This has been a great reading year for me: I am currently finishing my 149th book and there’s more than a day still to go! This is a lot of books even for me and this outcome is mostly down to two factors: 1) the first months of 2021 being slightly less insane on the work front than usual, and 2) me discovering audiobooks, which added a significant amount to my ‘reading time’.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be that great a year if all those books I read were terrible, but they weren’t (yay!). I found it really hard to narrow down my favourites to twelve and I will do separate lists for fiction, non-fiction and SFF, as there are many other books I would like to highlight – especially as I haven’t been doing my monthly round-ups in 2021. So here we go, in random order:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. I put off reading this for more than a year, as I was afraid I would not like it. And I understand why I was wary, as it’s a strange, slow and unglamorous story. It is also absolutely brilliant, however, and so refreshing, if you have been spending too much time with contemporary Anglo-American literature. We follow an eccentric older woman in the Polish countryside, as she is translating Blake, being obsessed with astrology and investigating the murders in her tiny village. This is no Miss Marple, though, and you must be ready for an uncategorisable, unique experience.

Summerbook, by Tove Jansson. Incidentally, this also has an elderly woman as the protagonist (and I put off reading this one for even longer), but that’s pretty much the only thing the two books have in common. Here, we are on a Finnish island with a grandmother and her granddaughter. Not much happens, but life, love and nature are beautifully observed. It’s simply wonderful and one of those books that I cannot see anyone disliking. Perfect for summer.

Assembly, Natasha Brown. This is a gut-punch of a book about race and class in today’s Britain. It is 112 pages, but its impact per page ratio is very high. I value conceptual clarity in my books and here Brown takes her message (or her metaphor?) to the logical conclusion with no sentimentality or mercy.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi’s Homegoing was my favourite book of 2017 and this is equally good, although different. Where Homegoing was sweeping, ambitious in scope both in terms of the time span and the characters, Transcendent Kingdom dedicates a full book to what would have been a chapter in Homegoing. There is an overlap in themes, though – family, race, trauma, roots, and most centrally in Transcendent Kingdom, addiction. Faith plays a prominent role as well, in particular by being lost. I have a slight preference for Homegoing, but I found Transcendent Kingdom hard to put down, despite its difficult themes.

Where the Wild Ladies Are, by Aoko Matsuda. I read many good short story collections this year, but in the end picked Matsuda’s dark but delightful (and very loose) retellings of Japanese folktales. As is often the case in Japanese literature, the atmosphere is rather weird and you aren’t entirely sure if you do in fact understand what’s happening, but the stories are also fun and and magical and put women front and center. The collection improves as it goes on, as the stories are connected and build on each other, increasing their impact.

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, by Akwaeke Emezi. This one is a good bridge from fiction to non-fiction: although a memoir in letters, it often reads like a novel and covers a lot of the same ground with Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater. It was a shockingly good debut, but Dear Senthuran is even better. I was so stunned by it that after I finished listening to it, I went and immediately read it on paper, too. It’s about gender, body, identity, heritage, writing and many other things and would probably require every single  trigger warning known to (wo)man. Emezi’s larger than life talent makes it all work, although if you are a conventional person, I do not recommend it. PS Emezi is also the only person who could have had two books on this list, with The Death of Vivek Oji also a strong contender.

ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, by Angela Chen. This was perhaps my biggest surprise of the year and another one I went through twice. I absolutely adored this book and found it hugely enlightening. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in how relationships and sex are constructed, no matter where you are on the asexual-allosexual spectrum. While it tells you a lot about how our societies function, it also works perfectly well as an introduction to asexuality, illustrated with diverse experiences of real people.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Pérez. No surprise here – I knew I should have read it a long time ago and I was right. This is an accessible, well-written and well-researched overview of how little we know about women and how that is harming us every day, even without any bad bad intentions. While the contents are often enraging, Pérez remains balanced and often much nicer than I would be able to. Required reading.

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, by Akala. Talking about patriarchy – I DO have a man on the list and I am happy to announce that this is purely a merit based decision. As I have written a full review of this one, I will not go into details, but it’s such a great take on race, class and colonialism.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This is a gorgeously and movingly written book about plants, nature and different kinds of knowledge. Kimmerer is a biology professor and loves science, which makes her openness to the indigenous traditions of America especially poignant. It is not a sad book as such, but I welled up repeatedly when I read this. There is also a paragraph about rain in a forest that is my favourite piece of nature writing of recent years – and I have read some damn fine nature writing during that time.

Network Effect, by Martha Wells. Finally, some fun, after all this crying and rage. I am an old, pre-Murderbot fan of Martha Wells and love her writing and her brain (she put older women in books before it was a thing!). If you are not familiar with Murderbot, it is an AI designed to, well, kill rather effectively. Since hacking its governing module, however, it has mostly been watching soap operas, until it is forced into action. Anyway, there have by now been five Murderbot novellas and Network Effect is the first full-length novel, which also happens to be better than any of the novellas (which are rather good themselves). So I’m afraid that if you haven’t yet, you now must go and read the shorter stories about our misogynistic friend, to be able to properly appreciate the novel.

A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine. I have a huge crush on Martine since she published her first book, A Memory Called Empire. This is the sequel and I liked it even more than the first one in the series. Martine writes exactly the kind of SF I like, a bit in the same vein with Ann Leckie – lots of focus on complex worldbuilding, politics, and the functioning of empires, the implications of technology rather then technology in itself (although always including some cool stuff) and interesting gender/sexual dynamics. This is in theory a first contact story, but the power play within the empire is where the real action is. There is also one of the best sex scenes I’ve ever read. [I have just realised that both of my SFF favourites are parts of a series, so let me also include a shout-out to Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary – a fun, heartwarming and accessible stand-alone.]

Have you read any of these and if so, what did you think? And please tell me your favourite reads of 2021!

PS I apologise for the poor visual – I don’t have my books with me in Estonia, so had to improvise.