Books of 2021: Fiction

Each year at this time, a good friend (whom I will not out here) and I share our complete reading lists from the year before.  We like and read many kinds of books that overlap and many that don't, which makes the list-sharing exercise fertile and interesting.  She reads a fair amount of romance novels and always notes on the list or in her cover letter (which might be the best part of the exercise, a hand-written letter!) "no judgment!"  

I beg the same of you, dear reader: much of the fiction I read in this escape-worthy year falls into the cop, spy, and noir genres.  To be fair (to me), the cop novels are set in Oxford, England, the spy novels are about MI5 rejects, and the noir is by an emerging author.  Although I will not call them my best of the year, readers who want to escape like I do may be interested in Colin Dexter's "Inspector Morse" novels, Mick Herron's Slough House/slow horses books, and the noir of S.A. Cosby.

The novel typically rules my reading roost, but this year, I have to give my top fiction props to a short story collection.  Among everything I read, no writing was better than Steve Wiegenstein's exquisite gem of a collection.

Best of the Year: Short Stories 

Scattered Lights, Steve Wiegenstein, 2020, PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist 2021

We learned about Steve Wiegenstein's (i before e except after t) collection of short stories,Scattered Lights, when we watched online the ceremony presenting the PEN/Faulkner Award to our neighbor and acquaintance Deesha Philyaw for Secret Lives of Church Ladies.  Each of the finalists read excerpts from their books, and Wiegenstein intrigued me the most among the runners-up.  This slim volume of short stories set in the rural south (Wiegenstein is an Ozarks native) stands up well against The Secret Lives.  It's clear why it would also be a finalist.  With efficient descriptions of characters and setting and plots that marry high stakes with day-to-day action, the stories are highly readable, cinematic, and memorable.  As is my practice with collections of stories and essays, I used Scattered Lights as a palate cleanser between other books, savoring each story on its own.  My only hesitation in recommending this book to others is the obscurity of the little press that put it out.  Fortunately, my neighborhood indie bookstore was able to order it.

Best of the Year: Novel

Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead, 2021

The concept of a Colson Whitehead novel unburdened by his "heavier" themes intrigued me.  Whitehead has written important literary novels with an urgency to show the injustice baked into America.  What might he do with a heist book?  In Harlem Shuffle, we meet Ray Carney, a guy with a foot in the "straight" world and another in the "crooked" world, trying to make a go of it as a Black businessman in 1950/60s Harlem.  As I read this, I thought back to August Wilson's plays, one theme of which is how hard it is to live the American dream as a Black man and how offerings of a crooked path might appeal to a Black man that would seem crazy to someone with different advantages.  Harlem Shuffle is an intricate yarn masterfully set in its period and place.  In an interview I heard before reading the book, Whitehead described walking around present-day Harlem and looking mostly above street level to see the remains of earlier eras.  First floors of commercial or mixed-use buildings get tweaked and updated far more than even the second floor.  Seeing ghost signs on the sides of buildings or in windows above the street provided the author with a sense of what had gone before. On the one hand, Whitehead's vivid descriptions of characters and Harlem made me think this book would be ripe for development as a TV series.  On the other hand, the plot is intricate enough that I wonder if people could follow it.  Particularly in the latter half of the book, the layers of power structures show themselves multiplying the deeper one looks.  A great read; I think I understood the ending.

Runners-up: 

Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong, 2017

Tomorrow Will Be Better, Betty Smith, 1948

Books of 2021: Best Regular Ol' Non-fiction

In a good year for non-fiction, a few titles to enthusiastically recommend.  One was actually published this year.  The other is from a while back.  That one from a while back gets my if you read nothing else I recommend this year, read this book endorsement.

The Unthinkable; Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, Amanda Ripley, 2008

If you read nothing else that I recommend this year, read this book.  Paige came across this book, and we started reading it aloud in the car on our long drive to and from the Outer Banks in the summer (our sons are so lucky).  Ripley pulls together an impressive amount of research and stories in a highly readable fashion a la the Heath brothers or Malcolm Gladwell.  She explains the natural human reactions (and some non-human animal responses) to disasters - major threats to survival - natural and otherwise.  Like the stages of grief, there is a predictable set of responses to unexpected circumstances including denial, deliberation, and "gathering."  People in the World Trade Center on September 11 and in 1993 when one of the towers was truck-bombed have shown a surprising fog of denial and a tendency to pick up and pack up things that their brain or gut tells them they need to gather before they get out safely.  Some people deny, deliberate, and gather so long that they don't get out.  The books is scary and bracing and empowering.  I came back from vacation and did something I've never done: walked down the stairs in my office building to make sure I know where the stairs near my office let out and how long it takes (~3 minutes from the tenth floor with no one in front of me.)  Ripley writes clearly and tells her example stories grippingly.  A book everyone should read and that goes down more easily than some "medicine" titles.

Dopamine Nation; Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, Anna Lembke, 2021

My standard joke about Dopamine Nation is that I had to request it at the library and then wait for it to come in, which was a big bummer because I wanted the immediate gratification of reading it.  Dr. Lembke briskly chronicles how a human species that evolved to survive scarcity now faces a possibly-worse threat: abundance.  She uses a pleasure/pain balance as her central metaphor and explores how when pleasure can be accessed super easily at almost all times, those with addictive tendencies tend to pursue pleasure to their ruin.  Whatever the "drug" that people reach for, they follow its empty promise until all good things in their life are stripped away.  Although this is rather familiar terrain by now, Lembke weaves her observations of addiction culture together with stories of her patients and the confession of her own addiction.  Possibly the most unexpected pieces here are that pursuing pain can be a way to restore a see saw that has been imbalanced toward pleasure and the healthy value of prosocial shame.  For the former, intermittent fasting and subjection to cold water (even ice water) are her most potent examples.  Re: the latter, Lembke breaks down shame and guilt and the reinforcing effects of destructive shame - pursue pleasure with abandon, feel shame, pursue pleasure to cover the pain of the shame.  She then offers an alternative with examples from 12-step groups and sports teams about how being honest about failure in a nurturing environment can help people grow, rather than shrivel.  Not quite as amazing as I expected after hearing Lembke interviewed, but a helpful read.

Books of 2021: Best Biography/Memoir

Continuing the week of book reviews, we get to stuff I would actually recommend.

Perhaps I am getting more selective with age.  Perhaps I just had a good year picking books.  Evidence points to the former.  For the last three years, the proportion of books in my highest category (highly recommended) has averaged just over 60%.  For the ten years prior to that, I average 49% at that rating level.

There's so much good non-fiction this year that I have to break it up.  Today, non-fiction starts with a post dedicated to biography and memoir.  The four books here take four different forms: biography, auto-biography, poetry collection, and essentially comic book essay collection.

The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis, 2017

Having read Danny Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarized his decades of work with Amos Twersky, I had no idea that Michael Lewis had written a book about the two men and their work.  I discovered that he had in the most 2020-21 way possible.  On one of countless pandemic neighborhood walks, I spied Lewis's name on the spine of a book in a Little, Free Library.  Being no fool, I snatched it up and kept walking.  My brother-in-law, Graham Hennessey, endorsed the book when I snapped a pic of the cover.  

I read Thinking, Fast and Slow because so many other books and articles I had read recommended it.  Kahneman and Twersky were a most unusual academic pair, a psychologist and an economist respectively, who worked out new scientific approaches to old issues in economics by introducing psychology.  They turned on its head the foundational economic idea that people act in rational ways to increase individual utility.  Although Lewis - in an afterword - praises their academic papers as more open to the general reader than most and asserts that Kahneman tried to make Thinking, Fast and Slow more accessible still, I can testify that it took some determination for this reader to get through that book. Lewis describes how the unlikely pair found each other and their specific method of working: spending hours in a room together talking.  The Undoing Project covers the arc of their friendship, working relationship, findings, and the mostly-positive recognition they received for those findings.  Lewis being Lewis also explains their work more clearly than they did for the general reader.  It was fun to recall or relearn the things Kahneman and Twersky concluded in little Lewis-bomb nuggets.

Beastie Boys Book, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, 2018

Having been 13 years old when Licensed to Ill was released, I always considered myself smack dab in the intended market for the Beastie Boys phenomenon.  My parents didn't try to get me to stop listening to any other music; I marshaled the surprisingly-persuasive argument that the Beastie Boys references they'd learned about from James Dobson were about violence (guns like all rappers rapped about), and not sex.  They allowed me to keep listening.  My knowledge of Beastie Boys as a band and as people waned after their peak, but the minutiae I did encounter always intrigued me - one of them had playwright parents; they were much smarter than "Fight for your Right to Party" would make you think.  The buzz about Beastie Boys Book came from respected quarters.  Adam Yauch died tragically young from a rare form of cancer, and the surviving Beasties wrote this book, honestly as an homage to a guy who sounds incredibly brilliant and unique.  The book, too, is unique: 550 pages with lots of full bleed photos, it's a kind of a mix tape with Mike D and Ad Rock passing the author torch back and forth (and making little notes on each other's essays.)  Notebook pages and other scraps of evidence of their creative process also get reproduced here.  The book is rounded out by essays by people in the Beasties universe in one form or another.  The book is so long, but the writing is totally crisp, and I learned a ton about what only die-hard fans would know about the band and its members as people.  It also made me nostalgic for the grittier New York City that I visited in the '70s-'90s (barely scratching its surface).  It's hard to imagine Beastie Boys springing up without the New York terroir of artistic foment and cross-cultural influences.  The book captures the punk rock ethos that these white hip hop artists never actually shed.

I Was a Bell, Soledad Caballero, 2021

We met our neighbor and frequent CSA-crate-subscription-sharer Soledad Caballero when her husband Richard Heppner and Paige worked together at ReedSmith.  A literature professor at Allegheny College, she also write poetry.  Like, serious poetry.  This debut collection focuses on her family's escape from their native Chile when Pinochet was torturing people and making everything awful.  The poems beautifully and poignantly capture Soledad's uprooted childhood to move to Oklahoma for her father's advanced degree.  The poems illuminate the pain of rupture, the alien experience of immigration to a place so different - the shock of snow emerges as a frequent theme - and the knowledge gathered over a lifetime of the darkness her family escaped.  All of that said, there are moments of sweetness, human kindness, community, and even humor here.  Thoroughly edifying.

I Will Judge You by your Bookshelf, Grant Snider, 2020 

My sister- and brother-in-law, Lauren and Mike Jackson, gave me this book.  It's a comical graphic essay collection on reading and writing by an orthodontist/comic book artist/writer.  Snider groups his observations and assertions into several loose themes that he couches as confessions, including: "I read in social situations" and "I like to sniff old books."  It's a quick read that inspires my own confession: I pad my annual book stats by reading short books in December.  Snider captures the dilemmas that readers and writers face, mostly the finitude of time, and the vagaries of motivation. It made me think about my reading and aspire to do more of it.

Books of 2021: Stay-Aways

The year 2021 opened much the way 2020 closed, with much more time alone in our homes than prior years.  With vaccines on the horizon, the year was poised to turn for the better, and it did.  It just didn't get anywhere near as good as it could have been if a large portion of the population weren't complete idiots.

Anyway, silver lining: I read a lot again, and I read books I really liked.  In fact, I only seriously disliked 2 books out of 25, my smallest ratio since 2010.  Per tradition, I share my recommendations for books to avoid like, well, the plague before I tell you what I loved in various categories.

Worst of the Year: Non-fiction

How to Do Nothing; Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell, 2019

This is the worst book I read this year by a long shot.  It was on my radar when my friend Tom Persinger and I started discussing having a book club (of two).  We went back and forth about titles, and I prevailed in making this our inaugural book to read and discuss, mainly on the strength of the title.  It's a great subtitle with its accompanying subtitle, but the product Odell delivers does not meet expectations.  She is, at least, up front about that.  This is not a "how to" book, but the title was clearly too good to give up.  It's a collection of essays, the first of which shares the book's title and also shared the title of a talk she gave at EYEO, the technology and art conference.  Odell makes digital art.  She actually came up with the title before she wrote the talk, which seems to have been her process with each of the chapters in the book.  The essays read like high-level student papers, stringing mostly-good, long quotes together with her analysis.  Odell likes making bold statements - "the world needs me to do something now more than ever" - without backing them up with a why.  In the case of that particular statement, I posited to Tom that that's the difference between Gen X and Millennials.  We don't think the world needs us or will provide us with anything; they do.  I would like to read a different version of this book in which her editor applied a much heavier hand to the logic and structure of the essays.  In multiple places, one thought gives way to another from paragraph to paragraph, but the link between the two thoughts was not obvious to this reader.  If Odell's book has a theme - and God forbid she form a conclusion (actual quote "It's tempting to conclude this book with a  single recommendation about how to live.  But I refuse to do that."), it is that having been sucked into the attention economy of social media and online advertising, we cannot escape into a void.  We are all connected beings on this planet; escape into community and nature - your "bioregion," a term used heavily in early essays and then abandoned.  Not a bad conclusion.  There were thought-provoking ideas here; her essay on why communes always fail was a revealing - if repetitive - part of her not-thesis thesis.  Barack Obama called this one of his favorite books of 2019.  Perhaps that and the best-seller status it likely caused will get us a second edition.  Maybe it will put the "edit" in edition.

Worst of the Year: Fiction

One of Ours, Willa Cather, 1922, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1923

Although I enjoyed reading One of Ours, I couldn't shake the feeling that I spent the whole book waiting for the story to start.  That's all the more striking considering that the hero spends the first half of the book essentially entirely at home on the farm, and the second half of the book "at war."  Actually, that structure makes One of Ours stand out relative to other war fiction.  When the characters wind up in the theater, we at least know one of their home stories well.  So often, home or the people there are far off and merely glimpsed in letters or a photo carried in a breast pocket.  Cather draws distinct characters and conveys a lot about them with a little bit of action.  So little action.  It's hard to place a novel in its actual milieu reading it nearly 100 years after publication, but I suspect that One of Ours felt ahead of its time.  Some of its personal psychology aspects must have caught the attention of the Pulitzer committee.  It wasn’t a whammy in my project of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners, but neither was it a thrill ride.