Get To Know Your Hosts - Ashtar's Fave Books of 2021 (and why 2021 was not a great year for books)

And oh, how the world turns. While 2020 was an incredible year for books and for me as a reader, 2021 was decidedly not.

I don’t know if part of it was reading burnout, but I had a hard time losing myself in books in 2021 and rarely did I find myself rapt by what I was reading. It was a rare moment I was desperate to gush at someone about a book I had just read. I walked away from 2021 with a very short list of books I loved and when I read back through the lists of the “Best of 2021” books, I find that most of them I never heard of or didn’t excite me enough to pick up.

Here are the books I loved in 2021 (many of them were not published in 2021):

Nonfiction/Essays/Memoir:

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

Giannis by Mirin Fader

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

Fiction:

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber

Long Division by Kiese Laymon