Hi everyone, I’m back with my monthly wrap-up for February.
With the shorter month and the Chinese festivities of the Lunar New Year (which means more time spent with family and friends instead of my nose in my books), I only managed to complete 5 novels, a couple of Sherlock Holmes novellas and a handful of short stories.
I’ll start with the novel which was the book of the month for me.
At last, 2021 is drawing to a close. Or, as I like to call it, 2020 part 2. While the year wasn’t the best, I did have a pretty great reading year. According to Goodreads, I read 110 books this year. According to my own spreadsheet, I read 192. That 82 book difference is comprised largely of various long, spicy romance series that I didn’t want to have to review because I was consuming them so quickly, so I made the decision to not include them on Goodreads. But I wanted to acknowledge them here. This was the year of the romance novel for me. Romance has never been my genre of choice, but I found so much solace in it this year. For the first time, I truly understand why there are so many dedicated romance readers out there, and now I happily consider myself one of them. Four novels on this list are romances, in fact.
While I read a metric ton of romance, I think I read fairly widely this year. This list includes fantasy, mystery, thriller, horror, sci-fi, and literary fiction. One of the biggest common denominators on this list is actually Greek mythology. I’ve always loved mythology, and this year I read some amazing books retelling some of those myths in fun and refreshing ways. This is something I hope to find even more of next year.
As always, I’m following Petrik’s example here.
– One entry per author. (But not always only one book. I’m cheating this year. You’ll see what I mean.)
– Rereads aren’t included.
– The books on this list were new to me, not necessarily new. They might not have been published this year, but this was my first time reading them.
– All of these books were either 4.5 or 5 star reads for me.
Links to my Goodreads reviews of each book will be included below. And now, without further ado, here are my favorite books of 2021!
Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For some reason, I wasn’t expecting much from Black House. While I really enjoyed The Talisman, the first novel in this duology, I feel like I’ve heard a good bit of negative commentary about this particular book in the past. Can I actually pinpoint any of said comments? Nope. Not a one. Maybe I was thinking about a different book. Because Black House was everything I should have expected: scary, moving, and vital to the Dark Tower.
“I must not be so bad if I have a friend like that.”
The Talisman by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve been reading a lot of King lately. Very rarely do I binge read a particular author. I feel the need to mix things up in my reading life or I find myself burned out and unable to appreciate a book I should love because I’ve consumed too much of the same thing in a row. I might love pizza, but I would find it far less palatable if I had to eat it for every meal. I feel the same way about my literary diet. So I’m a readerly butterfly, flitting from author to author and genre to genre as they grab my attention. However, this is my fourth King novel in a row, and it’s the fourth in a row I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I think that’s because each of these four novels, whether King penned them alone or with the aid of a co-author as with this book, vary drastically from everything else I’ve read by him. And yet what makes them so incredible is the way they tie into each other and refer back to things King wrote before them and foreshadow books he would write after. …