Best Books I Read in 2021:
This year I read 75 books. These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).
1. The Left-Handed Booksellers by Garth Nix (2020) HarperCollins
The first book I put on this list didn't come until the end of the first week of February. I read good books, but none of them quite turned the key.
This book is an interesting twist on urban fantasy and mystery. The story takes place in London where a young art student goes to visit her 'uncle' only to find herself thrust into a war of sorts where left-handed booksellers are authorized to kill fantastical creatures posing as humans. Only it turns out that the young woman has some fantastical connections of her own.
2.
The Boy, The Mole, the Fox and the Horse by
Charlie Mackesy (2019) HarperOne
This was a difficult choice only because I also read so many other good books in March. But this one stands out. It's a Jonathon Livingston Seagull for this generation. A simple feel-good book that could not have had better timing than to come out at the beginning of the pandemic. It encourages self-worth, and a feeling that no matter what we face, we can go on.
3. The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin (2015) Orbit
I have read much less Science Fiction on the past few years and have missed out. This is a fantastic, complicated book that deserved getting the Hugo and the Nebula.
On a planet, much like Earth, maybe it is Earth, where the continents have drifted back into one giant land, there are still changes that occur. The people on this planet call the times that last after a change, anywhere from months to years, seasons. Most settlements last only through one season. The capital of the empire has lasted through four such seasons. People with special abilities are shunned and recruited by the capital and trained to use their abilities to try to stave off earthquakes. The main heroine is one such person. We follow her in three different timelines: as a child, as a four-ring practitioner, and as a refugee. In the middle timeline, she is paired with a ten-ring practitioner, almost unheard-of, as her mentor and is ordered to bear his child. He is less than cooperative. They are sent to a city on the coast to clear coral from a harbor. She finds an artifact blocking the harbor. Trying to move it, she raises it and doing so destroys the city. She and her mentor find themselves transported to an island where life seems idyllic, and they can raise their child. But the empire finds them. In the third timeline, our heroine feels the start of another season and escapes as a refugee. She is reunited with her mentor on his deathbed. He has started the fifth season and wants her to finish what he started and destroy the empire.
4. The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern (2011) Doubleday
This is an urban low fantasy. There are no elves, no trolls, no orcs, no hobbits. But there is magic and illusion. Two very old magicians have an ongoing game they play with other people’s lives. Each finds a special child with inherent abilities. They adopt the child and train them. Once the bet is placed, each child receives a ring, which burns itself into their finger. Neither will be introduced to the other. In this case, the venue becomes a circus which opens at night. Those people who are involved with the circus find that they have become virtually frozen at the age they were when they first agreed to conceive and build the circus. But they are not immortal. One of the contestants enhances his own looks to make himself seem ordinary and serves as the assistant to the circus proprietor, who is not one of the magicians. The other, a superb illusionist has her own act in one tent of the circus. Each think that it is their work that sustains the circus. Little by little they recognize that the other contestant is making changes and additions to the circus. For years, this is how they compete. Eventually they find each other and go beyond mere introduction to becoming lovers. The problem is that there is only one way for a contestant to win. The other must die.
5. Tears of Amber by Sofia Segovia (2021) Amazon Crossing (english translation)
A group of people are thrown together during World War II in East Prussia, what is now the far-western Russian oblast of Kalingrad. A Polish man and a Polish woman are sent as slaves to help on a German farm. A second German family is torn apart by the enforced enlistment of the father. The history of the war works out its tragedy amongst these innocent bystanders just trying to survive a terrible time in history. But you will not forget it.
6. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021) Knopf (7/26)
Klara is an Artificial Friend who longs to be picked by a young girl. She resides in a store where the manager tells her how to do her best to represent the store and other artificial friends. She receives nourishment from the sun (she is solar powered) and while in a storefront window, watches a homeless man sit each day with his dog across the street. One day, neither the homeless man nor his dog rise and Klara is afraid they are dead. But when the sun comes out the next day, they rise and seem to be better than before. A machine is parked in front of the store that produces terrible pollution. When it is moved, Klara sees the homeless man become reunited with a woman as they embrace.
When Klara is picked, the girl who asked for her, Josie, is a 'lifted' youngster (genetically edited) who has trouble with her health. From Josie's room, Klara observes the sun sets, goes to rest, on the far side of the field in a barn. Josie has a friend, Rick, who is not lifted, but is brilliant with drones. They play and squabble. But Josie's health gets worse. Klara comes up with a plan to ask the sun to heal Josie with his special restorative nutrition. So she travels to the barn with Rick's help. She offers to destroy the pollution machine in exchange for Josie's improved health.
The family, including Klara go into the city for Josie's 'portrait' where Klara discovers it is a replacement artificial friend body that upon Josie's death is to become a new body for Klara. Klara is convinced that her bargain with the sun will result in a healthy Josie. She finds the pollution machine and with the help of Josie's father, takes some of her own lubricant and pours it into the exhaust of the machine, disabling it. Now Klara plans to watch the sun restore Josie. But Josie does not get better.
While the family surround Josie, expecting her to die at any moment, odd weather comes through the area where the family lives. Klara suddenly gets everyone to go into Josie's room and she open's the blinds so that the sun floods the room. Josie sits up and says she is feeling better. Klara's sacrifice has not been in vain.
Josie eventually gets well enough to go off to college.
The book ends with the manager finding Klara in a storage yard, discarded, but spending her time reminiscing her time with Josie.
This is a tour-de-force of writing. Ishiguro has a simple style that flows very swiftly and makes the story amazing. You won't forget Klara.
7. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman (2015) Atria Books (8/5)
Backman’s masterpiece – almost eight-year-old Elsa loves her grandmother, and her grandmother loves her back fiercely. Her grandmother is an odd duck who tells fairy tales from the land of almost asleep and defends Elsa like no one else. But her grandmother is sick and dies. Elsa is given a quest to deliver letters, which she must find to the people who live in her building. She finds out it really is her building because her grandmother owned it and left it to her.
We meet people who were rescued by the grandmother when they were just children, except for one woman who was rescued after a tsunami killed her husband and two sons. There is Wolfheart who is a warrior who doesn’t like to fight. There is Britt-Marie, who took care of Elsa’s mother while her grandmother was off saving other people. There is a set of brothers who were both in love with the same woman. There is a family taking care of their grandson, hoping their son gets some help. And there’s a wourse who is a hero.
A delightful read.
8. Billy Summers by Stephen King (2021) Scribner
King turns his storytelling talent to a thriller and does such a good job, it should get an Edgar.
Billy is a hitman - has been since he returned from Iraq. He wants to retire, but there is one last job to do, it's to hit a hitman who got too visible and killed someone he shouldn't have. The client wants Billy to follow a specific escape plan. Billy does the job, but he does his own escape, which is a problem for the client. While hiding in the same town as the hit, he sees a van stop and toss a body across the street. He checks and it's a girl who has been drugged and raped. He hauls her into his hideout and cleans her up. When she comes to, she thinks at first that he hurt her. But as her memory returns, she gets mad at her 'boyfriend' and his buddies. When it's time to go on the run, she goes with Billy. There is still one more job to do. Billy was stiffed because they never intended to pay him, they intended to kill him. So he hunts down the client to find out why. That results in a couple of deaths and a brain-dead thug whose mother is outraged. But the client gives-up the real money behind the hit, a billionaire who likes little girls. And that angers Billy and his rescued girl.
9. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021) Scribner
I am in awe of Mr. Doerr's ability to weave a story. The main theme is a simple story.
The novel covers six story lines based on character:
Diogenes original story that is only partially available that he sent to his sick daughter,
Zeno, the son of a Greek immigrant, whose father died in World War II, was raised by his almost step-mother, went to war in Korea and fell in love with a British soldier at a POW camp, who translated ancient Greek, and was separated from him when the Brit escaped, then went on to translate Diogenes’ story, and then help a group of fifth graders put it on as a play, and became a hero by running a bomb to a lake before it could kill anyone else,
Seymour, an autistic young man who was infuriated at the destruction of his Trusty Friend’s habitat and wanted to strike back at the developers who caused it and planted a bomb in the library where Zeno was watching a dress rehearsal of the play, he goes to prison for his crime and becomes a programmer for a company that is trying to present a view of the earth that is pristine. He evaluates anomalies and marks them to be revised with something pleasant. He eventually gets out of prison and goes to work for the company. He begins putting easter eggs in the views that have an owl as a hint and if you click on them, you will see the original view before it was modified. He finds that Zeno published a translation of Diogenes’ story and has them bound and gives a copy to the grown kids from the library play,
Anna, a young girl in Constantinople in 1483, when it fell to the Ottoman empire, who found a copy of Diogenes’ story and told it to her husband and sons,
Omeir, who was born with a cleft palette and whose grandfather refused to put the child to death, even though the child’s father died on the day of his birth, causing the family to have to move way out of their local town in order to survive – who raised two oxen and was pressed into the service of conquering Constantinople, but when the oxen died, he gave up and on his way home discovers Anna and takes her with him, marries her and raises two sons. When she dies, he makes the journey to Italy with her poor copy of the story,
Konstance, who lives on a deep space ship with her parents and a group of people trying to find another home for humanity and finds the tale on a vast electronic library when a plague kills everyone else on the ship and her father stowed her in the computer room with enough nutrient powder to last her 5 years of a 567 year journey.
All these story lines do come together, but in unexpected ways. It's a historical novel, it's science fiction and I found it very satisfying.