Books of 2021

Well, here is the list of books I read during the past year, and I am grateful for every one of them. Each became my companion for a time during this second pandemic year, and through many of them, I was joined by the intrepid members of my book group who met every Friday morning to discuss the next 50 or 100 pages of whatever novel we were reading together at the time. We helped each other finish a lot of long and sometimes difficult books, we kept each other company, and got to know each other better as friends. So although reading is, by its nature, solitary, it's hard for me to look down this list and not think of the experience with certain titles as a shared one. I know that this sort of group is not for everyone, but it's been good for me, and as facilitator for most of the books, it's really kept me on my toes.

If I could only recommend one of these books to you, I think it would be Milkman, by Anna Burns, written about Ireland during the Troubles: one of the freshest, most original pieces of writing I've read in years, with brilliantly-drawn characters who will win your sympathy. I've just finished Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, and admired her writing, though the story of a boy growing up on an island off the coast of Sicily is one that makes you cringe at times. While we're talking about islands, there was the Laexdal Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders, well worth anyone's reading time as a vivid portrait of human love, jealousy, greed, generosity and wisdom 1000 years ago, with characters who leap off the page and feel entirely recognizable. Finally, Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen is the first book of four about people living impossibly difficult lives on tiny islands off the coast of Norway. It's Nordic noir without even trying to be; I've only read the first in the series but found it absolutely compelling.

The year began with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a book that should be on every serious reader's shelf and taken down several times as we go through life, because with each reading, it reveals something new to you about yourself. I was very happy to read it with the book group; I think we all got more out of it than we would have alone.

Teju Cole's Black Paper is a collection of essays not just about race, but about the dark side of human nature as well as the forces of beauty that are its counterpoint, and most employ his signature style of interweaving seemingly-unrelated ideas or subjects to give a new perspective. Golden Apple of the Sun combines a series of photographs of his kitchen countertop during the pandemic with a concluding essay that is a searing indictment of racism from the early days of American colonial history. Fernweh, on the other hand, is a book of carefully-sequenced photographs taken in Switzerland that has been a consolation to me this year, not because they are pretty or conventional pictures, but because in depicting a place that at once feels closed but seductive, both artificial and natural, beyond-human and yet curated and manufactured, it somehow evoked the strangeness and alienation of the world in which we've found ourselves, but lands squarely on the side of beauty, offering a space in which to breathe. It has stayed on my bedside table since the day it arrived.

A confession: I started with the intention of reading all of Dante's The Divine Comedy, but found Inferno hard going: it's because the year itself was just too depressing to spend more of it in a fictional or imagined hell! On the other hand, I thought that Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was one of the most brilliantly-written books I've ever read. It's not well known, and it's written in a daunting stream-of-consciousness style with page-long sentences and few paragraph breaks, to which you simply have to surrender, allowing yourself to be swept along. The reward is that if you stay with it, your view of what it might mean to meet one's impending death, as a literate and conscious person, will be enlarged and changed.

Finally, I was surprised to find myself enchanted and then almost obsessed by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I had read almost all of Hesse's other works, but not this one, his last major novel, which sets up a hypothetical world in the future where education and culture are preserved and controlled by an elite group of celibate, secular, male intellectuals who live in near-monastic remove from the "real world" of ordinary people. The high achievers of this elite society became Masters of the "Glass Bead Game", a never-fully-described exercise in which participants make connections between disparate aspects of cultural artifacts or knowledge, such as relating a law of physics and a Bach sonata. The book provoked a great deal of thought about contemporary academia and tensions between the life of the mind and "real" everyday life in the world; European intellectual life prior to WWII; the preservation of human culture; relationships between men and women; and the interplay (or lack thereof) between political history and cultural/scientific achievement. If you didn't read it back in the 1960s, take a look now! To whet your appetite, I'll include, at the end of this post, my somewhat lame but colorful response to our group leader's challenge to create a mini "glass bead game" ourselves.

Happy reading in 2022, and, as always, please let us know in the comments what YOU read in 2021 and what books were highlights for you! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

2021

We Are All Equally Far From Love, Adania Shibli

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante #

Dubliners, James Joyce (excerpts)

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Time, Etal Adnan

Black Paper, Teju Cole

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse#

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.#

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje#

Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer

Real Presences, George Steiner

The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole

Fernweh, Teju Cole

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)#

The Interior Circuit, Francisco Goldman

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'Brien

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness #

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a monograph by various authors

The Hostage, Brendan Behan

Milkman, Anna Burns#

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck

O Pioneers, Willa Cather #

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

Agamemnon, Aeschylus #

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

Travels with Epicurus, Daniel M. Klein

The Return, Hisham Matar

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, Luisa A. Igloria

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky #

# indicates a book read with my book group. Stats:  37 books total; 14 by women, 23 by men, vast majority read as e-books. 20 of these books were written originally in English, 17 read in translation.

 

 

Comments

[Val]

Love the glass bead video! What an interesting book club you belong to. Hope you will do more of these meditative videos.

[Peter]

I love reading your list each year. I've purchased the Pevear / Volokhonsky version of Brothers K, but I haven't read it yet. I've thrice read the book in other translations, and I agree with you that it offers a different mirror -- or an accurate mirror of a different reader -- each time.

[Huw]

Beth, thank you for sharing your book list again. I always have half an eye on what I choose to read, knowing it will end up here. You keep me honest!

The books in common this year are Teju Cole's Golden Apple of Sun and Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena, both of which I enjoyed. Teju has the rare ability to turn the most banal of subjects into something of interest and often beauty. In times of physical stasisI have followed his lead and taken photos of our kitchen worktop, with much less success.

From my list the standouts were: Susanna Clarke's Piranesi which I read with two friends in the loosest of book groups - like your experience with Hesse's Glass Bead Game (which I started but could not engage with) it spurred creativity, with one friend writing a short story in a similar style; John Berger's G, which is strange but resonant (and flawed in the best way); Steve Lovatt's Birdsong in a Time of Silence because I know Steve and it was a delight; Ruth Ozeki's A Book of Form and Emptiness; and Homing by Jon Day, about pigeon racing in London. I missed the heft of a Brothers Karamazov and my lack of commute on train and tube has definitely changed my reading habits of the past few years. Perhaps less consistent, but also less fragmented

Best wishes for the New Year,
Huw

My 2021 list:
The Land Beyond, Leon McCarron
Kissa by Kissa, Craig Mod
How to Argue with a Racist, Adam Rutherford
Leonard and Hungry Paul, Ronan Hession
Things I Learned on the 6.28, Stig Abell
Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts
The Miracle Pill, Peter Walker
Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz
Difficult Women, Helen Lewis
Acts & Romans, trans. ESV
Birdsong in a Time of Silence, Steve Lovatt
A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Tree Wakers, Keith Clare
G, John Berger
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
Food Rules, Michael Pollan & Maira Kalman
How to Train a Wild Elephant, Jan Chozen Bays
The Gracing of Days, Martin Stannard
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Wanting, Luke Burgis
Black Country, Liz Berry
Absolutely On Music, Murakami & Ozawa
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestly
Lifesaving Poems, ed. Anthony Wilson
Blue Violet, Cig Harvey
Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole
Reunion, Alan Lightman
A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
What is this?, Martine & Stephen Batchelor
Homing, Jon Day
Island Dreams, Gavin Francis
Don’t Let the Goats Eat the Loquat Trees, Thomas Hale
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, J Jennifer Matthews
The Book of Form & Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki
Stroke, Richard I Lindley
One More Croissant for the Road, Felicity Cloake
Self-Knowledge, The School of Life
The Children’s Bach, Helen Garner
For the Time Being, W.H. Auden
The Practice of Groundedness, Brad Stulberg
A Heritage of Stars, Clifford D Simak

[John]

Interesting list as always. Am on the road. Will respond more a little later