 was so good and it made me cry. if they don't well friendship over this woman can write this is not gonna be a book for you. well done sanderson and i loved it. tis the season to round and rave today we are raving. my top 10 best books of 2021. these are not books that came out necessarily 2021 these are books that i read in 2021. this list is as always according to me and my opinions so i did my best to rank them uh as usual the middle bit is not super married to that order but the top is the top and the bottom of my best books of the year is the bottom so in the middle it's more it could go different ways. again as usual let's do the worst best to the best best and on an extra positive note. number 10 on my list is malibu rising by taylor jenkins read. this is taylor jenkins read's new book. this actually did come out in 2021 and taylor jenkins read has become an autobiography for me. i picked up uh the seven husbands of evil and hugo because everyone and their mother was raving about it even people who don't read lit fic were like this book though and i was like well if everyone seems to like it every type of reader seems to like it. sans therese and i'll probably won't hate it and i loved it balled my eyes out. i was like okay okay so when people were raving about her next book daisy jones and the six i was like well i wouldn't normally pick that up but she didn't let me down with seven husbands people like this too i'll read that too and i loved it so when melby rising was coming out i was like i mean literally if anyone else was writing this i'd be like nope a book about surfers in the 80s just absolutely not my thing but i was like taylor you haven't let me down yet so i will read this as well and i loved it i don't think i think of the three books from her it's probably my least favorite but an absolutely fantastic book regardless and i absolutely would not like a book about servers written by anybody else i mean i guess it's possible there's another taylor out there but she just is so amazing at weaving a portrait of characters instead of a short amount of time of lots of characters and very real fully fleshed out feeling characters that you really care about them and their stories in a very short amount of time because you feel like you've really lived with them even though these are all standalone books and they are relatively short so the amount of time you actually spend with them isn't that long but she writes them so vividly so poignantly so realistically that you just you believe in them and they feel real to you and once again she did that with melby rising again i think i like seven husbands and daisy jones a little bit better both of them but melby rising was still great and i absolutely deserve to be on my best books of the year next up i have a brandy sanderson book skyward uh i have a video up uh not a review but um talking about why skyward might secretly be named of the wind which was a video done tongue in cheek like don't actually take me seriously on that i don't take that seriously but anyway skyward his the first thing is ya sci-fi series and it was just a good time it was a really good time i binge read it i didn't even plan to pick it up at all it wasn't on my tpr but uh jess and jessey and el were hosting a read-along in anticipation of the weeks of sci-tonic and i was like all right i've been meaning to read skyward for forever let's freaking do it and i didn't i haven't read starside or sci-tonic yet but uh skyward i just couldn't put it down i really enjoyed it i feel like a lot of the things that i tend to zero in on as flaws in his other books and his adult fantasy books these are things that are still present in skyward but they were appropriate for skyward so having slightly more juvenile characters it's a ya sci-fi series our main character is yeah having quite modern uh and simple dialogue this is a sci-fi series for our main character as a teenager so like the his storytelling isn't actually that different in skyward as it is from other stories but because of the setting because of the audience it's geared towards the type the type of story that it is those are no longer flaws if that makes sense this is where this fits this is appropriate and i was like yeah well here yeah that's what goes here even the thing that i thought i would hate the like animal companion slug thing that was so cute i did hate the fake square word that is in it but i almost always hate that it always feels fake and stupid to me like literally almost docked an entire star for that but overall could not put it down and i'm very excited to restart sites so this is a win for me um well done sanderson next up i have deathless divide by jacina ireland um i read the first book dread nation in 2020 uh and i read deathless divide um with mara who had already read dread nation and had not yet read this so we better read the second one together and we both really really loved it um i think we both thought the first one was slightly better but it was more to do with just sort of pacing issues the second one has a big time jump in the middle so it kind of feels weirdly segmented where it's sort of like two books in one so we kind of felt like how that was broken up may not have made a lot of sense it's kind of jarring to have that like gap in the middle but overall it was an amazing conclusion to the duology this duology i think is a master class in what both y a and alternate history fantasy has the capacity to be you don't know anything about this duology it is a y a alternate history uh fantasy i guess i mean it's a zombie book i guess alternate history horror where uh it asks the question what if there had been a zombie apocalypse during the civil war so i think it tackles questions that are from a more like historical grill building perspective extremely well like okay what what would that look like how was society the way that it was back then have reacted to the presence of zombies how they would have reorganized society or dealing with that how this would have influenced and affected what and how like what they did with and how they handled the having of slaves and how they would repurpose slaves to address this issue how this could present both hardship and opportunity for the people involved how it would change the civil war itself and the trajectory of like of america's development so like just from like a again world building and history perspective this is how you do it forget that it's y a like alternate history fantasy is one of those tricky things to do but i think you really have to pay attention to that detail and really do that thought exercise now just do things willy nilly if you want to feel real and she did it was amazing and then the story itself the characters it's again and a fantastic example of like just how real and gritty and dark why a can be while still absolutely being why a like it doesn't feel like well this should have been marketed as adult i think adults can definitely read it and enjoy it i did but it feels like it's it's still for a yi audience the way that it presents these things it doesn't shy away from presenting the dark side of slavery of racism of zombies but it handles them in a way that it's still appropriate and palatable for a slightly younger audience and it is just chef's kiss and the main character again is a fantastic example of having a feisty main character that doesn't become a caricature like she's sassy and she can be stubborn but that does get in her way and that does have negative impacts on her she isn't just like a sassy why a character like she actually feels like a flesh and blood human being that's dealing with some real issues some dark things and the people around her also were very well written and just the whole the whole project of it was executed so well and it's just compellingly written like it's so intensely readable i hate zombies i avoid zombies at all costs but i picked this up because i heard such great things about it and it did not disappoint highly highly recommend this duology it is so good next up i have guns of the dawn by atrian tchaikovsky so well on my worst books of the year is a book that alan picked for me but on my best books of the year there's a book that alan picked for me so hi highs and low lows i liked guns of the dawn so much that i picked it as my pick for january's blaze and bodice groupers book club pick because i am certain that the ladies will like this as well and if they don't well friendship over guns of the dawn is a i keep wanting to accidentally categorize it as alternate history fantasy it is not actually it is just heavily inspired by history like historical place and time it feels very much like sort of like revolutionary war era it is flintlock fantasy but it does it isn't actually like england during the revolutionary war it is a fantasy world with like a fantasy country and fantasy problems and etc but it's very much that vibe and it is i think alan compared it to downtown abbey um i mean downtown abbey is the raw era uh i would more like in it to like pole dark or something i feel is you know very like that relationship kind of drama at least in the beginning and then the whole rest of the book is war and the war and the battle is written extremely well and to stand alone book which is always refreshing fantasy i think the world building is done very well uh you didn't have to do it too much of it because you know it leans on you recognizing revolutionary war era type type sort of aesthetic and political social norms etc and it executes them well so if this was historical like alternate history fantasy like it wouldn't be too far off the mark as it is but there's magic in it so we weave magic into it as well i mean you could go the route of having it be alternate history fantasy that includes magic but it's not it's a fantasy of its own world so i just i feel like yeah it just kind of has it all because it has this sort of a social relationship drama there's family drama there's like romantic uh lizzie darcy or like thornton and what's her name from north and south that kind of a situation there's also like epic war and there's political intrigue and there's magic um because like magic is part of the war and uh yeah it's just it's got it all i really really thoroughly enjoyed it i'm so glad alan picked it for me like i was when he talked about it i was generally interested in it so i probably would have picked it up eventually but i'm so glad that you know i was made to pick it up sooner rather than later and i'm excited to reread it in january next up i have girl in the tower by catherine arden this is the second book in the winter night trilogy um i reread the bear the night girl this year and then i finally got around to reading girl in the tower and the winter of the witch winter of the witch is not on this list winter of the witch is still very very good i don't want to say that's not but of the three books in the trilogy the second one is my favorite i think the whole trilogy is excellent without a doubt but the second book i just feel like is peak everything that i love about it i love the main character voss yes she is such an exceptional heroine feisty and independent without that being kind of like an overdone cliche the russian vibes are just off the charts excellently well done by catherine arden in terms of making it authentic and real lots of transliterated russian that makes it even more authentic but the clues the food the way they talk the way they behave the folkloric elements it is just like as russian-y and russian-ish as you can get without like reading a book in russian about russia and it is it it is the second book it maintains the magic and whimsy and wonder of bear the night and gale while still raising the stakes and making this a little darker a little more real and involving more of the characters that you didn't meet some of in the first book but sort of expanding things and escalating things and it was just an absolute page turner i didn't expect a book in the winter night trilogy to be they're immersive but i didn't expect it to be a page turner the way that the girl the tower was and i just i got sucked in and i loved it so so good the third book great too but second book so good next up i have the hundred thousand kingdoms by nk jemisin and nk jemisin oh my word this woman can write i i'm just staggered every time i pick up a book by her i read the broken earth trilogy and then i intended the uh is it the dreamer duology it begins with the killing man is that what it's called well whatever to be my next one but then my patrons picked hundred thousand kingdom does he buddy read so we won't with that and it was written before broken earth um so it was interesting kind of going backwards and seeing a lot of sort of like prototype versions of some ideas that are much more further explored in broken earth trilogy sort of seeing the seeds of those ideas where like some directions she's clearly interested in going and sort of like beginning to kind of like tease those directions or dipper toes in those directions and then again knowing where that interest kind of gets like fully fleshed out and like leaned into and broken earth so it's kind of fun to see hints of what was to come in this earlier work but it was once again just an absolutely staggering example of utterly original world building it does not feel like it's like that it's derivative or or imitating anything else and not that that's always a bad thing i mean there's certainly a great books that are heavily inspired and intended to be read as being inspired by specific places in specific times and that's absolutely their intent is for you to pick up on that but i think it's much harder to find truly original world building where it doesn't feel like okay well so you've basically taken x y z and then like made it fantasy and it also doesn't feel like oh like you are basically imitating another fantasy author like oh this isn't just like a tulkin redux or this isn't you know etc like it doesn't feel like anything else it's its own thing in a way that is so utterly uniquely jemisin and like the authorial voice is distinct and if you don't like jemisin's authorial voice there's no getting away from that but it's just a unique way both of building your world kind of telling the story like the way that she tells the story to you like the way that you come to know the story is also so inventive and unusual the way you come to the story the way you come to know the character the way you come to know what's going on is also different it doesn't feel like and here's the part where we get this and here's the part where we get this and this is the part where they explain that like all of it feels fresh and new and innovative and and captivating and again very bingeable and i just cannot put it down when i read a jemisin book because i'm just like wow what is any of this i must know so highly recommend i can't wait the other books in series are kind of like it's like a trilogy of stand alums that all are like tendentially connected to each other so it's not a direct sequel but i'm very excited to read the second and third books in the inheritance trilogy next up i have a very new edition uh the declaration of the rites of magicians by hg perry i very recently read this and even more recently read the second book a radical act of free magic of the two books i think the first one is slightly stronger but as a duology i kind of want to put just like the duology on my best of the year and again sort of like what i was saying about deathless divide doing alternate history fantasy is hard and if you think that it's easy if you think that oh well that's much easier because then i don't have to invent my own world and i can just kind of like piggyback off of what actually happened in history if that's how you've approached it which many authors have that's wrong it is just as difficult if not more difficult to properly do alternate history fantasy because to properly do the thought exercise of not only how that place and time would be different if it had this new element be it magic or zombies or whatever also how the having of that would then have a ripple effect and change how things have happened or if they didn't change how things happened uh or if they didn't change what things happened they would have to change how those things happened so that that even if history ended up still bending to the same arc that we know it would still have to have a new reason to come to that if that makes sense so um i think this is just an absolute masterclass in how to do that correctly and i know this book doesn't have as high a ratings as other books and i think that's partly to do with how much care and attention is paid to the historical time in place and how history itself is being reshaped by magic or is being recontextualized or reimagined with the inclusion of magic so this isn't like big huge sweeping battles of sorcery on the streets of london and a lot of nonsense that feels stupid and unreal the having of magic by itself is has a massive butterfly effect for everything in your world which is why like a lot of big epic fantasies that have a lot of big world building big magic i'm like i don't think you've thought this through because even the smallest change the tiniest magical addition the tiniest thing to change the reality is the natural laws of your universe has intense ripple effects so anyway a lot of the book kind of deals with if you don't think about it it takes place sort of um in the enlightenment era so we follow william pit and wilberforce and and then in france we follow robespierre um in the colonies we follow uh tussan levorteur and they are all sort of i mean the figures that you know from history however this is a world in which magic exists and so a lot of the questions that were being grappled with in the in reality in that time and place in history to do with people's individual right the rights of the common man the rights of slaves the questions of abolition these are all sort of reframed to include or to we instead about magic and commoners having the ability to have access to and use their magic and enslaved people's being enslaved for magic by magic and whether or not they have a right to use their own magic and so the debates that would have been happening in the house of commons or in parliament um the kind of bills that were being put forth the kind of debates that were going on about whether you give rights to people or you don't give rights to people then we have war you know and so in wartime then you give extra rights to people then how do you take them back do you take them back is there any taking them back once you've given people rights to have access to their magic and it's just it's so well done reimagining and reframing everything with the inclusion of this question of magic so i just thought it was it was so good and i think the characters were actually i mean even though it was a little bit more dry a little more like history i really felt myself extremely attached to in particular pit and will before us the relationship is very well painted by the author i really feel it feels like a very real friendship and not just in a way of because of like what you know about history but i mean you really feel it between them how much loyalty and trust there is and how much it hurts when that's shaken because they'll end up on opposing sides of a debate uh now and again but how much faith and trust and love there is between them regardless and how that's great but also that's what makes it hurt so much if they're not on the same page about something it's just so well done i see why it's not that popular because again if you don't want a book to be about like people debating a bill in the house of commons uh this is not gonna be a book for you but if you are a nerd about this kind of thing and you also like a bit of magical flair cannot recommend highly enough we're down to my top three now so third is ship of magic by robin hob this was so good i was so excited to start the flagship trader series with mara uh and this month i will be reading mad ship but i haven't read that yet so maybe that's even better but you know i i'm sorry it missed my personal cutoff of i'm filming this today but i've just been loving hob so so much it was a toss-up between putting this and royal assassin on the list and i chose ship of magic one because i read it more recently and two because while i adored royal assassin i think just from a writing craft perspective i think ship of magic demonstrates like the next step in robin hob's like writing journey i mean it's not like she's an up-and-coming author but like i mean she's she wrote a trilogy about fits far seer and it was all from this perspective and it was an amazing deep dive into that main character but now telling a story with multiple perspectives interweaving perspectives overlapping perspectives that's like a whole different volume that is a new level of difficulty that i feel like is not that it's a it's better but it's harder so i don't know yet i've only read ship of magic i don't know yet if live ship traders will end up being a series that i love more than the far seer trilogy i just spent so much time with far seer that like right now that's closer to my heart but i think ship of magic just demonstrated hob's ability to just like turn things up expand them do them in new and fresh ways introduce fresh new characters expand her world show you more they're not just leaning on the fact that she wrote far seer but showing you a completely different part of this world that is almost unrelated to far seer and still weaving in hints of what she written before it just it just shows a level of craft that i think is why it's on here instead of royal assassin even the royal assassin has my whole heart night eyes has my whole heart but ship of magic was just like watching what was a very promising bud fully bloom and it's so impressive chef's kiss highly recommend cannot wait to read mad ship number two is empire of silence by chris hurakia i read all of what's released in the senator series with alex this year we have live shows on our channels about the individual books and we are super stoked for the fourth installment which comes out next spring i think in march but uh empire of silence i think people told me and alex um that the books get better and better and that empire of silence is the weak one and i mean i remember being shocked by that and being like one part of silence was like 10 out of 10 i don't know how you get better than that and i i mean i gave every book in the series so far 10 out of 10 5 out of 5 like knockouts but i think my favorite probably is empire of silence um and it's and i do not mean to suggest that the second and third books are like now steps down or like it's like going down in quality i absolutely do not mean that but there's just something about the beginning of the series where you first come to know all of this you first come to know the characters you first come to know this world there's just something so i don't i don't know if there's a word for it but that's what makes it my my favorite i think so far is just coming to this world and coming to know it for the first time that like continuing to be in the world is a treat because it's well written and there's new and staggering things that you learn that completely re contextualized which you thought you knew so it continues to be like mind-boggling but you can't really repeat that like that first high if that makes sense of like this first introduction of this world and being like wow kind of similarly to the broken earth trilogy i have that experience where the fifth season like is probably my favorite but it's partly just because like that's your first time seeing what this writer can do and what this this world is all about and after that like it's still that like it's still absolutely on that level but it's not your first time tasting it you know your your first introduction to like holy shit this is amazing so um bar of silence is that like first high that you're chasing so if you don't know anything about um bar of silence um well you clearly didn't watch me in alex's live shows but um this is an epic space opera that i think fans of red rising will absolutely love actually i did a video about like should you read the sign eater so leave it down below as well if you're interested in that but um suffice to say like this does everything right this is everything that i want out of a space opera it has incredible world building incredible main character to follow it has similar to those red rising vibes of a sort of more archaic social structure but placed in a far future it does have something that red rising doesn't really ever tackle at least so far and that is alien life and it handles that so anthropologically which coming from me high praise indeed and it was just as i read it i mean while i was just like enjoying the story as a reader the entire time i was also just sitting there going like but from a craft standpoint like the way you've thought this through the way you've built this out the way that you've paid attention to all this detail i'm just like staggered from a technical perspective i think it's a rip roaring can't put it down story that is intense and dark and dramatic and mind-bending and expansive and just just amazing you highly recommend this series and empire of silence the first one is just like wow and the number one book of 2021 i'm sure you've already guessed it is um the wisdom of crowds by jarbra croppy this is the third and final book in the age of madness trilogy it is also the last book that we have that is planned that is scheduled to be in the world of the first law he has indicated interest in writing more in the world of the first law the way that wisdom of crowds ends it certainly leaves scenes for future historians to grow but right now this is all we've got and all that we are planned to have and this is the first book that abercrombie has written that has made me cry and not just a glistening single tear i was ugly crying i joked that i would cry when i read wisdom of crowds because it was the end and i mean that that's sad but that's not why i was crying holy shit it is i mean i think it's the best thing abercrombie has written from a writing craft perspective i mean i have an intense love for the original trilogy uh that i don't think anything could ever release a plant but like it's inarguable that as a writer from a technical standpoint he has gotten better and better and better and the new trilogy is as tight and as polished and as just lean and completely like perfect as it could possibly be i don't think that i could possibly argue that the original trilogy is from a technical standpoint better than the new trilogy the new trilogy is like peak olympic performance and then the third each book got subsequently better a little hatred i was like holy shit i'm this is the best thing i've read from you so far and then trouble with peace was even better and i was like that's ridiculous and then wisdom of crowds was so good and it made me cry and i just i i mean i have a review for it on my channel leave that thing down below i also interviewed abercrombie which was low key the best thing of the year so leave that thing down below too it's a third book in a trilogy that is also like the 10th book in an ongoing world so i can't really say too much about it except that way to stick that landing sir i was nervous going in because sticking the landing of any series is difficult it's impossible for me not to have high expectations because i hyped it for myself so intensely and it's still managed to surpass my ridiculously high expectations so hats off just kiss you're the goat i just wow wow so those are my top books of 2021 let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about my thoughts and feelings uh let me know if there's any books on this list that you have read that you want to read that you you hated and think they belong on the worst books list or that you were surprised that i didn't have on this list that you expected to see whatever you want let me know i post videos on saturdays other random times of all that i think saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined and i'll see you when i see you bye