Best Books 2021: Lit Hub's Ultimate Best List

This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Best Books 2021" series you can use the best lists tag. 

Yesterday one of my favorite best lists dropped-- Lit Hub's annual data crunch, of best lists from 33 major outlets. They make a list of the books that got the most "best" nods so you can get a sense of a consensus. And the outlets they check are both literary and populist.

I do not just love this list for the obvious reason that it gives you a sense of the overall "best" books but I also use it to build my annual "Year in Review" presentation that I give for PCI Webinars. More on that in January.

But that is next most, for today here is the Ultimate Best Books of 2021via LitHub.

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 The Ultimate Best Books of 2021 List

Reading All the Lists So You Don't Have to Since 2017

 By Emily Temple

For good or for ill, no matter what happens in any given year—be it insurrection, new variants, the rise of #BookTok, or even a free Britney—the end-of-year lists will go on. And therefore, per Literary Hub tradition, we will count them. After all, didn’t 2021 teach us anything about the value of personal opinions vs. actual data? (No, actually, I’m sorry to say that it looks like it didn’t, but for the record: listen to the data.) 

So this year, I counted up 49 lists from 33 outlets (as ever, there are . . . even more out there, but life and time are both finite), which recommended 785 total books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. 138 of those appeared on 3 or more lists, and I have collated those for you here, in descending order of frequency. 

Does this mean that these are the absolute Best Books of the Year? Who knows! But if you pay attention to a single popularity contest this year, you could do worse than choosing this one.

CLICK HERE for the list. They also offer backlist access in the post.