Every book I read in 2021

I am here once again to share some nonsense about the books I’ve read this year, brought to you by lack of sleep, Covid-enforced introversion, and the sporadic incorporation of audiobooks into my commute. Nothing deep to be found here (and the order is purely chronological), just my general thoughts upon completing each book and some occasional quotes I found striking and remembered to note for later.

1. Cutting for Stone — Abraham Varghese

A book with much unexpected beauty, written with a wholly unique kind of compassion and insight.

2. Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell

Okay, I did not expect this book to become entrenched in the themes it does. This was a magnificently imaginative read and has left me feeling re-energized and hopeful in a way that other books have not for some time.

“What precipitates acts? Belief.”

“One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself.”

“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

3. How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell

The third book I read in 2021 and a recommendation from a very smart person who it sometimes seems does just about everything. This is a really important book to read — I think Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living reached me better, but they are definitely in conversation with each other.

4. The Hate U Give — Angie Thomas

Got to this one late because the audiobook was on a huge waitlist through 2019 and 2020 each time I checked for it, and it was recommended that I listen to it rather than read it (I second this, Bahni Turpin does an amazing job). Whether you haven’t gotten to this one yet or you think it’s more for young adults than for adults who have enough nerve to make their own doctor’s appointments, you should still keep it on your list.

5. American Prison — Shane Bauer

I….how can you be punished for self-mutilation? The American prison system is one which, no matter how much I learn about it, constantly surprises me in the worst ways. This book was incredibly disturbing to read, not the least because in a manner reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment Bauer, who himself was formerly imprisoned overseas in retaliation to his work as a journalist, slips all too easily into taking advantage of the intense power dynamics at work within the walls of the prison he works undercover in. If you didn’t start this book convinced that our prison system needs reform (or abolishment), and if you still don’t feel that way when you reach the end of the book, I don’t know what to say. An incredible, difficult, and self-baring work of journalism.

6. Hasta Siempre, Mujercitas (So Long, Little Women) — Marcela Serrano

I picked this book a bit at random but it was a nice break away from what I normally read. I’ve yet to read Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women and am far more curious about it after having read this book.

7. The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov

This is a book I will need to return to after I have let it sit for some time in my mind. Several friends have recommended Master and Margarita to me over the years and it’s clear why. Though Bulgakov seemed to really suffer in writing and disseminating this work, it is a masterful satire commenting on basic human tendencies alongside what were contemporary social issues of his time.

8. Something to Live For — Richard Roper

This was an unexpectedly funny, poignant, and sweet. It reminded me quite a bit of Broken for You and A Man Called Ove.

9. Stay and Fight — Madeline Ffitch

So different from almost everything else I’ve read recently. But in a good way. I liked this quite a bit.

10. My Beloved World — Sonia Sotomayor

At times this read more like a career advice thread than an autobiography, and I don’t always agree with Sotomayor’s approach to principles and morality (one she indicates she is well aware is controversial), but I’m glad I read it.

11. Unorthodox — Deborah Feldman

I watched the Netflix series sometime last year and it was clear at the time that it was overly dramatized — but while reading through Feldman’s book, there were some pieces that I was surprised hadn’t made it into the film despite their reality and impact. I also felt myself wishing Feldman had actually addressed or spoken about the racism she records witnessing and perpetrating in her memoir, rather than simply detailing it and then moving on. It was incredibly striking when she said she grew too old to fight for small freedoms.

12. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — Mark Haddon

I felt like I was quite overdue to read this book, and now that I have I can see why it was so popular when it came out. I also think that there are some timely discussions on authentic representation and authorship that this book fits perfectly well into, even though Haddon chose never to explicitly state whether his protagonist is on the Autism spectrum.

13. The New Wilderness — Diane Cook

This was a unique book. I found the story breaking my suspension of disbelief at times, which was somewhat distracting, but I was really fascinated by the evolving concepts that showed up through the book.

14. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland — Jonathan M. Metzl

I do have to say that very little in this book particularly surprised me. I still feel like it was an important book for me to read, and that it’s important for others to take the time to read, as well. Metzl does a superb job of writing about a topic that many people refuse to approach, and from a wholly unique angle.

“Our nation urgently needs to recognize how the systems of inequality we build and sustain aren’t benefiting anyone.”

15. Sombras Nada Mas (Nothing But Shadows) — Sergio Ramirez

A book that brilliantly aligns fact and fiction through the plight of Alirio Martinica, who slowly reveals his complexities to captors who will pass final judgement over him. The context, the fall of the Somoza dictatorship to the FSLN, is one in which the imagery elicited by the title and the story fits chillingly well.

16. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower — Brittney Cooper

The only thing of value I have to say about this book is that as many people as possible should read it. Cooper says the rest better than anyone else.

17. Radical Compassion — Tara Brach

An incredibly thoughtful book that I found myself meditating with while reading. RAIN is both accessible and highly necessary in order to process the world around us, and Brach writes with a deep compassion.

18. We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders — Linda Sarsour

Sarsour is both an unbelievably impressive activist and a very talented orator of her own story. It is clear that she holds an incredible capacity to collaboratively draw forth the potential in those around her.

19. En el tiempo de las mariposas (In the time of the butterflies) — Julia Alvarez

Alvarez really took on a difficult subject in writing this novel, and she did an extraordinary job. Her resolute narrative retelling of the lives and murders of the Mirabel sisters under the Trujillo dictatorship is a testament to the powerful legacies that strong women have on those who come after them.

20. The Power — Naomi Alderman

A book whose imagination is only paralleled by its violence (my biggest critique). I found the nuances of the framing around the central story to be clever, and the writing was fantastic.

“The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami.”

21. The City We Became — N K Jemisin

I’m so grateful to the multiple people who recommended I pick up a book written by Jemisin. She is a fantastic author with a world-building (and destroying) imagination, and this book was an incredible work of art to travel through.

22. Normal People — Sally Rooney

This book just completely gutted me. I read Conversations with Friends last year basically in one sitting, and this book went essentially the same. Rooney writes hypnotically, pulling the covers back abruptly from the inner workings of her character’s minds so that they’re bared quite unexpectedly.

23. White Fragility — Robin DiAngelo

An important read for any white self-named progressives who are serious about introspection into their own silent complicity in and active enforcement of racism and white supremacy. I think this should be read as a secondary piece to works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Brittney Cooper, and Ijeoma Oluo (among many others), but do think it should be on the list.

24. Buzón de tiempo (Time’s Mailbox) — Mario Benedetti

Kind of stumbled across this book, but Benedetti is a really gifted author who created a sense of continuity through a series of stories that easily could have come across as entirely disjointed.

25. She of the Mountains — Vivek Shraya

This book felt completely unique to any other narrative I’ve read to date and was a particularly beautiful mixture of history, legend, and love story — of the other as well as the self.

26. How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood — Peter Moskowitz

I’ve learned about gentrification at different points in my education and my life experience, but not having grown up in a city myself, having moved from place to place in my adult life, and having the intersecting identities that I do, there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle that I’m inherently blind to. Moskowitz does the difficult work of making those pieces plainly visible, and of exploring the various ways that people have disintegrated, preserved, and rebuilt the essence of cities across the US. This was a particularly apt and interesting book to read on the heels of Jemisin’s incredible work The City We Became.

27. Half of a Yellow Sun — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is probably the most crushing of Adichie’s works I’ve read to date, and was a stunningly unrelenting look into the Biafran War through the eyes of characters who are often put at war with themselves.

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same name.”

28. White Teeth — Zadie Smith

This book felt equal parts comical and striking.

29. Exit West — Mohsin Hamid

What an incredible book. I ate through half of it in one sitting and then couldn’t get back to it for two weeks, but it was a lightning-fast and enrapturing read.

30. Apeirogon — Colum McCann

A book that, as was clearly planned, has as many layers as an apeirogon has sides. I selected this book for the author rather than the plot and did not check what it was about prior to reading it, but it was ultimately very timely considering all of the watered-down and largely performative social media posts I saw for about a two-week period in May. If you did not grow up hearing about life in Israel as well as Palestine, or if you found yourself speaking up about a topic you did not know the nuances of very well, this book, while some elements are fictionalized, does a remarkable job of explaining the current suffering, and the exploitation of previous suffering, that develop into the power dynamics playing out in this tiny region of the earth.

“But nobody should keep his foot on another man’s neck, he said. Peace was a moral inevitability. Neither side could keep the other from it.”

“All walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naive, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him.”

31. Nickel and Dimed — Barbara Ehrenreich

This book was recommended to me a few years ago and I just got around to reading it. There was some language that I found to be problematic, so I suppose that aspect of the book hasn’t aged particularly well. But I think that the author gave a genuine effort to carry out a task that she hadn’t been keen on doing herself when she first imagined it, and I would hope that this work makes a compelling argument to anyone who doubts how hard you have to work at minimum wage jobs not just to make ends meet but just to get through your shift.

32. The Icarus Girl — Helen Oyeyemi

Oyeyemi’s collection of short stories, What is Not Yours is Not Yours, has been one of my favorite books since I first devoured it. Icarus Girl is equally enthralling, horrifying, and liberating to read. The seamless integration of identity, folklore, horror, loneliness, and redemption within this text is captivating.

33. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

One of the most important books I’ve read in a while — not only for how many events I learned about, or learned about very differently from what I had previously known, but also for the fact that Dunbar-Ortiz made a concerted effort to gather so much history within a single text in order to paint a more complete picture of the development of oppression and genocide over time, and the ways in which it evolved across the nation.

“Settler-colonization is inherently genocidal in terms of the Genocide Convention.”

34. Men Without Women — Haruki Murakami

I keep finding myself reading Murakami despite being constantly worried that he’ll talk about the shape of some teenager’s ear to the sound of an obscure jazz cover. I definitely enjoy Murakami’s short story collections more than his novels at this point, though admittedly the only novel I’ve read by him is IQ84 which easily could misrepresent the rest of his work. Murakami writes with a deep reverence for the small uglinesses we live with, and intersperses magical realism in his work as though it were so many plants in a person’s house.

35. My Broken Language — Quiara Alegría Hudes

This was an incredible autobiography to read. Hudes is such a talented artist, from prose to music, and I remember seeing In the Heights when the musical first came out in my childhood and being entranced by the worlds she built up and tore down again. Her way of describing herself and the world around her is grounded, transparent, and unwavering.

“At a young age, Mom mastered the art of being incomplete.”

36. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster — Adam Higginbotham

A really fascinating work of investigative writing that seemed to have taken a toll on the author who produced it. Higginbotham clearly put great effort into helping the world more fully understand a tragedy that was covered up so intensively.

37. Cuando era Puertorriqueña (When I was Puerto Rican) — Esmeralda Santiago

A moving work of self-awareness, with an eye for the small details

38. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — Mariana Enriquez

This was a strangely enthralling book, with many dark corners. Enriquez builds believable, unsettling lives for her characters

39. The Invention of Wings — Sue Monk Kidd

Kidd was inspired by the lives and letters of the Grimke sisters to write this book which took some liberties with the details of their lives. The Invention of Wings is a really fascinating look at how different, imperfect, justice-driven women might have sought an intersectional approach to their efforts to free themselves and others.

40. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life — Mark Manson

While I found myself disagreeing with a lot of what Manson wrote (I don’t think it’s a sign of entitlement to find certain aged pieces of literature offensive), I agreed with enough of it to get through the book and honestly it was pretty applicable to many aspects of my own life.

“Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive.”

41. Transcendent Kingdom — Yaa Gyasi

I put off reading this book because I was unsure of how anything could follow Homegoing, but Transcendent Kingdom holds its own in what feels like a wholly different realm of literature despite continuing to build testimony to the long-resounding echoes of history, place, and experience that pass through generations. Gyasi writes with equal brilliance about the mundane and the moments that flare in life as brief spaces of awesome and awful reckoning.

42. Detransition, Baby — Torrey Peters

Of all the books I’ve read, this one by far focused the most on sexuality, gender expression, and the incredibly complex ways they can intersect in past and present life (with She of the Mountains coming in a close second). It’s useful to read as someone who is cisgender, and it’s also just a really well-written book by an author who happens to be openly trans.

43. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander

This is a book I have been meaning to read for some time now and I’m glad I made my way to it. Though I didn’t learn so many new things from it, it’s a truly seminal work in the areas of criminal justice reform and racial justice in the US particular to our histories of chameleoning racial caste systems, and as the author notes is one of its goals I feel it’s given me many more tools with which to engage people in conversation when they are ignorant of or resistant to acknowledging the depth of these issues. One point of particular import and fascination I found myself reflecting on was the concept that the drug war has involved a lot of the same “mow the grass” technique that is used in US international warfare, often with the same deleterious results that have led many to call against tactics used in US military and militarized police strategy.

“We must make do with the lessons of history.”

“The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history.”

44. The Witches Are Coming — Lindy West

At times funny, at times sobering. Like some of the other books I’ve been reading lately, I found myself disagreeing with parts of it but mostly I followed West the whole way through.

45. An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the Twenty-First Century — James Orbinski

I actually began reading this book almost two years ago, and had to leave it half finished when I moved overseas and such a large book didn’t make my packing list. Orbinski has quite a lot of wisdom to share, and it was often an unnerving experience to approach his work through the lens of my own very limited professional background. A book that I feel gives a fair window into some of the daily moral and ethical dilemmas that fill humanitarian work from unexpected angles. Often intertwined with this, Orbinski’s book also serves as a testimony to some of the greatest horrors the world has seen in the past several decades, and to the many, many people who stood in those moments with dignity and attempted to set things right.

“I went to bed and dreamt of the white blanket of lime covering the bodies at Auschwitz and of the beautiful eyes of the shoe-store man on St. Laurent. I could see now why those eyes were beautiful. They were beautiful because they were ready to die and yet chose to live; beautiful because he had made life with the same slow deliberateness with which he and his wife removed one shoebox from between others. He smiled at me, and I felt his hand on my neck.”

“In just a few short years, the world has been remade into a place where the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ has become a euphemism for ‘you are either with us or against us’ and has been used to explain the American withdrawal from the 1972 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the failure of U.S. Congress to even consider the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the pursuit of the weaponization of space, the imposition of a right-wing Christian ideology onto American foreign and international health policies, the rewriting of rules of war to create non-status POWs, and the co-optation of traditional notions of humanitarianism as weapons of war itself.”

“Why do we remember? Perhaps it is because our answers are not yet right.”

46. Ready Player One — Ernest Cline

Honestly this was a really amazing novel in many ways. Witty writing, a (sometimes) self-aware and openly flawed main protagonist, a beautifully built set of integrated worlds, and a wholly unique storyline. My biggest qualms are that the feminine-presenting characters (of which there are shockingly few considering the whole world engages with the simulation) are scantily clad in terms of their personality, motivation, and development (at least they weren’t literally scantily clad like many actual video games make feminine-presenting figures to be…?), and that despite the protagonist briefly acknowledging intersecting facets of systemic racism which women of color face, Cline couldn’t seem to resist describing the skin color of the one woman of color stated as present in the book in food-related terms. A PSA to all (white) authors — consider that you don’t ever describe your white characters as being the color of Wonder bread or whipped cream.

47. Becoming — Michelle Obama

A singular glimpse into Michelle Obama’s life, and also into the life she and her partner built together (and sometimes with great distance). Obama writes with a poetic strength that leaves many of her words echoing after you’ve read them.

“…But for me, [these people] formed a meaningful constellation.”

“These were children asking not just why, but why so often.”

“Sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.”

48. White Evangelical Racism: the politics of morality in America — Anthea Butler

A well-written and well-organized book. I didn’t find new information in here, but I suspect many would.

49. The Nickel Boys — Colson Whitehead

Drawing from (not so far away) historical roots of systematic abuse in locations like the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, The Nickel Boys passes through the blissfully mundane texture of a lasting relationship as easily as it falls into the pit of remembered horrific imprisonment. A standout novel.

“But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you, and another to let him live next door.”

“…Fight and things will change.”

50. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows — Balli Kaur Jaswal

I really, really should have understood what this book would be about based on its title, but I was still unprepared for how explicit it would be. A very good novel with a number of unforeseen twists in the plot that pushed many of the characters to their limits in more than one way.

51. A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin

A friend lent me this book after I complained about the perpetual issue of fantasy and sci-fi being written almost entirely from a white, cis-het male gaze and centering around the experiences of men. Le Guin is a spectacular author and this book is a fun and captivating read, but while she cleverly works in a subversion of existing expectations of race and class, the women of this story remain flat, powerless, and infrequent.

52. The Pillars of the Earth: A Column of Fire — Ken Follett

Moving away again from some of these more medieval European books as they don’t really work for me, fantasy or not. Ultimately every narrative centers around a man, and every woman written to be intelligent or independent ultimately falls into the clutches or protection of a man herself — often both. Beyond this, it’s rather odd the way that Follett handles some of the characters’ perceptions of race and the highly deadly slave trade of the time, particularly considering it seems that he seeks to put their viewpoints in a sympathetic light when they do nothing to actually support the reader feeling this way about their thoughts or actions. That said, Follett crafts lively narratives out of history many now read as being lifeless and simplistic.

53. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland — Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe writes with a narrative brilliance the actual and surmised thoughts and actions of a group that has taken great efforts to remain as silent as possible as to the truth of their history. A remarkable piece of work about a horrifically violent pocket of history that has not disappeared despite its legacy of secrecy.

“ It is not those who inflict the most, but those who suffer the most who will conquer…when somebody dies on hunger strike, the moral calculus of causation can be tricky.”

54. The Lying Life of Adults — Elena Ferrante

This book reads like a sledgehammer — intense and full of rapid blows that shock you to read. A wholly unique narrative voice to just about anything I’ve read before.

55. Por Fin Solos (Alone at Last) — Cristina Peri Rossi

A selection of short stories that fit almost seamlessly against one another, wonderfully written.

56. Build Your House Around My Body — Violet Kupersmith

A chilling, superb story of the supernatural and the ways it can cross lines of belief and experience.

57. Before We Were Yours — Lisa Wingate

I struggled with a few elements of this book; the oscillation between independently career- and passion-driven protagonist in the present-day portions with her childishly blinkered view of life and her options within it and, equally, the strange eruptions of white saviorism, paternalism, and barely toned-down racist remarks from many of the white characters (potentially the author’s intentional choice based on the attitudes many people held and continue to hold) paired with the infantilizing descriptions of the story’s Black characters (which the author certainly could have avoided). Beyond these significant shortcomings, the book speaks to an important and little-known piece of US history.

58. My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me: A Memoir — Jason B. Rosenthal

I found it a bit disconcerting that I didn’t put two and two together until rather far into this book, but Amy Krouse Rosenthal is the author of two children’s books I came across a few years ago and find particularly adorable — Little Pea and Little Hoot. Jason B. Rosenthal writes a loving exploration of his relationship with his wife, family, friends, and himself as they worked together to navigate through an impossible time, and all the impossible time afterward.

59. Circe — Madeline Miller

An absolutely fantastic book, really. I’ve always enjoyed Greek mythology for its imperfect gods, and I found Miller’s take on these stories to be both brilliant and slightly irreverent though she continues to preserve the core of the ancient tales. Utterly entrancing.

60. The Woman in the Window — A. J. Finn

I wanted to try out a thriller book because I tend to avoid them and lots of people had recommended this one. I think it’s great if you enjoy the genre, but I just don’t, and I also found the portrayals of individuals with mental health disorders in the text as rather juvenile and simplistic. I did appreciate the rather seamless integration of the noir films the protagonist constantly watches with her surrounding environment.

61. Here There Are Monsters — Amelinda Bérubé

My sister gave this book and I just found it utterly creepy. Gore, toxicity, spookiness, and a weirdly pathologized set of characters.

62. Medical Apartheid — Harriet A. Washington

I would label this critical and essential reading for anyone who works at any intersection of medicine, research, or public health. An unflinching review of select histories of abuse and neglect within the US medical system.

63. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World — Elinor Cleghorn

This would be another critical an essential read for anyone who should be reading Washington’s Medical Apartheid. Cleghorn’s work is an important additional voice in dialogues on medicine and its shortcomings, past and present.