Welcome to my Second Annual Book Awards! Today we’re giving ~awards~ to some of the books I encountered in 2021. Winners receive extreme clout.
While three members of BTS were kind enough to host last year’s awards, they are unfortunately recovering from COVID. Thanks to being vaccinated, they only had minor illnesses. Be like BTS: Get vaccinated, get tested, and wear good masks!
Instead, you’re stuck with little ole me. The good news, however, is that you are witnessing the internet premiere of my glasses! Big stuff.
Without further ado, below please find some books I thought would be worth bringing to your attention before I blow a final kiss to 2021.
Most Laughably Absurd, Delulu, Bonkers Book
We all know I love books that go off the rails. But which book is the most bonkers of them all?
Winner: Nightbitch by Rachel Yodler
I actually really liked this book, but it was fucking bonkers from start to finish. It’s hard to get more delusional than a stay-at-home mom who thinks she is turning into a dog. I felt deeply unsettled once I finished it, which is the mark of a pretty wonky bonky book for me. I wrote about it in more detail in October while I was still in its animalistic thrall, and it still makes me want to run outside and chase bunnies sometimes.
Speaking of which, a close runner-up for this category is always going to be Bunny by Mona Awad.
Best Book By A Man
A mere eight out of 69 books I read in 2021 were by men. This is the one I liked best.
Winner: Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke
I didn’t expect to like this book, given its structure as a fictional log of Slack conversations from a PR firm. But the concept—one of the firm employees gets his consciousness trapped in Slack, which his boss dismisses because it’s improving productivity—intrigued me enough to get it from the library. And the Slack structure ended up as pretty rewarding gimmick, because who hasn’t felt trapped inside their office’s chat platform at some point or another? Read this one if you’ve ever felt “the inescapability of the office” deep in your bones, particularly while working remotely during the pandemic.
Most Slept-Upon Book
A book that was underhyped! Underrated! SLEPT UPON!!
Winner: Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Intimacies has received a TON of critical acclaim, and yet almost nobody I know has read it. It has fewer than 9,000 ratings on Goodreads, which feels like a particularly low number for a book that was named one of the 10 best books of 2021 by the New York Times Book Review. The glamorous but lonely narrator of Intimacies works as an interpreter for an international criminal court, where she listens and interprets war crimes all day and observes a mysterious cast of characters by night. I wrote more about what makes this book special back in August and I hope you people WAKE UP and read it.
Best Book to Read for Sweet Dreams
This award honors a book that made me feel cocooned in warm blankets.
Winner: Love In Color: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola
I considered giving Love In Color an award like “best mythological retelling,” but that seemed to sell short what makes it so special. It is a spellbinding collection of stories that decentralize the patriarchal elements of well-trod tales in service of love—be it self-love, romantic love, or familial love. Each tale conjures distinct little worlds to display how love prevails, making the entire collection feel like soothing sips of honey for the soul. The book primarily reimagines African and Asian myths, offering a “corrective to both the Western idea of who gets to indulge in love for love’s sake and whose myths are worthy of retelling.” I read a few each night before going to bed and had very sweet dreams.
Best Three-Star Book
I have the utmost respect for a good three-star book, which is typically quite readable despite some flaws. This category obviously does not award the behavior of books that are the “just fine” kind of three-star. This award is for a three-star book still worth your time to read.
Winner: The Betrayals by Bridget Collins
Bridget Collins is a master of conjuring atmospheres that I want to revel in, but her penchant for a slow burn has made me bestow this award upon her work twice. The Betrayals unfolds two parallel love stories at an exclusive academy where students learn to master the grand jeu: an “arcane and mysterious contest” requiring multidisciplinary expertise. While The Betrayals had a dynamite conclusion and a great twist I didn’t see coming, I slogged through the first 75% of the book without a clue as to what was going on. It has a classic formula for a good three-star book: enough of it kept me interested to keep reading and the payoff was worthwhile, though it took some time to develop.
Best Book With a Centaur Fetish Party
Talk about horse play!
Winner: You Can Vibe Me on my FemmePhone by Kamala Puligandla
Reading this funky little novella was such a delight. It ostensibly follows the adventures of three friends who traipse through a near-future LA with feminist smartphones in hand (“imagine if your phone shared your values, instead of prodding you with its capitalist boner all the time”). But it is particularly memorable for its inclusion of a fun horse-y BDSM subculture and sexy centaurs. Please read this fizzy, reflective, and fabulously queer tale with a hallucinogenic in hand. I read it during my Hudson Valley ~reading residency~ back in April.
Best Book About An Evelyn
Once upon a time, two vastly different books were published less than a year apart with startlingly similar names. The coincidence wasn’t supposed to matter much. After all, one book was about a fictionalized Old Hollywood star and the other was a sci-fi murder mystery. As such, both books coexisted peacefully in their separate genres for four years.
Then they both went viral on TikTok, and the war began. I watched video after video of passionate reviewers imploring me to read their Evelyn book of choice. Read The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, it’s like Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day (1993)! Read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, it’s salacious and gay as hell! Both Evelyn books appeared on bestseller tables, side by side with other internet-approved reads. As such, an obvious question emerged: which Evelyn book truly reigns supreme?
Winner: The Seven ½ Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
Though I did genuinely enjoy reading both Evelyn books, I just relished Turton’s intricately-plotted murder mystery more. It lived up to the Agatha Christie comparison by developing a complex layer of clues for the reader to decipher, and it lived up to the Groundhog Day (1993) premise of repeating a time cycle until the protagonist reaches a different result. I went into it knowing almost nothing else about it, except that the US edition did in fact have its title changed (from “Seven Deaths” to “7 ½ Deaths”) because of its coincidental similarity to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2017 release. There is one notably and exceptionally bad chapter, but the overall book is satisfying.
Best Approximation of The Secret History by Donna Tartt
I reprised this award because my pursuit of dark academia aesthetics never ends. Now that I wear glasses that look suspiciously similar to those worn by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)—which always reminds me of Bunny and Henry’s ill-fated Italy trip in The Secret History—I feel particularly qualified to assess books based on how well they portray rich people wearing rich people clothes covering up rich people crimes.
Winner: If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Though the writing isn’t as stunning as Donna Tartt’s prose, If We Were Villains hits all the right notes to satisfy a craving for dark academia. After a group of theater students spend three years being typecast in Shakespearean plays at an elite conservatory, casting changes during senior year put some catastrophic events into motion as life begins to imitate art. There’s plenty of melodrama, mutual gay pining, and cigarettes to go around for everyone in this one. I wrote a bit about it back in June.
2021’s Best In Show
These are the three books that resonated most with me this year.
Best In Show: Fiction
The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha
I read this choose-your-own-adventure novel in January 2021 and nothing topped it for the rest of the year. I wrote about this odyssey following a Faustian bargain back in January:
The book’s blend of diverse mythologies, fairy tales, legends, and pop culture references let each thread shimmer with corresponding complexity and depth and humor. From time to time, your devil boyfriend (whom you toy with calling “Beelzebaby,” but settle instead on “Demon Lover”) shows up to derail your tale by telling you how absolutely boring your choices have been. Sometimes he pities you and helps you find another, more exciting, path to take; sometimes he scorns you, leaving you in your own mess. But it’s always a given that you won’t stop traveling for long—something that’s bittersweet for you, the one who made this deal to begin with, who might really have been searching for a home the whole time.
Best In Show: Nonfiction
Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina
I was so taken with Speak, Okinawa when I read it earlier this year that I couldn’t write about it. In a grand oversimplification in service of recommending this book, I will tell you that it is about the author’s nuanced and heartbreaking exploration of her biracial identity. It is also about Brina’s process of learning Okinawa’s history, which she recounts alongside her personal history. I found it through an excerpted section on LitHub:
For five years, as I was writing my book, researching the history, learning the language, I tried to embrace and connect to this half, this Japanese, or rather, Okinawan half. After I finished the book, although I felt a tremendous relief and acceptance of myself, I realized this half will always remain disproportionate, always remain less than the other, not because I consider it to be inferior, but because I started so late. I’ll never catch up. I read passages I wrote about my ancestors, my family, my mother, and they come off the page at me as noticeably mythical and one-dimensional, over-simplified. I can’t get inside this half. I can’t write from within this half. I still write from within my white half, my American half, and always for my white half, my American half. I’m still observing, still a spectator, still a tourist. I’m still pretending and performing.
Best In Show: Short Fiction
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
Every part of The Office of Historical Corrections is masterful. Each story has a plot-oriented and specific voice that also manages to probe complexities “examining race, female friendship, and privilege.” I wrote a little bit about the collection back in August, but I think the author herself did a much better job of describing what makes her collection so compelling in Bomb Magazine:
I’m obsessed with interiority because it gives so much room to think about structural realities in a human way, down to the level of character. Who does this character have to lie to? Who do they have to perform for in order to function in the world? How do they need to be seen in order to be safe, or achieve what they’re trying to achieve? Those are questions you ask yourself much more when you have to be aware of some kind of power imbalance. The more power you have in the power dynamic, the less you have to think about that kind of thing. But people of color, women, and queer people navigate the world with an awareness of who they’re expected to be and the consequences of straying from those expectations. My characters navigate every situation aware of the possibility of a hostile or discriminatory interaction. In my story “Happily Ever After,” the protagonist dresses up for her mother’s doctor’s appointments to head off racism and be perceived as a “real person” who deserves better information and care. I want the interiority to put some pressure on what’s happening in the story.
That’s a wrap on 2021! I’ll be back with more reads soon, and I know you’re waiting with bated breath. Until then, enjoy this highlight reel of Survivor: Cook Islands winner Yul Kwon being a babe. (He apparently wrote a memoir, so this is technically literary content.)