Another pandemic year, another year of comfort re-reads. Still, there were a few new gems among the 51 books I read in 2021.

I’m including S.K. Dunstall’s Stars Uncharted and Stars Beyond as a pair because… this is my list and I can do what I want. While the first book certainly stands on its own, the duology comes to a truly satisfying close. I love the future of space travel and body modification that this pair have created - S.K. Dunstall is the pen name of sisters Sherylyn and Karen Dunstall - and Nika Rik Terri is my new favorite nerd. I listened to both as audiobooks and I may or may not have driven around my neighborhood when I didn’t need to because I was edgy as hell worried about what would happen next.

Zoraida Córdova’s The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was so spectacularly lovely and warm and weird. If you watched Encanto and wished for more, read this.

A friend warned me this might be too sad, but it was just the perfect kind of sad for another year of what felt like missed or misplaced opportunities and fretting about agency and meaning and choices made. Despite reckoning with some very serious mental health challenges, The Midnight Library was tremendously beautiful and just what I needed when I needed it.

The Love Hypothesis is the perfect romance novel. The. Perfect. Romance. Novel. I read it in about twelve hours and stayed up until 5 AM to do so. Worth it.

Also where my Reylos at because COME ON.

I really enjoyed the weirdness of Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars but The Echo Wife absolutely blew me away. The concept was dark and perfect and perfectly executed. I knew as soon as I’d finished reading over the summer that it was going to be the best book I read all year - and I wasn’t wrong.

I’ve got a goal of 52 books this year because reading an odd number of books feels wrong. But I forgive you, 2021. Everything about you was a little off.