Every Book I Read in 2021 Reviewed in One Sentence
I’ve been racking my brain for a productive way to convey the highs and lows of the reading experiences I’ve had so far this year. It was so freeing when I realized that there was absolutely no one holding me accountable for full-fledged essays. I’m done creating unnecesary barriers to writing about things I enjoy. Here are all the books I’ve read this year reviewed in one sentence.
January
Dune
So this is where Tatooine comes from, which means I’m now obligated to watch a Timothée Chalamet movie to honor science fiction’s glorious tradition of magical space twinks from sand planets.
February
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
After I read How to Be an Antiracist this was the logical next step.
The Vanishing Half
A family saga this rich deserves pages and pages of love, but I am content to say that it joins a great literary tradition of books on racial passing and impresses on its reader the ferocity of a colorist world.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie, sweetie, maybe the problem is men.
March
The Only Good Indians
I think I’m afraid of elk now.
It
Some say that Stephen King is a pervert for writing little kid sex; I say he’s a coward, a sexist, and a homophobe for not letting the Losers Club all have a proper orgy.
Kafka on the Shore
This novel is perfectly balanced — Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old, fills me with rage, and then Nakata, who can speak to cats, calms me down again.
May
The Lost Apothecary
The ideal book for any woman who’s ever considered poisoning a man.
The Fellowship of the Ring
This sated my desperate need for Tolkien while allowing me to ignore the fact that I started reading The Silmarillion in 2020.
Anthropocene Reviewed
So I’m just crying about scratch and sniff stickers at work now?
June
Left Hand of Darkness
I went from vibrating with excitement over non binary aliens to shaking in tears at the ending.
Great Expectations
Any expectations I had for Pip dwindled with his half-hearted loyalty, but Abel Magwitch never once let me down.
Persuasion
It was a sweet little journey, this romance, but Louisa cracking her little head occupies my mind most of all.
Treasure Island
Wow — Treasure Planet really did rip this book plot point for plot point.
The Turn of the Screw
It was nice to read the source material after having so thoroughly enjoyed The Haunting of Bly Manor, but I dearly missed the lesbian romance of which I’d grown so fond.
Call of the Wild
If you’ve ever read a book from the point of view of a dog, you know that they are all of a kind, but at least this book has the benefit of calling itself the OG.
The Two Towers
The Battle of Helm’s Deep? The Last March of the Ents? Legendary battles both and I still don’t have to read The Silmarillion to experience them.
July
The Heart of Darkness
The colonizer gets his just desserts, but I’m not sure Joseph Conrad was precisely aiming for justice.
Annihilation
A healthy reminder that grief can sometimes feel just like turning into a mushroom.
Brave New World
It is a profound feat of writing that Huxley somehow manages to make casual sex sound tedious yet crazed.
Stranger in a Stranger Land
Nothing, not even reading Brave New World directly before this, could have prepared me for the polyamorous implications.
Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
Now I can say with some measure of certainty: All that glitters is not gold (it’s lately-acquired and quickly-traded cryptocurrency).
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Thank God that this had diagrams or else I might not have understood why I was laughing so hard.
August
Silas Marner
Maybe the real treasure was the baby girl who replaced our gold and became our adopted family along the way.
The Return of the King
I bawled as usual and who would have guessed it — I still wasn’t reading The Silmarillion!
Jane Eyre
This dude still sucks though… ?
Platero and I
I did not expect to cry over a donkey.
A Tale of Two Cities
My reading experience improved with each additional attempt by Mr. Lorry to convince someone he was an austere man of business.
September
The Feast of the Goat
Living under a Trump presidency really fueled my glee at the dictator character pissing his pants.
The Time Machine
We really have been predicting bleak futures for ourselves for hundreds of years.
The Silmarillion
Mr. Tolkien, please stop describing topography to me and go back to hyperfixating on these trashy elves whose names all begin with F.
To The Lighthouse
Is it worth the girlboss moment if I was bored to tears the entire time?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I root for Huck’s moral fiber at every turn and yes I do want to strangle Tom Sawyer, and Twain’s comical tone shines through it all.
Crying in H Mart
If you are a mixed race kid then you need to read this to brace yourself for some of this same inevitable grief.
The Sound and The Fury
This whole family is awful concerned with the purity of Caddy for folks who do so little to ensure that her life has any damn stability.
October
I, Claudius
And you thought you had family drama.
Pasadena
An epic book so will-they-won’t-they that you become sick of the characters and pray that they both end up miserable.
November
Cat’s Cradle
I truly wish that dangerous technology in the hands of disconnected powerful people was an alien concept to me, but tragically it hit real close to home.
A Wizard of Earthsea
Yeah I see why JKR decided to steal ideas from this book; it’s dope.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
One of the most devout times in my life was when I was a tween battling with internal atheism that I didn’t want and navigating newfound adolescence; Blume continues to strike a chord across generations of confused little girls.
December
This is How You Lose the Time War
I picked this book up for a good bit of sci-fi, and was delighted with a cute love story.
Star Trek: The Q Conflict
The perfect graphic novel for folks who spend their time building elite Star Trek crews in their head (me).
The Bean Trees
A quaint tale of striving to get by, motherhood and its travails, and an homage to the Southwestern United States all wrapped in one.
