORE? If so, make sure to check out my previous guides for some other great recommendations.
Fiction
Let's be honest--this tends to be the most pretentious of all the categories but I promise these picks are on the "easier" end of the spectrum.
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Beautiful World, Where Are You: "Irish author Sally Rooney is back with this celebrated novel on the complexities of romance, sex, and friendship on our swiftly tilting planet. A kind of deep-focus love quadrangle story, the book clearly hit a nerve for readers." Goodreads
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The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot: "Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Though the teenager has been told she’s dying, she still has plenty of living to do. Joining the hospital’s arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old, purple-pajama-wearing, fruitcake-eating rebel, who transforms Lenni in ways she never imagined. Though the end is near, life isn’t quite done with these unforgettable women just yet." Goodreads
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The Sentence: "Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning." Goodreads
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No One Is Talking About This: "Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature." Goodreads
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Hell Of A Book: "As a nameless narrator and debut author of a bestselling novel travels the country on his first book tour, he finds himself on an epic journey of self-discovery – even though he is usually drunk and never entirely certain of where he is or even what his book is about. He is also never entirely certain of what is real – is he being followed by a young Black boy who was recently murdered by the police? Why is his dead mother in the audience? This is a novel about racism and loss and fear and trauma and the toll it all exacts. It is also about who we become as a result. It also, as the narrator insists, a very unusual love story." NPR
Historical Fiction
Be transported to the days of long (and not so long) ago.
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The Great Circle: "Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost." Goodreads
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The Lincoln Highway: "Amor Towles’ latest is a compulsively readable joyride. Set in 1954, with the country on the brink of major change, this Great American Road Novel follows four boys, three fresh from a juvenile reformatory, as they set out in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. Their route from Nebraska to New York is filled with unexpected twists, turns, detours and close encounters. This is a quest novel, and its large cast – not all of whom are heroic – settle scores as they seek to find their way home." NPR
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Matrix: "It’s 1158 and an unlucky but well-educated girl of 17 is sent from her home to become a nun. She proves savvy and sharp-elbowed: In a mere lifetime, she transforms the decrepit abbey into a women-only, lightly queer Vatican." NPR
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Harlem Shuffle: "Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem." Goodreads
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The Personal Librarian: "This novel tells a fictionalized tale about a very real woman: Belle da Costa Greene, one of the “it” girls of the turn of the 20th century. As the personal librarian to J.P. Morgan, one of the richest and most powerful men in America at the time, Belle crisscrossed Europe acquiring rare art and manuscripts for Morgan’s personal library. She also led a glittering social life in the upper echelons of Gilded Age New York. But the whole time, Belle was keeping a huge secret: She was “colored,” in the parlance of that time, and passing for white. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray imagine how Belle navigated a world she wasn’t born into, why she chose to pass, and what the cost of keeping that lifelong secret might have been." NPR
Mystery/Thriller
Finding a well written mystery/ thriller can by a challenge but all of these picks definitely fit that bill.
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A Slow Fire Burning: "When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. Laura is the troubled one-night-stand last seen in the victim’s home. Carla is his grief-stricken aunt, already mourning the recent death of yet another family member. And Miriam is the nosy neighbor clearly keeping secrets from the police. Three women with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are – for different reasons – simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds." Goodreads
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The Survivors: "When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away." Goodreads
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We Begin At The End: "A fortysomething-year-old sheriff and a thirteen-year-old girl may not seem to have a lot in common. But they both have come to expect that people will disappoint you, loved ones will leave you, and if you open your heart it will be broken. So when trouble arrives with Vincent King, Walk and Duchess find they will be unable to do anything but usher it in, arms wide closed." Goodreads
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Razorblade Tears: "A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys." Goodreads
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Never Saw Me Coming: "You should never trust a psychopath. But what if you had no choice? It would be easy to underestimate Chloe Sevre… She’s a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her. Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new voice in fiction, that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer." Amazon
Sci-Fi/Fantasty/Speculative Fiction
When the "real" world is just too much, these titles provide the perfect escape.
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Klara And The Sun: "Klara and the Sun is a masterpiece from Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro about the saving grace of love. The story is set in a United States of the near future, a place riven by fascist political movements. Our narrator, Klara, is a type of robot known as an “Artificial Friend,” designed as a companion for the children of this brave new world. Klara becomes the companion of a girl named Josie, who’s sick, and the story turns on Klara’s attempts to heal her. Poignant and profound, Klara and the Sun will make you think about what makes a creature truly 'human.'" NPR
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Project Hail Mary: "Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?" Amazon
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Psalm For The Wild Built: "It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered." Goodreads
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A Marvlleous Light: "Red White & Royal Blue meets Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in debut author Freya Marske’s novel, featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies." Goodreads
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Cloud Cuckoo Land: "In 15th century Constantinople, a young girl scales an abandoned monastery looking to steal books. In the 1940s, in Lakeport, Idaho, a boy follows his father to a new job, a new life and, eventually, a new war. In 2020, a troubled teenager sits in his car outside the Lakeport public library, a gun in his pocket, a bomb in the backpack beside him. In 2146, on a generation ship headed for a new home on Beta Oph2, a girl waits inside a sealed room, hiding from a deadly plague, her only company an artificial intelligence called Sybil. These characters are linked, brilliantly, impossibly, through words, stories, libraries and, most notably, an invented manuscript (for which the novel is named) about a man who gets turned into a goat, a fish and a bird while searching for an imaginary city in the sky." NPR
Non-Fiction
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes deadly serious, there's nothing like a good non-fiction story that reads like fiction.
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Empire Of Pain: "The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis." Goodreads
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Cultish: "In this thought-provoking-yet-accessible read, linguist Amanda Montell weaves together personal anecdotes, survivor interviews and academic research to walk us through the loaded language of cults. The book explores the influence of “cultish” groups from Scientology to SoulCycle, examining how they use language to their advantage and why so many of us find them fascinating. Montell, the daughter of a cult survivor, breaks down these communities’ stories and rhetorical strategies with context and care, asking important questions about what constitutes a cult and how exactly they win over their followers. You’ll come away armed with some nifty vocab terms and a better understanding of the cultish language that shapes us on a daily basis." NPR
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Fuzz: "Mary Roach is your favorite party friend. Her stories crackle with wit and gumption, and each leaves you thinking: “I can’t believe she did that… and I very much wish I’d been there.” In Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, Roach shadows Vatican rat catchers, investigates simulated animal attacks in a Reno conference center, and (yes) learns how to build a better mousetrap. But the magic of Roach’s work is what lurks just below the surface of each of her escapades: her gentle meditations on how we all might live as better stewards of a planet we share." NPR
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This Is Your Mind On Plants: "Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?" Goodreads
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The Premonition: "For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19." Goodreads
Memoir/Biography
A love peeking inside someone's life and finding out about backstories and secrets--so entertaining!
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Crying In H Mart: "In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity." Goodreads
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Mike Nichols: A Life: "This story starts with Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, a German refugee with vaccine-induced baldness who spent most of his childhood quietly observing others and skipping school to hide out in a movie theater. It ends with Mike Nichols, one and the same, the legendary performer-turned-director who dominated both Hollywood and Broadway with a string of spectacular hits and misses. Mark Harris, who knew Nichols, takes us through everything that happened along the way in this immersive biography that includes amazing photos. It’s a book to savor, full of juicy industry details, nonstop name-dropping and insights from scores of Nichols’ famous friends. It truly feels like stepping into Nichols’ world." NPR
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Taste: "Taste is the perfect morsel of a book if Stanley Tucci has ever made the list of your dream dinner party guests. Tucci warmly and generously serves tales of the meals that accompanied laughter and heartbreak throughout his life, cooking tips you’ll marvel that you once lived without and countless recipes made more flavorful and elegant by their simplicity. There’s his infamous Negroni, the only tomato sauce you’ll ever need and every imaginable improvement on pasta. Crucially, if you ever do find yourself across the table from Stanley Tucci, for the love of all things culinary, don’t you dare cut your spaghetti." NPR
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Brat: "In his memoir Brat: An '80s Story, McCarthy focuses his gaze on that singular moment in time. The result is a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction, and masculinity. New York City of the 1980s is brought to vivid life in these pages, from scoring loose joints in Washington Square Park to skipping school in favor of the dark revival houses of the Village where he fell in love with the movies that would change his life. Filled with personal revelations of innocence lost to heady days in Hollywood with John Hughes and an iconic cast of characters, Brat is a surprising and intimate story of an outsider caught up in a most unwitting success." Goodreads
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Between Two Kingdoms: "A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery." Goodreads
Short Stories/Essay Collections
Sometimes s short story is just what the doctor (and the clock) ordered.
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My Monticello: "Say 'Charlottesville' and two things might come to mind immediately: Thomas Jefferson’s august estate and the white supremacy riot that occurred in the city in 2017. Both figure prominently in Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s first book – a collection of finely crafted short stories and a novella of the same title. Each focuses on race, belonging and community and the question 'To whom does American history belong?' All will leave you thinking long after you’ve turned the last page." NPR
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Five Tuesdays in Winter: "Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love." Goodreads
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Afterparties: "Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family." Goodreads
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: "For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times." Goodreads
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These Precious Days: "From the enchantments of Kate di Camilo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time." Goodreads
Backlist Rec
A Gentleman In Moscow (published 2016)
I know, I know, I'm a litte late to the AGIM love fest party. I'll admit, it took me a couple trys to get into the story, but then a friend recommended the audio version and that made all the difference in the world! As soon as I finished, I passed both the audio and hard copy to Charlie, who also fell in love with this story. It's a rare occasion where the two of us sit and have a detailed conversation about a book, but we spent a lovely afternoon at our local brewery doing just that-it was quite the lovely bookish afternoon.
That's a wrap! I hope you enjoyed this year's guide and found a new book or two for your loved ones (and yourself, of course!).
Here's wishing you a very happy and healthy holiday season.
