Category: books/readings

I read 92 books this year, ten more than last year and one more than my goal of 90. 52 were fiction and 40 were nonfiction, a slightly more even distribution than last year’s 58 to 33. Much like last year, most of these books were great. Some were incredible. Some sucked. Also, much like last year, I’m starting this new one off with another takedown of Silicon Valley (An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang.)

A few trends stand out to me, looking back at this year’s list. I read more science fiction than usual (intentional, for collection development purposes and curiosity). I also delved into more series this year than I normally do (Murderbot and the Three Pines mysteries, which couldn’t have less in common but I find both to be delightful). There were also more than usual titles that had multiple authors or editors.

Looking back at last year’s recap, I’m going to pull a quote that feel very relevant at the current moment: “As shitty as this year was, I’m grateful I had the time and stability to read as much as I did, and for the fact that my brain still finds so much solace in the written word. Books got me through, folks. Whatever got you through was the right thing for you.” Same deal this time around, and also it’s nice to look back at this list and last year’s and remember that there was a time before the nonstop misery/anxiety spiral that was the fall of 2021. And I super miss listening to books while gardening.

Note: I’m not going to do a list of favorites from 2021 this time just because so much of what I read this year didn’t come out this year. I’m looking forward to reading the best books of 2021 when people stop placing so many holds on them, lol.

Top 5 fiction:
Dana Spiotta – Wayward
Rory Power – Wilder Girls
Rumaan Alam – Leave the World Behind
Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet
Kim Michele Richardson – The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

Top 5 nonfiction:
Danielle Henderson – The Ugly Cry
P.E. Moskowitz – The Case Against Free Speech
Jathan Sadowski – Too Smart
Xiaowei Wang – Blockchain Chicken Farm
Bryan Stevenson – Just Mercy

Top 5 that taught me the most:
Sara Ahmed – Complaint!
Cliff Kuang & Robert Fabricant – User Friendly
Margaret O’Malley – The Code
Mariame Kaba – We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine

Top 5 that will probably have the most significant and/or lasting impact on me:
Andrea Bonior – Detox Your Thoughts
bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress
Dean Spade – Mutual Aid
Chana Porter – The Seep
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
(bonus – Ash Sanders’s essay in All We Can Save, “Under the Weather,” was one of the best things I read all year.)

5 best audiobooks:
Margaret Atwood – Oryx & Crake
Donella Meadows – Thinking in Systems (also relevant in all of the other categories, save for fiction)
Rory Power – Wilder Girls
Raynor Winn – The Salt Path
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky – Trauma Stewardship

The complete list of my 2021 reads:

1. Wendy Liu – Abolish Silicon Valley
2. Tommy Orange – There There
3. N.K. Jemisin – The City We Became
4. Aaron Benanav – Automation and the Future of Work
5. Chana Porter – The Seep
6. Alexis Henderson – The Year of the Witching
7. Ursula K. LeGuin – The Dispossessed
8. Akwaeke Emezi – The Death of Vivek Oji
9. Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine
10. Kim Stanley Robinson – Red Mars
11. R. Eric Thomas – Here For It
12. Bryan Stevenson – Just Mercy
13. Colson Whitehead – Nickel Boys
14. Yaa Gyasi – Transcendent Kingdom
15. Emily M. Danforth – Plain Bad Heroines
16. Margaret O’Mara – The Code
17. Olga Grushin – The Charmed Wife
18. Maika & Maritza Moulite – One of the Good Ones
19. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Ejeris Dixon – Beyond Survival
20. Mariame Kaba – We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
21. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky – Trauma Stewardship
22. Lori Majewski & Jonathan Bernstein – Mad World
23. Kate Bornstein & Caitlin Sullivan – Nearly Roadkill
24. Nnedi Okorafor – Binti
25. Charlie Jane Anders – All the Birds in the Sky
26. Nicholas Carr – The Shallows
27. Jathan Sadowski – Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World
28. Kim Michele Richardson – The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
29. Clare Pooley – The Authenticity Project
30. Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
31. P.E. Moskowitz – The Case Against Free Speech
32. Lee Vinsel & Andrew Russell – The Innovation Delusion
33. Mateo Askaripour – Black Buck
34. Annalee Newitz – Autonomous
35. Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen – Thanks for the Feedback
36. M.L. Rio – If We Were Villains
37. Matt Haig – The Midnight Library
38. Tara Dawson McGuinness & Hana Schank – Power to the Public
39. Patricia Lockwood – No One Is Talking About This
40. Naomi Alderman – The Power
41. Fredrik Backman – Anxious People
42. Xiaowei Wang – Blockchain Chicken Farm
43. Rumaan Alam – Leave the World Behind
44. Torrey Peters – Detransition, Baby
45. Brene Brown – Braving the Wilderness
46. Becky Chambers – To Be Taught, If Fortunate
47. Tommy Wallach – We All Looked Up
48. Megan Devine – It’s OK That You’re Not OK
49. Dana Spiotta – Wayward
50. Joanne McNeil – Lurking: How a Person Became a User
51. Kevin Roose – Futureproof
52. Terry Miles – Rabbits
53. Cliff Kuang & Robert Fabricant – User Friendly
54. Tsedal Neeley – Remote Work Revolution
55. Martha Wells – All Systems Red
56. Lulu Miller – Why Fish Don’t Exist
57. Jenny Offill – Weather
58. Brandon Taylor – Real Life
59. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson – All We Can Save
60. Charles Yu – Interior Chinatown
61. Martha Wells – Artificial Condition
62. Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
63. Dean Spade – Mutual Aid
64. Donella Meadows – Thinking in Systems
65. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai – The Mountains Sing
66. Robert I. Sutton – The Asshole Survival Guide
67. Naomi Kritzer – Catfishing on CatNet
68. Alexandra Kleeman – Something New Under the Sun
69. Rory Power – Wilder Girls
70. Rory Power – Burn Our Bodies Down
71. Louise Penny – Still Life
72. Kiese Laymon – Long Division
73. Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet
74. Donna Tartt – The Secret History
75. bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress
76. Martha Wells – Rogue Protocol
77. Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, Kimberly Loh – Compassionate Conversations
78. Jay Caspian Kang – The Loneliest Americans
79. Danielle Henderson – The Ugly Cry
80. Raynor Winn – The Salt Path
81. Andrea Bonior – Detox Your Thoughts
82. Margaret Atwood – Oryx & Crake (re-read)
83. Tressie McMillan Cottom – Lower Ed
84. Lindy West – Shit, Actually
85. Sara Ahmed – Complaint!
86. Tim Hwang – Subprime Attention Crisis
87. Erving Goffman – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
88. Jessica Bruder – Nomadland
89. Katherine McKittrick – Dear Science & Other Stories
90. James C. Scott – Seeing Like a State
91. Keller Easterling – Extrastatecraft
92. Louise Penny – A Fatal Grace

I just read two great books that I guess you could call…spiritual? Metaphysical? Introspective? They don’t fit neatly within genre, but I find that what I’m liking best these days rarely does. First came the novel Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, then I picked up Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection by Carmen Maria Machado. At the end of Emezi’s book, they talk about a writer’s workshop where their fellow people of color said they couldn’t do what Nabokov does. This kind of stuck with me, not because of the relative Nabokov-iness of either one of these books but because of how silly it is to try to box these writers in comparisons with their forebears. I rarely assess things from that point of view anyway, but still, there was so much going on in these two books that to bog down a reaction to them by trying to find past commonalities seems pointless.

Earlier this year, I read Aimee Bender’s The Butterfly Lampshade and liked it for its similar vibes. All of these works are surreal, introspective, and haunting, but to link them by saying there’s a common theme of troubled protagonists is also too reductive. In The Butterfly Lampshade, Francie worries about peering into otherworldliness because of the genetic legacy she may or may not have inherited from her schizophrenic mother. In Freshwater, Ada is contending with her/their brain being divided up and fought over by gods as she/they attempt to enter adulthood. In Machado’s stories, the mostly unnamed first-person narrators are bound by mysterious magical ribbons and try to truck through global catastrophes; in the most powerful story of the collection, “The Resident,” the protagonist finds herself torn between past and present, wandering too closely to a darkness in herself that she winds up having to destroy, even though it’s part of her and the inspiration for her art.

As a person who has struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and has engaged in… lifestyle choices that may or may not have exascerbated it, these tales all felt close to the bone, “The Resident” perhaps most of all. In the story, the narrator goes on a writer’s retreat to an unnamed mountain range north of Philadelphia that starts with P. It turns out to be very close to a Girl Scouts camp she frequented in her childhood (aside: I went to a Girl Scouts camp in the Poconos) and the novel she’s working on involves a character inspired by the childhood traumas she winds up reliving as an adult. There’s a repeated idea in it that the point of the retreat is to allow your brain space and time to make random connections and dig up memories you didn’t know you still had. This is intended to be positive (and may be a comment on how complicated and insensitive this prompt would be for many people), but as the narrator leans into that, she’s only met with horror after horror, both physical and mental, and her traumas meld together in a way that transcends time.

I think this story resonated with me in particular because I don’t feel as besieged with emotions (and, let’s be honest, possessing of creativity) as I used to. And while part of that is due to better lifestyle choices and stability, part of it is due to having shuttered that section of myself off in many ways. And the reason for that shuttering is explored well in The Butterfly Lampshade – it’s a defense against following threads too far into a version of the world (and yourself) you might not be able to come back from. Freshwater differs in how its inevitability is clear from the start; Ada is mostly along for a ride she/they adapted to in order to survive. I have been fortunate to live with some semblance of control over my situation, but I also feel like a large part of me has been excised in return for it.

There was a time when a blank page or a blinking cursor in an empty document was never a match for the downpour of words flowing out of me, when I could sit composing music and tweaking lyrics for hours. But now I’m eating, sleeping, and making money, and I’m afraid of removing any of the load-bearing walls I’ve assembled to keep moving forward. Or maybe it’s not a matter of load-bearing, as Machado puts it at the end of “The Resident,” but a thing some of us find we must do:

Thus far in your jury deliberations, have you encountered any others who have truly met themselves? Some, I’m sure, but not many. I have known many people in my lifetime, and rarely do I find any who have been taken down to the quick, pruned so that their branches might grow back healthier than before.

– Carmen Maria Machado, “The Resident”

• Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi (2018) – buy on bookshop.org
• Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (2017) – buy on bookshop.org
• The Butterfly Lampshade, Aimee Bender (2020) – buy on bookshop.org