With another year of so many people working remotely and spending more time at home than out and about, I thought I would write up a list of some of my personal favorite books from 2021.
To be clear, these are books I read in 2021, but they may have been previously published and I just didn’t get to them until this year. It also isn’t really a ‘best of’ type of list. Rather, it’s a list of some books that I really enjoyed reading this year to provide some inspiration to your own reading lists for 2022.
The Last Graduate – Naomi Novik
The follow-up to A Deadly Education and the second book in the Scholomance trilogy is a very enjoyable read. Take the premise of Harry Potter, that there is a world of wizards and mages that exists beside the real world, but ‘normals’ can’t perceive the magical world.
Make that world a bit more grown-up and definitely darker than the Potterverse and create a school where young wizards attend to learn how to survive the horrors of the magic world – which is basically overrun with creatures that want to eat you and take your magic and rival magical communities all vying for power.
Then introduce us to the main character, our heroine who has been prophesied to have an incredible and world-altering impact. Oh yeah, but she isn’t destined to save the world, she is destined more for what Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring would have become if she took the One Ring from Frodo – a dark and terrible queen of magic.
This book’s Galadriel (yup, she was named after the Tolkein character) is also a teenager who has been wrestling with the meaning of this annoying prophecy for her whole life. She isn’t particularly interested in being a terrible dark wizard, but she certainly has the skillset and capability, if she were to decide to go that way.
The first book might have been just a bit better since the concept was new, but The Last Graduate lets readers watch Galadriel (El) start to evolve into a version of the powerful wizard she will become, but one who has decided to avoid the world-destroying aspects of her powers in favor of just maybe helping all her fellow students escape school without being eaten by monsters. If you enjoyed Harry Potter, but would like something just a bit darker, this series could be right up your alley.
The Interdependency Trilogy – John Scalzi
OK, so this is actually three books (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox), but they are all fast reads and easily could be one long novel. The story revolves around an interstellar human empire in the far future.
The empire is ruled by an Emperox and numerous powerful noble houses. We follow a young and unprepared new Emperox, who steps onto the throne at a most challenging and inopportune moment in the empire’s history – when it may be ready to collapse forever.
The empire is connected by a system of extra-dimensional pathways that make travel from one star system to another comparatively quick (weeks or months instead of hundreds or thousands of years). But that system is beginning to shift, which will mean that all those disparate human colonies will lose contact with each other and all be on their own.
There is plenty of political intrigue, some interesting speculative science, and well-developed characters that readers will become attached to. Scalzi has a long history of writing approachable science fiction novels and these three fit right in. If you’re a sci-fi fan, add these to your list in 2022.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix
Imagine an alternate London of the mid-1980s, where many myths and legends are real, if just off in the shadows. The magical world is largely overseen by a group called the Booksellers, who, besides running two successful bookstores, keep the magical world in line and separate from folks in the normal world.
We meet a young 18-year-old named Susan who is visiting London, searching for her estranged father, before heading off to university. But, she immediately runs afoul of the mystical world and meets a young Bookseller named Merlin.
He is a Left-Handed Bookseller, meaning he is more of a James Bond type of magical agent (right-handed booksellers are more cerebral, like intelligence analysts rather than field agents). Susan and Merlin engage in an adventure in search of her father, who may or may not be something other than a normal human being.
It’s a fun romp with numerous amusing characters and a fun plot that whisks the reader along toward its conclusion. This looks like it will be the first in a possible series, but no further books have been released.
A Drink Before the War – Dennis Lehane
This is one that fits the category of a book that came out well before 2021, but that I read this year – actually for the second or third time.
However, it has probably been nearly 10 years since I last read it, so it was time to revisit the world of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro – private investigators in Boston. This is the first book in the series of 6 books about these two characters. It inspired one movie (Gone Baby Gone – the 4th book in the series) and has a legion of fans.
The characters are unique, the mysteries fun to unravel, and the action violent and bloody. If you enjoy a good mystery story, with hard-nosed, but likable characters, give this series a try. But, definitely start at the beginning, with A Drink Before the Ward.
Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Here’s another one that I have read more than once, but it remains my favorite book on leadership. Yup, this one is non-fiction, but it is every bit as engrossing as many novels. The authors are retired Navy SEALs who take their training and lessons from the military and adapt it to the world of business.
The book provides a wealth of guidance on how individuals can become more effective leaders in their organizations and companies, typically relying on specific experiences from the authors’ military careers as examples. It’s a great read, or listen, if you prefer to check out the audiobook.
