What I Read in 2021

The last time I did a reading challenge was probably around the same time my GitHub profile photo was taken. After a brief 20-odd-year break, I came across the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge in late 2020, while thinking about which books I wanted to read—out of my rather dauntingly long TBR list—over the next year.

Here is how that list ended up looking after many revisions throughout the year. One thing I really liked about the challenge was that a lot of the prompts pushed me into picking up books that I didn’t know about before. The prompts are in bold, my chosen book is in italics (or the field is *blank* because I couldn’t find something that I wanted to read that also fit the prompt… although quite a few choices are kind of a s–t–r–e–t–c–h as well), and the number in the [square brackets] is the order in which I read the books throughout 2021 (or there are no square brackets, which means I didn’t get around to reading it).

Needless to say, I didn’t end up reading everything that I set out to… but I’m still incredibly glad that I took up the challenge. I read way more in 2021 than I ever imagined, and I think this challenge deserves huge credit for helping motivate me to not only read a lot, but also read reasonably widely.

Here’s to hoping that I get around to reading some of the ones I didn’t get around to this time around in the not too distant future. If you want to know which books I enjoyed the most, you can check out how I rated each one here.

1. A book that’s published in 2021 — A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders [19]

2. An Afrofuturist book — The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

3. A book that has a heart, diamond, club, or spade on the cover — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll [10]

4. A book by an author who shares your zodiac sign — Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

5. A dark academia book — Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

6. A book with a gem, mineral, or rock in the title — The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead [6]

7. A book where the main character works at your current or dream job — The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

8. A book that has won the Women’s Prize For Fiction — Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

9. A book with a family tree — Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi [15]

10. A bestseller from the 1990s — The Green Mile, Stephen King

11. A book about forgetting — Waiting for Godot (audiobook), Samuel Beckett [7]

12. A book you have seen on someone’s bookshelf (in real life, on a Zoom call, in a TV show, etc.) — A Promised Land (audiobook), Barack Obama [13]

13. A locked-room mystery —

14. A book set in a restaurant — Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg

15. A book with a black-and-white cover — Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky [4]

16. A book by an Indigenous author — Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

17. A book that has the same title as a song — Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami [11]

18. A book about a subject you are passionate about — The Third Plate, Dan Barber

19. A book that discusses body positivity — Wonder, R. J. Palacio

20. A book found on a Black Lives Matter reading list — The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin [3]

21. A genre hybrid — Beloved, Toni Morrison [12]

22. A book set mostly or entirely outdoors — The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien

23. A book with something broken on the cover — Les Miserables, Victor Hugo [21]

24. A book by a Muslim American author — A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini [1]

25. A book that was published anonymously — North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

26. A book with an oxymoron in the title — The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

27. A book about do-overs or fresh starts — A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman [14]

28. A magical realism book — Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

29. A book set in multiple countries — Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell [20]

30. A book set somewhere you’d like to visit in 2021 — Dubliners, James Joyce [16]

31. A book by a blogger, vlogger, YouTube video creator, or other online personality —

32. A book whose title starts with “Q,” “X,” or “Z” — Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain

33. A book featuring three generations (grandparent, parent, child) — Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

34. A book about a social justice issue — On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong [5]

35. A book in a different format than what you normally read (audiobooks, ebooks, graphic novels) — Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi [2]

36. A book that has fewer than 1,000 reviews on Amazon or Goodreads — Upstream, Mary Oliver [8]

37. A book you think your best friend would like — Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut [17]

38. A book about art or an artist — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

39. A book everyone seems to have read but you — Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury [9]

40. Your favorite prompt from a past POPSUGAR Reading Challenge → A book that passes the Bechdel test — Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf [18]

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