2021 Reads

In 2020, I managed to squeeze in 52 books for the year, so for 2021, I made that my target for my year’s reading goal. I surpassed that number and read a total of 67 books. As I’ve done for the past few years, I thought I’d share some of my favorites.

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir has become a reliable author for me. I know when he has a new book coming out, I’m going to be excited about it until it’s released and when I read it, I’m going to enjoy it until the end. He doesn’t disappoint. That’s the case with Project Hail Mary. I enjoy a good sci-fi novel. Especially where the technical elements are written in a clear, understandable way where you don’t get bogged down in terminology, but you feel like you have some sort of understanding of what the problem is in the story and how it’s being addressed. I like the humor his characters have in desperate situations so it helps to ease the tension.

Andy Weir is the author of The Martian, which was turned into a movie, and like The Martian, in Project Hail Mary, the protagonist finds himself alone, in space, trying not to die. And in this book, the protagonist is also struggling against fuzzy memories that he feels he desperately needs to fight an extinction-level threat to Earth. Andy does a fantastic job of having one character carry most of a novel. It’s difficult to pull off, but Andy does it well.

Night

Talk about a powerful book. I think I picked this book up at a used book sale, intrigued by the Nobel Peace Prize note on the cover. A friend mentioned the book near the end of last year and I remembered it was on my bookshelf, so I pulled it out to read. It’s gripping, horrifying…the depths of human cruelty are shocking.

Elie Wiesel writes of how his family was taken from their home in 1944 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. His account of how no one would believe what the Nazis were doing to the Jews because it was too horrific, too unimaginable to believe, and how some of the soldiers seemed to derive some sort of sick pleasure in abusing the Jews takes the reader into a whole new realization of what occurred during this time. It’s an impactful recollection of his experiences in the concentration camp and so well written, especially considering it’s been translated.

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainer Sasquatch Massacre

This book is a little maddening for me because I really liked the story. I didn’t like some of the techniques used to relay the story. In fact, there were times it infuriated me that a book put out by a big publisher didn’t weed out some of the problematic things in the book.

So first, the story is about a private, eco-friendly town with few residents. Trouble comes when Mount Rainer erupts and cuts off the town from the rest of the world, as if that isn’t hard enough, Sasquatch are pushed from the mountains into their little town and start killing off everything.

Here’s the parts I didn’t like. The story switches narrators, it goes from a journalist who’s researched what happened to the town and shifts to a set of journal entries from one of the residents of the town that gives a firsthand account. The part of the story told from the journals shifts awkwardly to try to show that it’s a journal entry, but goes into normal story telling, then adds awkward details to remind the reader that it’s from a journal which pulls you out of the story. It also has the author of the journal, Kate Holland, write the journal to her therapist — an unsuccessful attempt to explain the awkward story-telling method. The other part that I didn’t like is that Max Brooks came up with fictitious books that the journalist researched to add information and theories into the story. Here’s the thing, there’d be whole sections, pages, of the book that was dedicated to relaying what these books said on the subject. And as a reader, I didn’t care what some fake book had to say on the matter. I would have cut out whole chapters to get rid of that tedious reading and get back to the heart of the story.

But in the end, the book still ends up on my list of favorite books for the year because the story has stuck with me. Yes, I wish they’d cut about a third of the book out because it would have been stronger, but the parts that were good, were really good.

Dr. Colbert’s Healthy Gut Zone

I started reading this book because I’ve dealt with acid reflux for years now. I wanted to see if there was a way to resolve the issue and not just live with it for the rest of my life. This book was truly eye opening in digging into all the different ways we unknowingly contribute to our poor gut health.

The thing I really enjoyed about this book is that it’s not overly technical. He doesn’t spout medical jargon at you, but he tells you things that are harmful to the health of your gut and how those things are destroying the lining of your gut or weakening your immune system. Dr. Don Colbert discusses how most health problems in the human body are all products of poor gut health. He admits that like most doctors, he used to prescribe medications to his patients to treat symptoms, only to have them come back later with the same or worse symptoms. It wasn’t until his own health took a turn for the worse that he started looking for a better way and started looking at getting to the root of health conditions to treat the cause and not just the symptoms.

If you’d like more book suggestions to add to your reading list this year, check out my favorite books in the 2020 Reads and 2019 Reads.