Podcast 46: Favorite books of 2021!

Hello hello, and welcome to Episode 46 of Life On the Brink!

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you were able to enjoy your holiday celebrations and are getting settled into this new year. Personally, my family and I have been sick with Covid, though thankfully everyone is recovering well. It definitely put a damper on New Year festivities, however, and has provided me with more down time than I’ve had in a long time.

Whether you find yourself in quarantine or not, January is the perfect time for a book!

If you’ve been listening over the past year, then you’ll know that 2021 was the year that I fell back in love with reading. I set a goal to read 15 books last year (a leftover goal from both 2019 and 2020) and actually ended up reading 24 books!

*click here for Episode 20 all about goal setting*

Part of the current collection. (the bottom right is my TBR)

Among that list were some duds (and one I decided not to even finish), but most of them I really enjoyed. Today I’ve picked my very favorites to share with you! So these books weren’t necessarily published in 2021 (though a few are quite new), but I read them during the year 2021.

All the books on this list either gained 4 or 5 stars from me, and I highly recommend them all. In the podcast audio (and transcript) I speak a bit about the plots of each book and detail why they made my list of favorites.

What’s in my teacup? The now-discontinued Samurai Chai yerba mate blend from Teavana (R.I.P.). Here’s a similar blend, though.

But first! I asked you all on Instagram to share the best book you read last year, and have compiled and linked them all in this blog as well. Feel free to comment here with your recommendations from last year’s reading as well. Let’s see what you all said…

Ideal reading setup.

Here are some of YOUR 2021 favorites…

-”Atomic Habits” by James Clear

-”Before We Were Yours” by Lisa Wingate

-”Will” by Will Smith

-”War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy

-The Leviathan Series by Scott Westerfeld

-”Living With the Bomb: American And Japanese Cultural Conflicts In The Nuclear Age” edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden

-”400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019” edited by

Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

-”The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah

-”Maybe You Should Talk To Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed” by Lori Gottleib

-”Everything I Know About Love” by Dolly Alderton

-”More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say)” by Elaine Welteroth

-”Becoming” by Michelle Obama

-”Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life” by Christie Tate

THE BEST BOOKS I READ LAST YEAR

-”Shanghai Girls” and “Dreams of Joy” by Lisa See

-”Dark Matter” by Blake Crouch

-”World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

-”The Bookish Life of Nina Hill” by Abbi Waxman

-”The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig

-”Magic Lessons” by Alice Hoffman

-”The Secret History” by Donna Tartt

-”Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens

And there you are! Those were our favorites from last year, and now I can’t wait to start filling up my bookshelf with new ones for this year. And, if you’d like to follow me over on Goodreads, I’m keeping track of my reading goal over there so we can discover even more good books from each other.

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This Week’s Little Joy: This year, for my family's Christmas Eve dinner, I finally made a

Bûche De Noël, or Yule Log cake. It took several hours in all, but it was delicious and super impressive. Josh is asking me to make it again even when it's not Christmas!

As an added bonus, I only needed about half of the chocolate ganache, so I saved the rest in the fridge, microwaving it a tablespoon at a time for chocolate fondue alongside cara cara oranges. De-vine.

Here's the recipe I used. The video is very helpful and hilarious.

What I’m Listening To: The soundtrack from “Encanto.” I saw the film on Black Friday and, while I did enjoy it, I didn’t expect it to stick with me the way it has! The music gets stuck in my head on a loop, and it endeared the film and the family dynamics within it to me even more. More than just the songs though (I’m not always a fan of Manuel-Miranda’s writing style) the score by Germaine Franco is so fun and really beautiful.

Thanks for listening! If you have any book suggestions, please leave a comment below. I'm always looking for new wonderful books, so until next time, happy reading friends!