Memorable Books we read in 2021

Each year, Theater in Asylum releases a list of books we read that were impactful, stuck out, and memorable. Below find a list, crowd-sourced from our community, of the books we loved in 2021. And check this post out to see the books we loved last year, in 2020.

Ariella Axelbank reading Susan Quinn's Furious Improvisation!

Fiction

• A String of Silver Beads by Melissa Addey
• Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
• Oh Pray My Wings are Gonna Fit Me Well by Maya Angelou
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Just Above my Head by James Baldwin
• Milkman by Anna Burns
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
• All the Ted Chiang short stories
• When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cold
• You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria
• Babel-17 by Samuel Delany
• Master of the Revel by Nicole Garland
• The Midnight Library by Matt Heig
• Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
• Green River Valley by Robert Lashley 
• The City and the City by China Mieville 
• Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
• Bewilderment by Richard Powers
• On Love and Other Difficulties by R. M. Rilke
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Carry On by Rainbow Rowell 
• Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell
• We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• The Invisible Life of Adie LaRue by V.E.Schwab
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 
• The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
• The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang
• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Non-Fiction

• Re-Enchanting the World by Sylvia Federici
• Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher 
• Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman
• Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
• Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes du Mex
• I Overcame my Autism and All I Got was this Lousy Anxiety Disorder by Sarah Kurchak 
• My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
• Van Gogh: The Asylum Year by Edwin Mullins
• Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz
• The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les and Tamara Payne
  
• Furious Improvisation by Susan Quinn
  
• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up by Sarah Schulman
• The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman
• Conflict is not Abuse by Sarah Schulman 
• Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman 
• Energy at the End of the World by Laura Watts
• Caste: The Origin of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson