Hello friends. As December settles over us, we’re now in the season of year-in-reviews and listicles. I am definitely not immune to these lists — I like looking at the NY Times Best Books of 2021 just to see how many of those books I have read.
(The answer is zero.)
I haven’t decided on how many books I am looking to read next year — currently I am on book 50 out of my goal of 36 — but still, I already have a list of books that I am excited to read in the next year.
To be clear, these are books that I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. NetGalley has been very generous and has already given me four books that are set to be released next year, but I am always on the hunt for more. So yes, this is me making a public plea to be given some more ARCs.
If you’re looking to stock up on your reading list for next year, here are some books that I’m looking forward to that may tickle your own fancy.
And They Lived by Steven Salvatore (8 March)
A budding animator and hopeless romantic, Chase Arthur is obsessed with finding his true love, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s just not worthy of love. Trying to navigate the intricacies of college when you’re still struggling to figure yourself out is no easy feat either.
Then Chase meets Jack Reid, a pragmatic poet who worships words and longs to experience life outside of his sheltered world. But Jack is still learning about his sexual identity and he hadn’t factored someone like Chase into the equation. Chase will have to learn to love — and be enough for — himself, while discovering what it means to truly live.
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (15 March)
When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray takes up a gig for an old acquaintance, Tom, as a grunt for an “animal rights organisation”. But these aren’t just your everyday strays but rather massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju, which roam about in an alternate dimension, one that is human-free world.
But people are starting to find their way into this alternate dimension and it’s causing trouble for the Kaiju and everyone back on the Earth, unless Jamie and his team can find a way to solve it.
Portrait of an Art Thief by Grace Li (5 April)
Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell in this heist novel where Will Chen, a Chinese American art history student at Harvard, has assembled a motley crew to steal back priceless Chinese artefacts from a Western museum. If they succeed, they stand to earn ten million each, and a chance to make history. If they fail, they lose everything and the West wins again.
Portrait of A Thief has already been optioned by Netflix ahead of its publication and if that isn’t a stamp of approval for this novel, I don’t know what is.
A Show for Two by Tashie Bhutan (10 May)
Mina knows she is a shoe-in for winning the Golden Ivy student film competition when indie film star — and known heartbreaker — Emmitt Ramos enrolls in her high school to research his next role. When Mina sets out to persuade Emmitt to join her cause, he offers her a deal instead: he’ll be in her short film if she helps him with his own photography contest.
As Mina ventures across New York with Emmitt by her side, the city she was so desperate to leave is starting to look more like home than it ever has before. With the competition deadline looming, Mina’s forced to ask herself: Is winning worth losing everything?
Glory Spares None by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman (Fall 2022)
Details on the sequel to All of Us Villains are scarce with neither Goodreads or StoryGraph having any information on it. We don’t even have a cover yet! But somehow that makes it all the more exciting. With this being the final book in the duology, the stakes are high to see whether the second novel is able to wrap-up everyone’s arc satisfyingly.
I can’t wait to get my hands on these books — in whatever shape or form they come to me — and I hope you’ve found a book or two to add to your own TBR list ahead of 2022.