2021 in reading

In 2021, I twitter-threaded books I read, and reached 100 by the time the year ended. Go me. 

This is an undercount as I did not list partially-read books, short comic books and graphic novels (for example, Hem by Jason, even though I liked it quite a lot), or re-reads (with a couple of exceptions).

I did not see many movies or TV shows and it was, well, 2021 (COVID-19, now with added omicron), so I didn't see my usual number of concerts or plays. So this list is probably longer than it would've been in a more normal year. 

Books were my escape outside of the pandemic walls.

When I wasn't reading, I was often doing book-related activities: I followed writers on twitter, read reviews, checked best of the year lists, marked books that sounded intriguing. I made lots of lists. 

Also, I bought a lot of books. My TBR is even more ridiculous than it was when the year started. Buying likely-looking (and inexpensive) books from bookoutlet.ca was a pastime--as well as buying from other bookstores and sites (some new, some used) when I could order online or visit in person. I bought lots of books for the kids, as well as myself. 

We are blessed in Toronto with a magnificent public library of both ebooks and printed books, and I made use of those too, often for comics or for books I was pretty sure I didn't want to own. 

(I am also slowly buying [mostly used or remaindered] Library of America, New York Review of Books, and black Penguin Classics printed editions to help form a beautiful permanent library, for maximum joy. I read a few of those this year.)

All in all, it was a great year for reading, and for thinking about books. 

Here's a few of the highlights:

Modern Literary Fiction:

• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I am very much looking forward to the sequel that is coming out in 2022.
• No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. Stunning in its precision, strangeness, beauty, and grief. Also very funny and the right novel for anyone who has ever been swallowed by the Internet.
• Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken. How does she do this. How does she write these stories so well, so cleanly so that I know Tony and Wes and Peter Elroy and Karen Blackbird and Stony. Magic.
• Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. A beautiful, terrifying, intimate novel about family and madness. First person in five different character voices, a tour de force too.

Classic Literary Fiction:

• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Devastating. 

Noir/Crime/Thriller:

• On the Yard by Malcolm Braly. Prison life in all its brutality, delusion, and boredom. Brilliant though rambling, not for the squeamish (NYRB).
• Black Wings Has My Angel by Eliot Chaze. Pulpy, noir, overripe. (NYRB)

Science Fiction and Fantasy: 

• The Unveiling by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Wow. A far-far-future queer Bildungsroman with a different gender mapping and achingly human characters. Highly recommended for fans of innovative sf (i.e., Samuel R. Delany).
• Mordew by Alex Pheby. A strange, genuinely amoral philosophical fantasy, dealing with power and hubris, guilt and shame and pain. Huge backstory, maps, appendices, and a chosen one like an epic fantasy but it’s a beautiful frightening dream.
• Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. One of the finest fantasy books I’ve ever read, by turns comic, horrifying, metafictional, romantic, mystic, and ironic. Thank you, Small Beer Press.
• The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck. Love everything she writes. Completely brilliant.

Memoir:

• Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough. I read, and loved, her "cable guy" essay online so I had to read this. It's astonishing, infuriating, sad,  funny, and amazing. A journey from growing up in a cult to the military to almost-homelessness, coming out... must read.
• One Friday in April by Donald Antrim. A story of suicide and survival with lots of open-ended questions.

Comics:

• The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens. Absolutely gorgeous graphic novel, very slice-of-life, very 20-somethings getting in serious trouble in the demi-monde. Witty, literate, tumultuous and the drawing is fantastic.

Please check out the twitter thread if you want to see the rest. There's some great stuff in there: Molly Gloss, Suzanna Clarke, Jane Yolen, Alastair Reynolds, Adrian Tchaikovsky, David Mitchell, Monica Byrne, Adam Roberts, and so on and so on. There's only a few I didn't like and I usually said so. 

Aren't books just the best?