12 Books, 12 Friends: TBR of Friend-Recommended Books to Read in 2021!

I’m kind of panicking at the thought of 2020 ending soon…

…But I am so excited for this little “project” of mine for 2021! A few months ago, I decided I wanted to do something for 2021 where I read specific books that my friends loved/recommended to me, one for each month. So today I’m here with the 12 books I’ll be reading in 2021 because of my friends, all by POC!!

I really love this list, because it ended up having books in different genres/age groups that’ll be perfect for my mood reading, and it’s also full of books I’ve been meaning to read for a while (many of them being published in 2018 or before!). The books aren’t in any order, as I don’t have a specific month planned for each of them, but I’m hoping to read at least one from this list each month next year!

Yes, I know there are more than 12 books, and there are more than 12 friends on this list… let me be.

9 Books I’m Planning to Read Before the End of 2020

It’s almost the end of this hellish year and I couldn’t be more excited!!

First of all, I love the holiday season and it always cheers me up. Second of all, I’m especially excited for 2020 to be over, because everything that has happened this year has been terrible and I can’t wait for a a new year where (HOPEFULLY) things will start to look up.

But with the end of the year comes cramming to finish my Goodreads challenge, which is why today, I’ll be listing a few of the books I want to read before 2021! I am… sadly but unsurprisingly behind on my reading goal (7 books behind), so most of these are shorter/not full-length prose novels. I’m not sure if I’ll actually get to all of them, not because of a lack of time but because I will just chuck it out if I’m not in the mood for a book, but I’m really hoping I will!!

30 Non-YA Books I Want to Read (Including Adult Fiction, Classics, and Non-Fiction!)

A moment of silence for YA…

Just kidding! I probably will never stop reading YA, BUT I’ve been wanting to branch out of it for a while now. So I finally took the plunge and made a list of adult fiction, classic, and non-fiction books I want to read! I was already excited to read these beforehand (though also a bit intimidated), but making the list made me a lot more excited somehow!!

I definitely will not be reading all of these by the end of the year, but I want to start reading at least one book from this post every month! Hopefully it’s not just one book, because one book a month would take over 2 years and… I don’t have the patience for that.

Click for BLM resources. I’d like to bring special attention to the Portland bail fund because of the way the government and police are responding to protesters right now.

• petitions
• numbers/emails
• videos to stream (ad revenue will be donated)
• George Floyd gofundme
• Gianna Floyd (his daughter) gofundme
• Breonna Taylor gofundme
• Ahmaud Arbery gofundme
• Elijah McClain gofundme
• bail funds, research local ones near you too
• organizations
• small Black businesses that were destroyed
• Black-owned businesses
• indie Black-owned bookstores
• tips on overall protest safety
• google doc masterlist of BLM resources

My Revised June Pride TBR: Reading as Many Books by Black Queer Authors As I Can!!

This is proof that I’m terrible with TBRs!

I made my original June TBR right before Black Lives Matter protests broke out all over the world, spurring people and companies and also the book community to take action. One of the things that we can do in the book world moving forward is to read from Black authors and support their work.

So! I decided to drop a few books off my original Pride TBR to make room for more books by Black authors. Of course, I’ll be holding myself accountable to keep this same energy throughout the entire year instead of just this month with the protests, but I thought it was especially fitting for June since Pride exists today because of Black queer activists!!

(I also was looking at my TBR and realizing that I wasn’t really too excited about some of the books. And as a mood reader, especially right now with my inability to focus, being excited about the books I plan to read is really important!)

My June TBR: Books for Pride and a Long Awaited PJO Reread!

Originally, this post started out with simply “v excited”…

…and I feel like that’s pretty accurate to what I’m feeling right now.

I was originally going to take part in the Olympic Games readathon in June, but then Scribd got taken away from me momentarily. Then when I reviewed my TBR, I found that I wasn’t super interested in a lot of the books I’d put just for the sake of fulfilling prompts. So I just decided to make my own TBR and not participate!

(Also, I’d wanted to do the readathon to do something PJO-related to trick my brain into waiting just one more month to reread the books, but… the adaptation news took away my resistance completely.)

So, while a majority of the books on my TBR are queer to celebrate Pride Month, PJO is not! I tried to include a diverse range (POC, f/f, nonbinary/trans), and since none of these are white m/m by straight white women like you see so often in “LGBTQ+ book recommendations” lists, I’d say I did a pretty good job. [insert passive-aggressive smiley face]