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Bad On Paper

The Best Books of 2021!

Bad On Paper

Becca Freeman

Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.84.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2021

⏱️ 66 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's been a big year of reading, and today we're talking about our favorite books from 2021! We each picked a top 5 and also had our listeners weigh in on the best books—from thrillers to romance to non-fiction to backlist—they read this year. If you're in search of book recs, look no further, we have the best of the best for you!

 

Grace's Favorites

- The Push by Ashley Audrain (Mystery/Thriller)

- Good Night Beautiful by Aimee Mollloy (Mystery/Thriller)

-Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (Fiction)

-Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Fiction)

-Untamed by Glennon Doyle (Non-Fiction)

-Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee (Non-Fiction)

-The Third Door by Alex Banayan (Non-Fiction)

-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (Non-Fiction)

-The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Backlist)

 

Becca's Favorites

-The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Mystery/Thriller)

-People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (Romance)

-Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly (Romance)

-Seven Days in June by Tia Williams (Romance)

-The People We Keep by Allison Larkin (Fiction)

-The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand (Backlist)

 

Listener Reccomendations!

-The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Mystery/Thriller)

-Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger (Mystery/Thriller)

-The Wife and The Widow by Christian White (Mystery/Thriller)

-Olympus Texas by Stacey Swann (Fiction)

-Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (Fiction)

-Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans (Fiction)

-Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (Fiction)

-We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride (Fiction) 

-Expecting Better by Emily Oster (Non-Fiction)

-Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Non-Fiction)

-Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Non-Fiction)

-Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell (Non-Fiction)

-The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson (Non-Fiction)

-Indistractable by Nir Eyal (Non-Fiction)

-A Most Beautiful Thing by Arshay Cooper (Non-Fiction)

-A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Backlist)

-Summer of 69 by Elin Hilderbrand (Backlist)

Obsessions 

The Morning Show 

A Discovery of Witches 

 

What we Read this week!

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

Always, in December by Emily Stone

If This Gets Out by Sophie Gonzales and Cale Dietrich

 

November Book Club Pick:

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

 

Sponsors:

Better Help - Go to betterhelp.com/badonpaper for 10% off your first month

Everlywell - Go to everlywell.com/bop for 20% off your at-home lab test

 

Join our Facebook group for amazing book recs & more!

 

Like and subscribe to RomComPods. Available wherever you listen to podcasts. Visit Grace's blog, The Stripe. New posts daily!

 

Follow us on Instagram @badonpaperpodcast. Follow Grace on Instagram @graceatwood and Becca @beccamfreeman.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hi everyone, welcome back to Bad on Paper Podcast. I'm Grace Atwood and I'm Becca Freeman.

0:24.0

Today we are talking about our favorite and your favorite books of the year. So I guess we're

0:30.4

calling this our best books of the year episode. This is our Super Bowl. I'm really excited for

0:35.9

this. Also, I don't know if people know this. Grace loves a listicle of best books of the month,

0:42.5

best books of the year. Like you love a best books list. I send them to you, like because of whenever

0:48.5

I'm working on my weekend reading post for my blog, I always come across them and I send them to Becca.

0:53.6

Like here's one. And then you sometimes will send me like feedback on it and you'll be like, well,

0:58.5

I don't know about this list or whatever. I'm like, I'm just sending it to you. I haven't read it yet.

1:04.0

Well, this is a love one. This is a list of our very own. I'm very excited. I also was very

1:10.5

interested to see what books our listeners were recommending. And I would say in summary, our

1:17.9

listeners might be slightly higher brow readers than us. There was a lot of nonfiction and like

1:23.7

important fiction recommended. So we'll round it out with some more trashy rex. Well, I think if

1:32.0

a stranger asked me like what the best book you read this year would be, I would try and say

1:36.9

something a little more high brow. But for our podcast, I'm like, I'm going to tell you the best

1:41.2

trashy thriller I read. And we're going to go from there. Well, you know what? I think I probably

1:46.4

would have done that three years ago before we had the podcast. But now I feel like if somebody

1:51.2

asked me what my favorite book of the year was, I would just like fully go off and like really

1:56.0

recommend something like super trashy. Like obviously this is not. And trash, I don't believe

2:03.0

that anything is a guilty pleasure. People hate this turn of phrase when I call something trashy.

2:08.5

It's, it's something I love. Anyway, like a few years. I just know people are going to come

2:14.7

to love that. Please don't go and yell at her for saying trash person. But if two years go

2:19.6

off something, it's like, what was your best book of the year? I would have talked their

...

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