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.