The Best Books Of 2021, According To Everyone
It's December, which means Best of 2021 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best books, albums, songs, TV shows and movies. You're welcome.
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The Best Books Of 2021
10. 'The Prophets' — Robert Jones Jr.
Although it's been classified as historical fiction, when it comes down to the heart and soul of this beautifully written debut novel by Robert Jones Jr., it's a love story at its core. Jones explores the forbidden romance between two enslaved boys — Isaiah and Samuel — in the Deep South, who find solace and safety in one another, despite their circumstances and the negative forces trying to tear them apart. Darkness becomes their best friend — the only time when they feel secure enough to strip away from their reality and come together as one. Told from multiple perspectives, Jones seamlessly intertwines names and themes from the Bible with the merciless treatment of enslaved people to bring readers a story that's equally uncomfortable as it is alluring.
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9. 'Crying In H Mart' — Michelle Zauner
Equal parts blisteringly honest and generously vulnerable, Zauner's chronicle of the ways in which Korean food — and her family heritage — pulled her back from the brink of despair after her mother's untimely cancer death became the year's must-read memoir for very good reason. A sad story has never been so impossible to put down.
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8. 'All That She Carried' — Tiya Miles
One untraceable day in the mid-19th century, a mother in South Carolina handed her 9-year-old daughter a cotton sack packed with a handful of treasures. They would never see each other again, separated by the man who owned them both and the brutal institution of slavery. In this book, Miles, a historian, explains how difficult it is to trace the path of this sack and of Rose, the mother who gave it, and Ashley, the sold-away daughter who carried it, through the years. The archives historians typically use to reconstitute the past contain almost no information about the lives of enslaved people. The sack itself, currently part of the collection at Middleton Place in South Carolina, near where Rose is believed to have lived, can tell its story only because Ashley's granddaughter embroidered the tale onto the fabric itself, creating an alternate archive made of ordinary domestic materials. This National Book Award winner is a beautiful and heartbreaking evocation of the stories history so often fails to tell.
[Slate]
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7. 'Intimacies' — Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura established herself as a master of cool disquiet with her 2017 breakout, "A Separation," a taut and cosmopolitan near-mystery about a young woman moving across the globe in search of her soon-to-be ex-husband, who has gone missing. Her fourth novel, Intimacies, is wholly set in the rainy municipality of The Hague, but its spirit is no less unmoored. The unnamed narrator is living in a city that does not feel like home, filling a temporary job as a translator in a war-crimes court and staying in the emptied apartment of a lover who may or may not be reconciling with his wife. There's more than a tinge of danger to the story, with war crimes and street violence playing a small part in the narrative, while messages encoded in Dutch art and libraries curated by interior designers enliven the book's intense interiority. Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized. As the narrator understands, "The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself."
[Vogue]
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6. 'The Love Songs Of W.E.B. Du Bois' — Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
"The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois," the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the "songs" of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, "Love Songs" creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.
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5. 'Klara And The Sun' — Kazuo Ishiguro
In Ishiguro's poignant, transporting fable, set in a dystopian future, a humanoid robot named Klara is purchased as a companion for a frail young girl. Her quest to learn the ways of friendship illuminates our deepest questions about life.
[People]
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4. 'Empire Of Pain: The Secret History Of The Sackler Dynasty' — Patrick Radden Keefe
The gifted storyteller and investigative journalist behind "Say Nothing" turns his attention to the Sackler family and its association with the potentially addictive pain medication OxyContin. Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence — interviews with more than 200 people, access to internal company documents and a review of tens of thousands of pages of court documents — and deploys it with prosecutorial precision. The book also benefits from his talent for capturing personalities, which is no small thing given that the Sacklers didn't provide access.
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3. 'Second Place' — Rachel Cusk
The first novel from Rachel Cusk after her celebrated Outline Trilogy, and somewhat like those great books, here is another consideration of art and responsibility, if slightly less abstracted, though just as probing of its characters. A mother has a revelation in a gallery and proceeds to detonate her world, her marriage, her future. It's a novel of ideas, as they say. But the kind that has you leaning forward, recognizing the places where a person's moral certainty and self image look fabricated.
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2. 'Crossroads' — Jonathan Franzen
"Crossroads," the captivating first novel in a new trilogy from Jonathan Franzen, opens on 23 December 1971, and tells the story of the Hildebrandt family, who live in the "Crappier Parsonage" in New Prospect, a suburb of Chicago. Franzen masterfully captures the complicated emotional fallout from household grudges, rivalries and insecurities.
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1. 'No One Is Talking About This' — Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood doesn't give a sh*t about the traditional novel or what anyone might want from it. She knows she can nab you with descriptions of the self-imposed suffocation of being Very Online before wringing your heart out with the tale of a dying infant. "No One Is Talking About This" flicks the Establishment in the face and giggles.
[Vulture]
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A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).