We also need to acknowledge that the film industry lost a great contributor in Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian director of Wild, Dallas Buyers Club, and the HBO series Big Little Lies. Vallée died suddenly over the holidays at his cottage in Quebec. We offer our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. 

Television Shows

In year two of a global pandemic, It’s no surprise that streaming television shows dominated the small screen space last year. The variety of series that caught our attention, from the Korean thriller Squid Game to Peter Jackson’s sprawling Beatles documentary series Get Back, scripted and unscripted TV kept us glued to our seats in 2021.

Books

Some of our favourite new books gave us perspectives we hadn’t heard before and glimpses into different people’s lives. We especially appreciated Dr. Jen Gunter’s The Menopause Manifesto, a follow-up to her extremely successful The Vagina Bible.

AudioBooks

Celebrity memoirs topped our 2021 audiobooks list -- partly because they were narrated by the celebrities themselves. Seth Rogen’s Year Book comes highly recommended.

Music

Nostalgia seems to connect a lot of our favourite albums of 2021. Whether it’s Olivia Rodrigo bringing us back to the pop-punk bops of the early 2000s or Silk Sonic reminding us of partying the 70s away, or Taylor Swift literally re-recording a 10-year-old album, we wanted to wrap ourselves in the past like a warm blanket. A good way to get through a pandemic, if you ask us.

Podcasts

We listen to a lot of podcasts at Innovate By Day. It’s a medium that really lends itself to passive learning. And we learned a lot! We especially wanted to highlight two podcasts that are close to the Innovate By Day team. Teagan Lisson, the author of this blog post is one of the co-hosts of Our Golden 20s, and her husband Tyrell hosts The Band: A History.