Top Five Books of 2021

LibraryThing's Top Five Books of the Year has returned! Please see our new blog post for each staff member's list of favorite reads from this past year.

What were your top five books for the year? We'd love to hear about them here, and also invite you to share them in our December List of the Month: Top 5 Books of 2021

In no particular order:

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
by H. G. Parry

Circe
by Madeline Miller

The Shadow and Bone Trilogy
by Leigh Bardugo

House in the Cerulean Sea
by TJ Klune

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Yes. I know that's more than five, it's the best I can do. Sorry

Edit:

I just finished a fantastic book, all of the books by this author are keepers

Doctors and Friends by Kimmery Martin

I had to add it I really didn't want to remove any of the others, so here we are.

* Prague Winter: a personal story of remembrance and war, by Madeleine Albright
* The Wild Silence, by Raynor Winn
* Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
* Heartland, by Sara Smarsh
* Late Migration, Margaret Renkl

Some years I could add up to 10 books. I wish you would allow that each year. Or maybe 5 and 5 runner ups.

I didn't have any 5*'s this year. These are the best 4*s that I read.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin
The Forest by Edward Rutherfurd
The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
Piranesi by Susanna Clark
Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson
And The Schoolmaster's Daughter by Jackie French

I had so many other good reads this year! But I'm going to leave this list as is.

>4 Micheller7:

How about 5 fiction and 5 non-fiction?

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Threads of Life: A History of the World through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter
House on Endless Waters by Emunah Elon
Have You Seen Luis Velez? by Catherine Ryan
The Way We Wed by Pat Warren

I'll be pretty surprised if any of my top 5 turn up on others' top 5 lists for the year.

A Voyage to Arcturus
Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World
Tales of Nevèrÿon
The Third Policeman
A Critique of Pure Tolerance

(The newest of them was first published in 1986.)

>9 paradoxosalpha: Maybe next year--A Voyage to Arcturus is nearing the top of my to-be-read pile.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Okla Hannali by R. A. Lafferty
The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
Peace by Gene Wolfe
The New Testament and the People of God by N. T. Wright

>10 JacobHolt:

Nice picks. I've read the first two, but still haven't gotten to Peace despite being a Wolfe fan.

Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
The Years by Annie Ernaux

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett
Execution by S J Parris
Death in the Dordogne by Martin Walker

>9 paradoxosalpha: If only I could have The Third Policeman unread again. What a joy to discover it for the first time again!

I've had a pretty high quality reading year, or maybe my standards have slipped, because I read four books this year that got 5 stars, and 11 books that got 4.5. Here's my top 5, in the order I read them:

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (fiction, read in January)
The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business by Wright Thompson (nonfiction essays, April)
The Survivors by Jane Harper (fiction, May)
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach (nonfiction, October)
Billy Summers by Stephen King (fiction, November)

>15 anglemark: I've recently enjoyed the wisdom of de Selby as revealed in this very book. Very weird book indeed!

It’s been a good reading year for me too; despite two eye surgeries, I’ve read or listened to over 120 so far. My picks are all fiction.

A Man With One of Those Faces - characters!! I wanted to follow each one introduced through their own story. Irish writers seem to excel in that.
The Once and Future Witches - by an up and coming fantasy writer. This is her second novel and proves she’s gotten control of the format. Check out her short stories.
A Doctor of the Old School - I cried my eyes out. I sobbed. Although it’s mostly in heavy Scottish dialect, it’s just the littlest bit hard to follow. But oh man! It packs a powerful emotion and at the same time has you snorting with laughter.
Nothing to See Here - low key coverage of a freaky phenomenon and the circumstances which allow the main character to find meaning in her life. Captures the genteel South of Tennessee nicely.
Mort - finally found it on audio and loved it.

Usually my top faves are novels but this year 2 nonfiction made it into my top reads:

1) Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

2) The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

3) White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm (who has earned his way into my favorite authors list this year)

4) Foucault and Neoliberalism by Daniel Zamora

5) When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

My top picks of books read in 2021:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows- uniquely told in the form of letters, heartwarming, historical fiction
2. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch- a great memoir about what is important in life
3. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg- part memoir, part uncomfortable history, you get caught up in the lives of the characters
4. Piranesi by Susannah Clark- a most unusual book, creative, and it takes you along for an enjoyable ride
5. Of Mice and Men or Cannery Row by John Steinbeck- great descriptive writing, explores the human condition, classics

in random appearance and for different reasons:
Spoorloos by Fleur Bourgonje (trackless,missing)
Meisje van glas by Frank Gunning (girl of glass/glass girl)
Graaf in Moskou - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
De acht bergen - The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti
Oorlog en Vrede - War and Paece by Lev Nikolajevitsj Tolstoj

A couple of people have managed to add more than 5 books.

What an interesting thread. I do enjoy reading other people's choices. Here are mine.
1. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
2. Careless People: Murder and Mayhem and the invention of 'The Great Gatsby' by Sarah Churchwell.
3.The Lost Man by Jane Harper.
4. Where the Crawdads sing by Delia Owens.
5. The Black House( Book 1 of The Lewis Trilogy) by Peter May

I'm happy to see this list up before Christmas this year, so that I could buy myself appropriate gifts.

Seriously, I pretty much only read used books so I am at least two years behind everyone else. But thanks to the list, I bought myself Piranesi and The Prophets brand new at a bookstore that is closing near me. So thanks to whoever got this up so quickly!

>24 vwinsloe: You're only two years behind? Wow. Most of the books I read weren't published in this millennium! Looking through my notes, the only book I've read this year that's less than five years old is Neil Gaiman's Art Matters.

>25 PawsforThought: When I was young I once met a man browsing books in the city library in Strängnäs, who was very impressed with me for reading science fiction. He lived in a sailing boat (at least in summer) with his typewriter and his two hundred most treasured books, living on savings and spending his time translating medieval Persian poetry into Swedish and reading. He had decided that reading had to be chronological, and he hadn't yet made it out of Antiquity. He must have been in his late fifties or early sixties, so he would be dead now, I suppose.

>26 anglemark: Holy cow. That’s absolutely wild. Using that metric, no one would ever be able to make it past even the 1800’s.

And now I kind of want to watch a TV series about a guy who lives on a boat and spends his time reading and translating poetry. Sort of like a more literary version of “Snoken”.

>27 PawsforThought: I can't promise that he wasn't pulling a young student's leg, of course, but he sounded serious. We spoke for half an hour.

Well one silver lining to this year is that I managed to read more than previous years, up by 10% or so to 115 books with a couple of weeks still to go! (why do people do best of lists before the time period has ended?!)

Top rated - at the time - are:
Robert Galbraith not all of them, but several of the series made 5*. I didn't read them when the hype was new, have watched the TV series, and remain impressed by them.
dune the classic, but a re-read before the film proves that it remains so for very good reasons. (and the film is pretty too).
A gamer's wish which was one of the very few bundled ebooks to ever rate 5*. It will only appeal to a certain type of reader, but if you fit that demographic it's great. Liek pready player one but DnD rather than computer games. My introduction to the niche-genre of LitRPG. A lot of fun.
Finding Fire and Other Stories the conclusion to the series, a new look at our favourite character's sidekicks and a proper epilogue to round the whole thing off. The entire series is great, and I'm not saying that just because I know the author and helped beta-read them, they really are well written addition to YA/near future SF, and occasionally scarily accurate.
Record of a space born few Chambers' wonderful heart-warming SF. Glowing characters who you can really empathise with. Nothing dark or grim anywhere near, yet manages not to be fluffy either.

Special Mention to the other 2 5* form hit year
Century Rain It's dark noir crime, but actually SF incredibly well done and inventive. Remain great many years on and special marks for being a standalone.
in an absent dream the best of the novellas about children who can find (once!) a doorway somewhere else. Full of friendship, wonderful and achingly sad.

>25 PawsforThought:. I'm glad that I'm not the absolute last to read things. One of the benefits of being behind, I think, is that many of the things that get rave reviews for the first year or two don't stand the test of time. Although everything that you read that is older may not resonate with your particular taste, I think that you do have a chance of reading higher quality books if you don't keep current. Just my opinion after watching most 5 star reads in year one turn into 2.5 or 3 star reads a few years out.

>30 vwinsloe: That’s very true. So many things that people can’t stop talking about one year they have barely any memory of a few years later. Not that that’s the reason why I’m so late at reading things, I just am more drawn to books that are older.

I admit to voluntarily reading some trashy older stuff too.

32 Yes, but they are still generally superiorly written than a lot of the current stuff.

>33 2wonderY: hahaha

>31 PawsforThought:. I loved Ursula LeGuin's explanation of the Amazon BS machine effect, and think that it is pretty true.

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/99-up-the-amazon-with-the-bs-machine

>35 vwinsloe: Ursula Le Guin was a very wise woman.

This was a very good reading year for me. Early in the year I read De meeste mensen deugen, which changed my view of what humans are like and what some famous experiments actually show. Just that one would have made it a good year.
Then The master and his emissary found me, after it had been on my wishlist for almost ten years, and it really blew me away. It connected almost all my books. It showed me the system in my interests. It made me see both the message of the books I have read and my own reaction to them more clearly. And then I found that its writer, Iain McGilchrist, had a new book coming out, The matter with things. I'm pretty sure the last time I bought a book right when it was released was in 2007, so it definitely is not a habit of mine, but I could not resist. Yes, it is a monster of a book, about 3000 pages, but I think it's even better than The master and his emissary. It is definitely my favorite for this year, and probably for the next years as well.
Oh, and I discovered Lisa Aisato. Such beautiful, touching, humorous, loving drawings.

>35 vwinsloe: Thank you for sharing that article by le Guin. It was written in 2015 but is still so applicable (maybe more so) today. It highlights why I never trust commercial "best of the year" lists and why I love the Top Five Books Read this Year from LibraryThing. It's a great way to fuel my reading list for the next year.

I use the public library for most of my reading material, so it's actually to my advantage to get books that are no longer "hot titles" because they're available right off the shelf, without a long "waiting list" like when they're first released. And as people have mentioned in this thread, you're more likely to get some quality books, not just what's most hyped at this moment.

>38 LDVoorberg:. You're welcome. I feel exactly the same way.

My Top 5 Favorites for 2021

Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatahil

Pax, Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker

Matrix by Laura Goff

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

In order to be sure of being Cool, I always do whatever >40 jnwelch: does, so...
MY TOP 5 READS OF 2021

1. Cove by Cynan Jones — this was the book I wanted The Old Man and the Sea to be, but it wasn't.

2. The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine — beautiful book about Love When One is Old. Gorgeous writing, as expected.

3. Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots — sheer perfection for the superhero-weary story-obsessed pop culturist.

4. Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby — bitter the tears of a father who can no longer make it right with his dead, gay son.

5. Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray — splendid reimagining of Beauty and the Beast that confronts the extreme damage homophobia does.

>41 richardderus:. 😅. Go Hench! And I want to read Razorblade Tears.

>40 jnwelch: >41 richardderus: I wanna be cool like you guys, so...

The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free by Paulina Bren

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

My top five for 2021 which are not re-reads are:

The Conductors
The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
The Last Graduate
The Witness for the Dead

If I were to go with re-reads:

All Systems Red
Ancillary Justice
The Book of Atrix Wolfe
Grendel
Riding Shotgun

Would rank above or equal to this year's new reads.

After reading (listening to) 101 books this year my top 5 are

The Betrayers, David Bezmozgis
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, John Le Carré
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Thirteen ways of looking, Colum McCann
Apeirogon, Colum McCann

>43 NarratorLady: Oh, you read The Barbizon! It was on my wishlist but I wasn't gifted it...maybe later this year. I'm always pleased when someone like Sriracha and Lt. Uhura (from Convenience Store Woman) better than I did. It deserves good attention!

>43 NarratorLady: Richard, The Barbizon was especially fascinating since I stayed there aeons ago in its waning days as a ladies’ hotel. (You could imagine the ghosts wandering the halls. Now I realize who some of the ghosts were!) Sylvia Plath’s experience during her summer there as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine is told in some detail. Since I’ve never read The Bell Jar, it’s now on my list.
Isn’t it grand when one book leads you to another that you might otherwise have missed?

>47 NarratorLady: It is, it is, the grandest thing ever is discovery, and I am nerdy enough to enjoy the extra fillip of finding a book from reading a book.

This is always tough, and I might change my mind.

Fiction:

In a Dark Wood Wandering, by Hella S. Haasse
Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman
Vita, by Melania Mazzucco
The Magician, by Colm Tóibín
Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Alberto Urrea

Non-fiction:

The Writing of the Gods: the race to decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick
‘Dangerous Work’: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Winter Pasture: one woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders, by Li Juan
All that She Carried: the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake, by Tiya Miles
Chicago's Great Fire: the Destruction and resurrection of an iconic American city, by Carl Smith

Fiction:
Gereon Rath, by Volker Kutscher
Ich weiß, warum der gefangene Vogel singt, Was für immer mir gehört and Nur mit meiner Stimme, by Maya Angelou
Zwei Herren am Strand, by Michael Köhlmeier
Die Anomalie, by Hervé Le Tellier
Den Hund überleben, by Stefan Hornbach

Nonfiction:
Das weibliche Kapital, by Linda Scott
Scale : Die universalen Gesetze des Lebens von Organismen, Städten und Unternehmen, by Geoffrey West
Was, wenn wir einfach die Welt retten? : Handeln in der Klimakrise, by Frank Schätzing
H wie Habicht, by Helen Macdonald
Über selbstbestimmtes Sterben : Zwischen Freiheit, Verantwortung und Überforderung, by Heinz Rüegger

My top 5 (and I'll cheat because I'm including 2 full trilogies hehe):

* The Tide child trilogy by R.J. Barker
* The Daevabad trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty
* Infernal battalion, the last book of Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns series (I read the others in 2020)
* The unbroken by C.L. Clark
* Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

My top 6 7 (I feel I can do that because three four are not full-length books:

Top 3 full-length books of 2021 (in order read):

News of the World by Paulette Jiles - historical fiction
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - science/social justice
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - scifi

Top 3 4 Novellas/Short Stories/Other Shorts of 2021 (in order read):

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells - Murderbot. (Need I say more?*)
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire - YA fantasy
Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente - mythic fantasy
Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell - wonderful!

*OK, I will say just a little more. It was not my favorite the first time I read it. It wasn't my favorite the second time I read it as an audiobook. However, as I was rereading it last night (for comfort) and laughing/grinning a lot, I realized I love this novella and it is now a favorite.

ETA Fugitive Telemetry and to make a few other changes.

>52 Storeetllr: Coming up for air just now from Project Hail Mary. Thanks to the gods for Andy Weir!

>53 2wonderY: It was pretty fantastic, wasn't it?! I found the lack of any swear words - or even euphemisms - astonishing. Quite a change from The Martian. I read the book on Kindle, and I'm planning to listen to the audio version this year.

It’s on Audible. The character and his discovery process are wonderful. He even reflects on his tame language.

>55 2wonderY: Yes, it's on my Audible Wish List, up toward the top of the rather long list.

>52 Storeetllr: My *story is a bit embarrassing - When I read All Systems Red I was already very much a Martha Wells fan and thought she was much overlooked though not underrated by those who knew and rated it a mere 3.5. It seemed to take a bit long to get to its point, though later reads have shown me it got there rather solidly in its first run on sentence and the remainder is elaboration.

>57 quondame: I can identify, Susan. I always enjoy the books first time through, some more than others, but it's on reread that I come to a full appreciation of all the sly humor, economy of Wells' prose, and depth of characterization in those books. I'm really going to have to read some of her other stuff.

My first encounter with Wells' work was off-putting. I did not enjoy her contribution to The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft. At the same time, I could see that she was a capable writer. I just thought that story was a somewhat painful attempt to fuse incompatible elements, and it also seemed to take for granted certain appetites on the reader's part that were not part of the general expectations set up by the book. I started in on the Murderbot Diaries last month, and I'm finding them admirable and fun.

>59 paradoxosalpha: I read an anthology with works by Tad Williams, Bernard Cromwell and many others and every single story in it was dreadful, as if someone had taken something each author had penned under deadline while hungover and meant to throw away but somehow got submitted to an editor with a grudge against all the contributors. I haven't read anything by either since, so it worked.

The cover of The Cloud Roads captured my attention on the new book shelf at my favorite local library, and I not only followed that series but went back to earlier novels. I think she continues to improve.

Mine are mostly fiction, but a non-fic pick got in at the end because it was so enchanting and I loved it to bits -

Underwater Wild by Craig Foster
A Good Family by A.H. Kim
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (second time on the top five)
A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

True Grit by Charles Portis
Histoires désobligeantes by Léon Bloy
Denier du Rêve by Marguerite Yourcenar
Trashed by Backderf
Les Royaumes de Borée by Jean Raspail

I appear to have read no book-length fiction in 2021. A non-fiction top five may be:

Ancient China and Its Enemies
The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha
Imagining Mars
Rome and the Enemy
Eight Banners and Green Flag

Another year with a lot of East Asian reading, as may be obvious. Looking at the wishlist, 2022 may have a more European focus.

Challenging exercise! I came up with:

Em by Kim Thuy
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Singer's Gun byu Emily St. John Mandel

My top book is actually a series of books so I'll just put down the first book:

Widdershins by Jordan Hawk

I loved this series so much that I've read it multiple times throughout the course of 2021 since discovering it.

*edited*

I went back and looked and apparently read the series while quarantined over Christmas 2020. However, I did re-read the series multiple times during 2021, so I guess I'll leave it as it is.

>67 Jenson_AKA_DL: Hi, Jenine! It's been ages since we've talked. Where are you living now on LT? I'm staying in the Green Dragon for now. If you love it enough to reread it over and over, I'm definitely going to check out that series! (My current comfort read that I've reread over and over is The Goblin Emperor. Not a lot of magic, but it's just magical. I love it!)

Better late than never?
(Considering the connections between Talk and Lists)

- The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
- M Train by Patty Smith
- Juicy Ghosts by Rudy Rucker
- Mislaid by Nell Zink
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck

>69 dhm: So these are your top books for 2021? Or 2022?

>69 dhm: 2021; I just went back and consulted that list, in order to tie off this starred topic. It's pointless, I realize, but since I had the topic still in bold I thought I'd complete it :)

It also got me to re-look up how to do the html titles, so actually not pointless...

>71 dhm:

It also got me to re-look up how to do the html titles

You don't actually need to use html. You can create a touchstone by putting single square brackets around the title and double square brackets around the author.

>68 Storeetllr: I'm so sorry I missed your message (almost a year ago). I went through a period when I didn't get on LT so much but I've been on here a bit more lately. Oddly, I'm once again re-reading the same series I was talking about in my post and started Stormhaven (3rd book of the series) again last night LOL

>73 Jenson_AKA_DL: Hey, Jenine! Somehow I missed your message from February, so you aren't alone. My LT Talk time is hit and miss too, but I love it for keeping track of my reading. At my age, I sometimes forget I've read a book a month later. It's good to be able to go back and check. I never got into that series for some reason. I think I tried the first book but wasn't able to get into it for some reason. Probably my mood at the time. I'll have to try it again.

>74 Storeetllr: I'm constantly forgetting books. Sometimes I'll just scroll through my library or reviews just to see what I've read and a lot of the time I don't have any recollection I've read it (even with the review LOL)!

Widdershins (series in general) is just an ongoing re-read at this point. I remember that it just really grew on me throughout the series and now I just love the series as a whole.

>75 Jenson_AKA_DL: Murderbot Diaries is my ongoing reread for fun and comfort series. Also the innkeepers Chronicles.