Chris Gaither Coaching
Sustainable leadership for sustainability leaders.

Blog

My 2021 reading list: books that guided me through another pandemic year

In 2021, I moved into a new home, got married, coached almost three dozen individual clients and seven leadership teams — and still read 63 books. Didn’t matter if they were print, e-books, or audiobooks… nonfiction, fiction, or poetry… I created space each day for words and ideas to energize and inspire me.

The books that moved me the most explored how we meaningfully allocate our time, connect with one another, solve problems, create art, and grieve great losses. I allowed beautiful sentences — prose and poetry — to reset my eyes so I could see the world anew. And, because we’re in a global pandemic, for Pete’s sake, I found books that made me cry with laughter and took me on great adventures.

Here are my favorite books of 2021. You can see my full list on Goodreads. Please follow me for future recommendations.

Nonfiction

  • Chatter, Ethan Kross

  • Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown

  • Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

  • The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

  • Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey

  • How We Show Up, Mia Birdsong

  • The Practice, Seth Godin

  • Upstream, Dan Heath

  • The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller

  • Yearbook, Seth Rogen

Fiction

  • Anxious People, Fredrik Backman

  • A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet

  • Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

  • Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar

  • How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue

  • Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu

  • Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

  • The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles

  • The Matrix, Lauren Groff

  • This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Poetry

  • Feeding Your Vow, Brooke McNamara

  • Please, Jericho Brown

  • Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds

Chris Gaither