Goodbye 2021: My Favorite Books of 2021!

Here comes the most excruciating part of any year…

I read so many fantastic books in 2021 that I couldn’t imagine deciding on my top books of the year. But as I was scrolling through my many positively-rated books, there were 11 books in particular that stood out the most to me, and I truly believe that every single one of them is written impressively well and .

Some quick observations: I love how this list ended up being so diverse in genre, and I love how my top 6 were all absolutely emotionally devastating! I may not have much going for me but at least I’m consistent with my book tastes (books that hurt me).

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Goodbye 2021: My Favorite Moments of the Year

Welcome to the start of my silly end of year traditions!

You all know I love end of year posts and carrying on “traditions” on this blog, so as always, we’re kicking off my “Goodbye” series with my favorite moments of 2021. And as I always say, I can’t believe we’re here at the end of the year. I know last year I was hoping (but doubtful) that things might be different in terms of the pandemic, and it sucks that they aren’t. But there were some pockets of happiness I was able to find in 2021, which I’m forever glad for!

Speaking of the pandemic: I have COVID! This is certainly NOT a favorite moment of the year… but luckily I’ve been experiencing only mild symptoms (and hopefully it’ll stay that way). I’m going to pretend that my tiredness from COVID is the reason why this post is short, and not because I couldn’t come up with any more favorite moments :p

Goodbye 2020: My Favorite Books of 2020! The Best of the Best + Honorable Mentions

To seek escape from 2020, I found a lot of comfort in good books.

Granted, last year gave me my lowest average rating for books, which I’ll be talking about in my end of year reading wrap-up next. But! Today is not for negativity! (I posted about my least favorite books of 2020 already—check out here.) Today, I’m only bringing positivity and talking about my favorite books of the year!

I am terrible and don’t allow myself to truly love many books, but there were so many 2020 reads that I really enjoyed and wanted to highlight, even if I didn’t love them enough to call them favorites. So in the post, you’ll see my 7 honorable mentions (haha…), and my top 4 books of the year!! All of these books touched me in some way, and I would recommend all of them.

Goodbye 2020: My Favorite Moments of This Very Terrible Year!

Can you believe it’s already time for the end of year posts?

I don’t know how to feel about the fact that in a little over a week, this trashfire of a year will be over. On one hand, it’s a relief to know that we can have a fresh start in 2021, but at the same time, I have a deep fear that nothing will change—whether it be COVID specifically or our political systems in general—and it feels so overwhelmingly heavy to carry that.

I don’t like to list out my accomplishments, no matter how great or small, because it just ends up allowing my brain to find more reasons to hate myself. And that’s especially true during an absolutely terrible year like 2020, when a large accomplishment is having survived. What I think is much healthier is to reflect on the more positive moments that took place, the things that happened that made the year a tiny bit better. Obviously, most of these were not enough to completely cancel out every bad thing in 2020, but… they provided a little bit of joy to me, and that’s what is important to me.

This post is going to be much shorter than my usual posts, because it—unsurprisingly—was difficult to think of a multitude of memorable, positive moments from this year. But I have some other fun end of year content planned that’ll hopefully make up for it!

9 Things/Tropes I Will Always Love in Fiction + Some of My Favorite Books with Them!

I have no brain cells to spare, so we’re doing an unoriginal post!

I’ve always wanted to a post talking about my favorite fictional tropes and never had the chance to. But after finishing She-Ra and losing my mind in the DMs with my friends, I realized how many tropes it involved that I loved, so I thought, why not do this post as a convenient way to just lose my mind about She-Ra on my blog!

Not all of the things I’m going to talk about are necessarily tropes, so that’s why I just said “things” in the title. It’s also very important to note that I was strongly tempted to just include “gays” as one thing and then provide no detail whatsoever, but I held back to give you… actual content.

(I also attempted to list 10 things instead of just 9, but as stated before! No brain cells.)

Click for BLM resources.

• sign petitions
• text/call/email people
• stream these videos (ad revenue will be donated, don’t skip ads!)
• donate to the George Floyd gofundme
• donate to the Gianna Floyd (his daughter) gofundme
• donate to the Breonna Taylor gofundme
• donate to the Ahmaud Arbery gofundme
• donate to these bail funds, research local ones near you too
• donate to these organizations
• donate to small Black businesses that were destroyed
• support Black-owned businesses
• protest, if you can be safe/healthy! wear a mask, tips on overall safety
• I put together a list of just a few YA books by Black authors to read on Goodreads