2021 in Books

As in 2018, 2019, and 2020, I logged the books I read. Here's the 2021 list, followed by some brief comments.

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1. Underground Airlines — Ben Winters | 1.2
2. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life — Samantha Irby | 1.5
3. Someone’s Trying to Find You — Marc Augé (Trans. Chris Turner) | 1.5
4. Cycling on Form — Tom Danielson | 1.7
5. Vollidiot — Tommy Jaud | 1.13
6. Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang | 1.16
7. North — Scott Jurak | 1.18
8. How Much of these Hills is Gold — C. Pam Zhang | 1.18
9. Swimming in the Dark — Tomasz Jedrowski | 1.20
10. Whatever — Michel Houellebecq (Trans. Paul Hammond) | 1.23
11. Shrill — Lindy West | 1.25
12. Spy of the First Person — Sam Shepard | 1.25
13. In the Land of the Cyclops — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. Martin Aitken, Ingvild Burkey, Damion Searls) | 1.26
14. A Month in Siena — Hisham Matar | 1.30
15. Neu Jahr — Juli Zeh | 1.31
16. The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien | 2.1
17. Suppose a Sentence — Brian Dillon | 2.3
18. Mirror, Shoulder, Signal — Dorte Nors (Trans. Misha Hoekstra) | 2.5
19. Swing Kings — Jared Diamond | 2.7
20. Other Men’s Daughters — Richard Stern | 2.13
21. The Art of Travel — Alain de Botton | 2.14
22. Follow Me to Ground — Sue Rainsford | 2.15
23. Everywhere You Don’t Belong — Gabriel Bump | 2.23
24. Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied — Peter Handke | 2.25
25. Remainder — Tom McCarthy | 2.25
26. First You Write a Sentence — Joe Moran | 2.27
27. No Name in the Street — James Baldwin | 2.28
28. If You Kept a Record of Sins — Andrea Bajani (Trans. Elizabeth Harris) | 3.4
29. When We Were Vikings — Andrew David MacDonald | 3.10
30. Just Us — Claudia Rankine | 3.11
31. Bone Canyon — Lee Goldberg | 3.13
32. Homeland Elegies — Ayad Akhtar | 3.16
33. Minotaur — Benjamin Tammuz (Trans. Kim Parfitt & Mildred Budny) | 3.18
34. Let My People Go Surfing — Yvon Chouinard | 3.20
35. Millionär — Tommy Jaud | 3.26
36. On Writing — Stephen King | 3.30
37. Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live — Peter Orner | 4.10
38. Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between — Eric Nusbaum | 4.11
39. Deaf Republic — Ilya Kaminsky | 4.13
40. Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Garbriel) | 4.14
41. Dorfpunks — Rocko Schamoni | 4.15
42. Before the Coffee Gets Cold — Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Trans. Geoffrey Trousselot) | 4.20
43. The Faraway Nearby — Rebecca Solnit | 4.24
44. Ironweed — William Kennedy | 4.24
45. Children of the Land — Marcelo Hernandez Castillo | 4.26
46. Bright Scythe — Tomas Tranströmer (Trans. Patty Crane) | 5.3
47. Green Girl — Kate Zambreno | 5.4
48. Strange Weather in Tokyo — Hiromi Kawakami (Trans. Allison Markin Powell) | 5.12
49. Artemis Fowl — Eoin Colfer (Auf dem Englischen von Claudia Feldmann) | 5.15
50. Perestroika in Paris — Jane Smiley | 5.18
51. An Event, Perhaps — Peter Salmon | 5.22
52. To The Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf | 5.24
53. The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick — Peter Handke (Trans. Michael Roloff) | 5.25
54. Night Boat to Tangier — Kevin Barry | 5.29
55. Age of Death — Michael J. Sullivan | 6.2
56. Faces in the Crowd — Valeria Luiselli (Trans. Christina MacSweeney) | 6.2
57. On Looking — Lia Purpura | 6.10
58. Resturlaub — Tommy Jaud | 6.12
59. My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante (Trans. Ann Goldstein) | 6.12
60. Leaving the Atocha Station — Ben Lerner | 6.22
61. Stories with Pictures — Antonio Tabucchi (Trans. Elizabeth Harris) | 7.1
62. The Last Best League: 10th Anniversary Edition — Jim Collins | 7.1
63. Weather — Jenny Offill | 7.7
64. Acrobat — Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Trans. Nandana Dev Sen) | 7.8
65. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk (Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) | 7.13
66. Yearbook — Seth Rogen | 7.16
67. Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark — Mary Wollstonecraft | 7.17
68. For the Love of Europe — Rick Steves | 7.22
69. News of the World — Paulette Jiles | 7.25
70. What Are You Going Through — Sigrid Nunez | 7.26
71. Mittagsstunde — Dörte Hansen | 7.28
72. A Life Without Limits — Chrissie Wellington | 7.30
73. The Martian — Andy Weir | 8.3
74. Shuggie Bain — Douglas Stuart | 8.11
75. How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps — Andrew Rowe | 8.15
76. Wanderers — Chuck Wendig | 8.16
77. Everything Like Before — Kjell Askildsen (Trans. Séan Kinsella) | 8.16
78. Sorrow and Bliss — Meg Mason | 8.19
79. Dear Committee Members — Julie Schumacher | 8.20
80. Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman | 8.24
81. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin | 8.27
82. The Longest Race — Ed Ayers | 8.30
83. The Constant Rabbit — Jasper Fforde | 9.6
84. Laufen, Essen, Schlafen — Christine Thürmer | 9.8
85. Range — David Epstein | 9.13
86. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — George Saunders | 9.21
87. The Heart to Start — David Kadavy | 9.25
88. Ancillary Justice — Anne Leckie | 10.2
89. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now — Jaron Lanier | 10.4
90. The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen | 10.6
91. Trespassing Across America — Ken Ilgunas | 10.13
92. Old Filth — Jane Gardam | 10.15
93. Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro | 10.16
94. Mixed Plate — Jo Koy | 10.25
95. Neverworld Wake — Marisha Pessl | 10.29
96. Winter — Ali Smith | 10.31
97. Sharing — Arno Strobel | 11.2
98. A Time for Everything — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. James Anderson) | 11.4
99. The White Book — Han Kang (Trans. Deborah Smith) | 11.7
100. How to Write Short — Roy Peter Clark | 11.8
101. Three O’Clock in the Morning — Gianrico Carofiglio (Trans. Howard Curtis) | 11.13
102. Pity the Reader — Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell | 11.13
103. Underland — Robert MacFarlane | 11.17
104. OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say — Ben Sheehan | 11.21
105. Less than Zero — Bret Easton Ellis | 11.22
106. Mind Management, Not Time Management — David Kadavy | 11.25
107. Red Pill — Hari Kunzru | 11.25
108. Alles auf Anfang — Melina D’Angeli | 11.25
109. Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love — Haruki Murakami (Trans. Philip Gabriel) | 11.30
110. Proustian Uncertainties — Saul Friedländer | 12.7
111. Snow Country — Yasunari Kawabata (Trans. Edward Seidensticker) | 12.9
112. The Necessary Angel — Wallace Stevens | 12.15
113. The Priory of the Orange Tree — Samantha Shannon | 12.20
114. The Untouchable — John Banville | 12.21
115. Alles Richtig Gemacht — Gregor Sander | 12.23
116. Britt-Marie Was Here — Frederik Backman (Trans. Henning Koch) | 12.23
117. The Cost of Living — Deborah Levy | 12.25
118. The Power of the Dog — Thomas Savage | 12.27
119. Murder Your Darlings — Roy Peter Clark | 12.31
120. Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata (Trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) | 12.31

I read twelve books in German this year—eleven novels and a nonfiction book about through-hiking America’s three long-distance trails (Laufen, Essen, Schlafen). At the end of the year, I’m pretty happy with my reading comprehension and speed—both improved measurably from January to December.

I had trouble, though, with Mittagsstunde (because of its use of dialect) and Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (because of literary vocabulary, figurative language, and idioms). I’ll read the latter again—it’ll act as a good barometer of progress. Books auf Deutsch that stood out were Neu Jahr and Alles Richtig Gemacht. I have a story to tell about Neu Jahr, but I haven’t figured out, yet, how to tell it.

I did not read anything longer than an Instagram post in Norwegian. Maybe 2022 will be the year I read a kid's book or graphic novel?

Overall, I read fifteen fewer books in 2021 than I did in 2020. The reason for this is clear: I started cycling in June. Since then, I’ve ridden almost 5,000 miles, and that has cut into my reading time.

Here are a few books that stood out:

• Remainder — Tom McCarthy
• Remainder is the most inventive novel that I’ve read since The Universal Baseball Association. A fully realized imaginative world that I longed to inhabit—not to be there, in the narrative, but to be inside the book each night as I curled up in bed, my Kindle screen lighting my rapturous reading face. I still think about the world McCarthy created, perhaps once a week. Absolutely fantastic.
• A Month in Siena — Hisham Matar
• This reminded me a bit of María Gainza's Optic Nerve, a book I highlighted in 2019. Both are excellent reflections on art and existence. As with McCarthy, I'll definitely be reading more Matar.
• Dear Committee Members — Julie Schumacher
• I'm obviously the target audience for this book, and I laughed out loud several times. But this one also broaches the profound and discomfiting in a wholly unexpected way.
• Green Girl — Kate Zambreno
• Roxanne Gay discusses Green Girl at length in Bad Feminist. I'm glad of that. Otherwise I might not have read this excellent novel.
• Weather — Jenny Offill
• Offill has become one of my favorite authors, full stop.
• What Are You Going Through — Sigrid Nunez
• What I said about Offill? Nunez = same.
• Deaf Republic — Ilya Kaminsky
• I almost never recommend books because reading taste is so subjective—I might think something is wonderful and you might think the same book is trash. But I'm recommending Deaf Republic to you, dear reader. Buy it, read it, keep it. Buy it for friends and family.
• The Constant Rabbit — Jasper Fforde
• A clever, engaging satire of contemporary nationalisms and tribalisms.
• Night Boat to Tangier — Kevin Barry
• This is the book to give to folks who like reading thrillers but who avoid literary fiction. Barry is a superb stylist, and there are pages and pages of crafty dialogue that make this a snappy read.
• A Time for Everything — Karl Ove Knausgaard (Trans. James Anderson)
• This isn't on the list because I loved it. Though this is brilliant at times, it was also a slog more often than not. I had to put it down for a month or so, even though I was 80% in (more on that below). It's on the notable list because (a) it's mostly bizarre and (b) there are hints of what Knausgaard would do later in My Struggle (especially in the book’s Coda, which is in the voice I’ve come to expect from Knausgaard). Bonus: this recent review by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB, of Knausgaard's latest novel, is truly amazing.
• Old Filth — Jane Gardam
• This was unexpectedly great. Unexpected because I'd never heard of Gardam or the Old Filth trilogy (even though these are famous novels) and because this is the book I turned to when I could no longer stand reading about the tiresome plight of Noah and his stupid ark (Knausgaard—see above). It was a Kindle deal, and the perfect palate cleanser when I needed it. (Read on for one more anecdote about Old Filth).
• Underland — Robert MacFarlane
• Fascinating, timely, and superbly written.
• Red Pill — Hari Kunzru
• 300 pages of slow-burning existential dread for our times. Another book I'd suggest for people who don't normally read literary fiction.
• The Untouchable — John Banville
• It's possible to not really love a book but be blown away by the prose. That's the case, for me, with The Untouchable. Kind of slow, kind of stodgy (both by design, btw), but filled with clever and insightful prose. I read this thinking "I'll never be able to write like Banville," with nothing but admiration in the thought.



One consequence of reading a lot is encountering the happy accident or overlap. Near the very end of Alles Richtig Gemacht comes this bit of dialogue:

“Was liest du?”

….

“Jane Gardam. ’Ein untadeliger Mann.’”

“Gut?”

“Tröstlich,” sagt Stephanie. “Wie Earl Grey trinken und Scones essen.”




In English:

"What are you reading?"

....

“Jane Gardam. ‘An irreproachable man.’ [Old Filth] "

"Good?"

“Comforting,” Stephanie says. “Like drinking Earl Gray and eating scones."

I’d not have registered this at all, let alone gotten the significance of the reference (and what it says about the protagonist and his relationship to his wife, Stephanie) had I not read Old Filth just two months before. That the cross pollination occurred across languages, times, and countries—East Germany, Ireland, and reunified Germany (Alles Richtig, 2019), the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and Hong Kong/PRC (Old Filth, 2004), and the United States (me, as reader, 2021) makes it even more satisfying and interesting.

Happy reading, ya'll.