Welcome to Wren in Black Book Reviews! Thank you so much for taking a moment of your time to visit Wren in Black! If this is your very first stop, take a moment to read the about me page so we can get better acquainted! It’s okay. I’ll wait right here.

Done? Great!

Now, to celebrate the blog’s launch I am doing a short series of 2021 Reading Year in Review posts. First, I want to brag on and celebrate my top ten favorite reads of last year.

Here they are in the order that I read them:

1. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
2. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
3. Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham
4. This Light Between Us by Andrew Fukuda
5. The Darkness Outside Us by Elliot Schrefer
6. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
7. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
8. Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson
9. They Went Left by Monica Hesse
10. Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Of these, The Anthropocene Reviewed was by far my favorite book of 2021! I was not expecting that to be the case, since it is a book of nonfiction essays. But, oh my, John Greene proved me wrong. I wound up buying a copy of the book for me (as well as a Kindle copy so I could search my highlights), a copy for my classroom, a copy for a friend, and a copy for my mother. I should buy stock in all things John Green from now on, especially if this is an entry point into nonfiction.

Overall, it was an excellent reading year. I finished 165 books total. I read by mood until I found the 52 Book Club challenge on Thanksgiving Day. I discovered I only needed 6 more books to fit all of their prompts, and I made it! The challenge gave me the final push I needed to get through a couple of books that had been on my TBR stack (that’s To Be Read for those you who aren’t book obsessed) forever, like Heart of Darkness. Here’s what I used to fit each prompt in that challenge.

I’ll be doing a full review of The Anthropocene Reviewed tomorrow, so stay tuned!