2021 Book List

It's popular to set a reading goal for the year (e.g. "1 book a week", "22 books in 2022", etc.), but a few years ago, I realized that this took the joy away from reading. All that said, 2021 was a great year for books. I read 48 books in 2021, which doesn't break my personal record (52 books in 2018), but still edged out 2019 (47).

Like most years, 2021 brought a mix of celebrity memoirs, historical/contemporary fiction books, nonfiction books on subjects I find interesting, every Jenna's Book Club pick (I haven't read the December 2021 selection yet), recommendations from family, and whatever caught my eye at the library when I didn't already have something to pick up. I've indicated my favorites / those that stuck with me in bold, but really enjoyed most of these. Looking forward to all of the books I'll read in 2022 (already on my third!).

Memoirs: No Time Like the Future (Michael J. Fox), Everything Beautiful in its Time (Jenna Bush Hager), The Answer Is ... (Alex Trebek), Bravey (Alexei Pappas), You Look So Much Better in Person (Al Roker), The Bassoon King (Rainn Wilson), Out of Many, One (George W. Bush), My Life in Full (Indra Nooyi)

Nonfiction: Ronald Reagan & Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (Nicholas Wapshott), All The Rage - Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership (Darcy Lockman), The Secret Life of Groceries (Benjamin Lorr), The Mercury 13 (Martha Ackmann), The Poisoned City (Anna Clark), Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper), *I Heard You Paint Houses (Charles Brandt)

* I Heard You Paint Houses was the basis for the 2019 movie The Irishman and based on a long series of interviews with Frank Sheeran. While I classified this as nonfiction (everyone in the book was a real person), it is still not clear exactly what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

Jenna's Book Club picks: Black Buck (Mateo Askaripour), Send for Me (Lauren Fox), The Four Winds (Kristin Hannah), What's Mine and Yours (Naima Coster), Good Company (Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney), Malibu Rising (Taylor Jenkins Reid), Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead), The Turnout (Megan Abbott), Beautiful Country (Qian Julie Wang), The Lincoln Highway (Amor Towles), The Family (Naomi Krupitsky)

Historical fiction: The Only Woman in the Room (Marie Benedict), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid), The Forest of Vanishing Stars (Kristin Harmel), The Ophelia Girls (Jane Healey), Firefly Lane (Kristin Hannah), Ladies of the Secret Circus (Constance Sayers)

Classics + childhood favorites: East of Eden (John Steinbeck), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)

Contemporary fiction: Milk Fed (Melissa Broder), Gold Diggers (Sanjena Sathian), How Lucky (Will Leitch), Make Up, Break Up (Lily Menon), Much Ado About You (Samantha Young), The Midnight Library (Matt Haig), The Love Proof (Madeleine Henry), The Hive (Melissa Scholes Young), We Were Never Here (Andrea Bartz), The Wife Upstairs (Rachel Hawkins), The Plot (Jean Hanff Korelitz), Party Crasher (Sophie Kinsella), Apples Never Fall (Liane Moriarty), People We Meet on Vacation (Emily Henry)