This is my 10th year of the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I’ve been challenging myself to read more books for the last ten years. After getting interested in the Wheel of Time series, I decided to spend the year reading the entire series mixed with a bunch of random books I come across.
Usually, I would have a separate post for each category, but this year was dominated by Fantasy Fiction interspersed with some short stories and suspense thrillers. So here goes!
The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra is one of those soft mystery books that take you on a journey while investigating a crime. It is the first instalment of the Kaveri and Ramu mysteries set in pre-independence India. The reader gets an inkling of the socio-political situation around the time, providing an interesting background for the story to evolve.
Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University. She writes on issues of nature and sustainability and has published works of non-fiction on the topic of sustainability in urban areas. The Bangalore Detectives Club is her first work of fiction.
Lightseekers by Femi Kayode is not just your regular crime fiction but is based on actual events. Femi familiarises readers with the town, its people, and their history while trying to figure out what went wrong. I’ve been reading books from around the world for the genre. This year, I’m becoming more familiar with other countries and their cultures. This book hit all the right notes, and I recommend you add this to your reading list.
Lightseekers was inspired by the necklace killing of four undergraduates in a university town in Nigeria and is Femi Kayode’s debut novel and the first in the series of novels about the investigations of Philip Taiwo. The book won the UEA/Brown Little Crime Fiction Award in 2019.
La Hora Azul or The Blue Hour is a novel by Peruvian author Alonso Cueto and is translated into English by Frank Wynne. The book looks back on Peru’s history, exploring the aftermath of the Peruvian Civil War.
Alonso Cueto won the Herralde Prize in 2005 for The Blue Hour (La Hora Azul). The book has plenty of themes to keep you engrossed: family secrets; an obsessive love affair; the brutality, misery and guilt of war; and an anti-hero searching for answers.
Translated books are a treasure trove of insights into different parts of the world. I would highly recommend adding this and diversify your reading list.
I came across a few short stories on Amazon last year and loved them. Amazon has commissioned a series of original short stories by prominent writers. These stories are categorised by genre and are only available as digital books on Amazon or as audiobooks on Audible.
If you have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited, then you can read most of these for free. The narrators on Audible are often celebrities, so that’s something you might consider when choosing which format to get.
The stories are short but impactful. They take you on a journey and make you see the world differently.
Short stories in the Hush Collection ranges from political mysteries to psychological thrillers, in which deception can be a matter of life and death
I came across a few short stories on Amazon last year and loved them. Amazon has commissioned a series of original short stories by prominent writers. These stories are categorised by genre and are only available as digital books on Amazon or as audiobooks on Audible.
The stories are short but impactful. They take you on a journey and make you see the world differently.
Short stories in the Hush Collection ranges from political mysteries to psychological thrillers, in which deception can be a matter of life and death
I came across a few short stories on Amazon last year and loved them. Amazon has commissioned a series of original short stories by prominent writers. These stories are categorised by genre and are only available as digital books on Amazon or as audiobooks on Audible.
If you have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited, then you can read most of these for free. The narrators on Audible are often celebrities, so that’s something you might consider when choosing which format to get.
The stories are short but impactful. They take you on a journey and make you see the world differently.
Here is a list of fiction books I read in 2021. There were a few misses as always, but overall, it’s a good list of books. I am also glad that the authors I read this year are from diverse cultural backgrounds—Algerian, Indian, Vietnamese, and Dutch, to list just a few. If you’re interested in diversifying your bookshelf, read my previous post on Around the World in Books.
This is Part 1 of 4 posts about the books I read in 2021. I’ll start with the shorter reads.
Amazon Kindle has teamed up with some great story writers for a series of short stories in various themes that are available only as Kindle books or Audibles. I read a few that were powerful reads.
This year, I also read some books from the romance genre, from the literary to the unabashed soft porn. I wasn’t blown away by any of them, but they were good in-between reads—a palette cleanser, if you may!
I couldn’t catch up on any poetry collections published this year, mainly because I didn’t have the time to research the titles I wanted to read. I’m still looking for an easier way to get a list of books from different genres and regions without spending hours researching.
Short Stories I read in 2021
Books on Romance
Poetry Books
Love, Life, & Beyond 