Favourite Reads of 2021 📚

I started off 2021 with an ambitious plan — read 24 books. I ended up reading 62. Here are my favourites from the year.

For those who know me, I’ve suffered from undiagnosed tsundoku for a large portion of my life. Books have always featured as a staple of my interior design aesthetic, and I’ve never succeeded in walking past a bookstore without making an impusilve book purchase (or three). I’d buy books whenever I got the chance. I’d put them on my bedside table. I’d carry at least one on every flight I boarded. I just never ended up reading them.

My Goodreads Reading Challenges of past years have always been a cornerstone of depressing life statistics. 2019: 2/15 books, 2018: 3/15 books, 2017: 4/20 books, you get the point. The problem would always begin with picking up too many books at once, quickly getting bored (or distracted), and never managing to finish any of them. So when I decided to up the game and read 24 books in 2021, I figured I was simply setting out to participate in the annual tradition of disappointing myself and making a public record of it. Instead, I beat my goal by 2.5 times.

A huge part of this dramatic shift had to do with embracing audiobooks as the medium of choice for consuming literature. Listening to books was a huge shift for me in my ability to focus on and retain content. I also developed a habit around actively planning, tracking, reflecting on, and sharing what I was reading. Notion has been a real game-changer for me on this front. I’ve shared a link at the bottom of this post to the template I created, so feel free to check that out and make it your own. More to come on this in the next post.

But without any further ado, here are my favourite books I read in 2021…

10. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

One Word Review: Wholehearted

The Slightly-Longer Review: 2021 was my experimental voyage into reading memoirs. I’ve never cared for the genre, but somehow a number of them have made it to my favourites list this year. Take a good storyteller, a great voice, and a dramatic retelling of all the crazy shenanigans you’ve got into and consider me a captive listener. I think McConaughey is a fantastic actor, but he’s always come across as a bit of a douchebag to me. This book reinforced that opinion in many ways, but it also drew me in to his warm heart and his Southern charm, and made me realize he’s actually a lot more eccentric (and philosophical) than I ever gave him credit for. A thoroughly entertaining read. BUMPER STICKER!

I highly recommend the audiobook if you decide to give this a shot. I devoured it in one sitting over a long flight.

9. Atomic Habits by James Clear

One Word Review: Helpful

The Slightly-Longer Review: One of the things I wanted to get better at last year was building stronger habits (like reading). In 2021, I made the decision to leave a job I worked at for the better part of a decade and nearly all my routines and habits were built around work and the office calendar. Heading into an unstructured (and unemployed) future terrified me for the sole reason that I no longer had anyone else to tell me where I needed to be or what I needed to be doing. There’s a lot in this book that might seem obvious once you read it—like breaking down tasks into chunks, focusing on building habits one at a time, etc.—but there’s a lot of practial tools and advice here that made the concepts immediately actionable. I’m not a regular customer in the aisle of better-yourself-self-helpy type of books, though I recommend checking this one out if you’re looking to start making some changes in life.

While I enjoyed listening to the audiobook (narrated by the author), I’m planning to pick up a physical copy to revisit some of the chapters again.

8. Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

One Word Review: Fascinating

The Slightly-Longer Review: If you’re like me, you’ll spend a good amount of time on a vacation in Hawaii wondering just how the hell people managed to find and settle on some tiny islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I’m glad Christina Thompson asked the same questions a few years earlier and decided to write a book about it to satisfy this curiosity. I love how this book is written, offering readers a variety of histories and beliefs about Polynesian seafarers, and through an intellectual narration that reads like a plot to a detective story, slowly uncovers what we best know about these far-flung specks of land and how they came to be inhabited by people. An incredible piece of research and storytelling that will leave you in awe and wonder.

Probably one of the more “niche” topics I’ve read about in recent years, but this book opened up a huge interest in books about epic sea voyages, island colonization, and the ethereal mysticism of ocean-based civilizations.

7. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

One Word Review: Magnificent

The Slightly-Longer Review: Talking about oceans, this was the first book to make me cry in 2021 (there were 3 others). Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel made me feel a nostalgia and pain for a life I never lived. The story is raw, devastating, yet hopeful, and the author cracks his heart open to his readers, bleeding beauty and poetry onto every single page of this novel. Maybe I just have a soft-spot for letters from children to their mothers, but reading this book felt like a punch to the gut, in a good way of course. Again, the audiobook is read by the author, and adds a personality and a pace to the text that would be hard to recreate by reading it myself.

6. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

One Word Review: Noir

The Slightly-Longer Review: I loved listening to this story mainly because of the Polish actress Beata Pozniak who narrated it. While it took me a second to get used to her accent at 1.25x speed, she inhabited her role as the protagonist Janina so seamlessley and so well that I felt completely transported to the tiny Polish village where the events of the book take place. The story is eerie, the setting sinister, with danger ever-looming, but the characters and plot line make this novel read more like satire or dark humour. This is my first time reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and it definitely won’t be the last.

Check out the film Spoor if you’d prefer watching a movie. It’s not nearly as good as the book, but still an enjoyable watch.

5. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

One Word Review: Beautiful

The Slightly-Longer Review: I’ve read 3 Carlo Rovelli books this year, and even though this is the shortest one at 96 pages, it’s definitely my favourite. As the title suggests, it’s a brief introduction to some of the most interesting concepts in post-Newtonian physics, from Einstein’s theory of relativity to quantum mechanics to black holes. I really appreciated that this was read by the author himself, a very sweet, very nerdy, very earnest Italian physicist who pulls you in to his poetic explanations of some of the most complex phenomena in our universe. The language and writing is super accessible. Even if you’re familiar with theoretical physics concepts, a good read!

Note: Another one of Rovelli’s books, The Order of Time, is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, which is a whole other audio experience all together. I can listen to BC tell me about quantum superpositions all day. Also a mind-bending book.

4. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

One Word Review: Meditative

The Slightly-Longer Review: Okay, so 2021 had got me feeling quite existential. A pandemic had been raging on for more than a year, I was about to leave the only job I’d ever had, and I was moving to a country I’d never visited before. A lot of books I picked up last year flirted with questions about the meaning of it all, finding purpose, mortality, etc., etc., and none offered me more clarity than this beautiful book by Paul Kalanithi—a neurosurgeon grappling with understanding the meaning of his life after discovering he had a terminal illness. It’s not the best written book by any means, but reading it made me feel a sense of calm and acceptance that I really needed last year.

Another book that might make you cry. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

3. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

One Word Review: Powerful

The Slightly-Longer Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates pens this essay to his son, using personal revelations from his life to offer a framework on American history, race, and moving through the world in a black body. One of the more powerful books I’ve encountered, and the audiobook narration by the author is worth checking out, even if you’ve already read the book. Between the World and Me is a masterclass in writing with heart, and baring one’s truth for the world (and their son) to learn from. So, so good.

2. Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

One Word Review: Brilliant

The Slightly-Longer Review: I have to thank my friend Simone Stolzoff for recommending this book, which ended up becoming one of the best novels I’ve read. Ayad Akhtar tells a story of belonging and identity in America in the wake of 9/11, a story so real and inspired by his personal life, that it blurs the line beautifully between fiction and reality. The writing reads like a memoir, with essays that are sharp, witty, and brimming with keen observation. Some of my favorite dialogues in the book are between the protagonist and his father, made even more memorable by the author who narrates the book with such passion, capturing beautifully the painful tensions that arise between immigrant parents and their first-generation American children. Haven’t read a book quite like this in a while.

1. The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina

One Word Review: Eye-opening

The Slightly-Longer Review: I can’t think of a book that has had a bigger impact on my world-view than The Outlaw Ocean. I picked up this book after reading Sea People, looking for books about grand ocean adventures and brave seafarers, but I wasn’t ready for the rabbit hole I was about to go down. Ian Urbina is a tremendous investigative journalist who travels the world reporting on the dark underbelly of oceanic outlaws—organizations and countries that exploit poorly regulated maritime laws and act with impunity while committing some of the most heinous crimes against humanity and the environment. This book opened my eyes to the shady practices of the global fishing industry, the rampant presence of sea slavery, and the destruction of natural ecosystems for profit among other terrible things that happen at sea. Some of the reporting is extremely tough to read, but it’s made me rethink many of my choices around things like the fish I consume that I wouldn’t necessarily have been conscious of if it weren’t for this book. Can’t recommend this enough.

Conclusion

One thing is for certain—audiobooks have been a game changer for me. Works that have been narrated by the authors themselves has been one of the best things for consuming literature (in my opinion) since the printed book. 8/10 books on this list are author-narrated and it gives a reader a whole new dimension for appreciating the nuances of storytelling.

As mentioned earlier, I used Notion to create a database to track the books I was reading. Feel free to duplicate and play with it if you find it useful! 👋

Free Notion Template → 📕 George’s 2021 Books