Thursday, December 30, 2021

Obligatory books of 2021 Post


The stack that has been sitting around for half a year now . . .
 My total for books read not-for-work in 2021 is fifty-seven, assuming I won’t finish off the remaining ninety pages of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s English Climate: Wartime Stories on the last day of the year. (And am I the only one who keeps being befuddled as to whether the year that is just ending is 2020, 2021, or 2022?) A surprising few (eight) were rereads and a mere five were nonfiction.

It was a year when I was tired of reality, apparently, and also a year when I admitted early on that I wasn’t going to fill a number of the squares on my book bingo card so mostly I read the novels I felt like reading and/or that I’d bought on bookstore day. As it happens, those remained stacked up and I see that Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubus, Travels with Charley, and The Mysterious Correspondent are the only bookstore-day purchases I’ve not read yet. I started Posthumous Memoirs and quickly became bogged down so I did that which I nearly never do and put it aside.

 

Instead, I read half a dozen Anthony Trollope novels and four Louise Penny mysteries. I heard Elif Shafak on the radio plugging 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and was moved to buy a copy. It was truly excellent in surprising ways, but her earlier The Architect's Apprentice was a bit more standard fare and thus something of a disappointment. Still, I’m reminded that I should look for more books by the “most famous woman writing novels in Turkey today” according to a 2015 review in The Guardian.

 

New books from once-reliable authors, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and Jasper Fforde were all a bit “meh” while Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness was every bit as fine as I remembered it and The Plague of Doves (Louise Erdrich) and Lolly Willowes (Sylva Townsend Warner) were unexpected delights. For some reason I’ve always shied away from Ms Erdrich; I should see about getting more of her books to read in 2022. It goes without saying that Scott’s current-work-in-progress, Islands, is probably the best fiction written in North America in 2022 and that it’s a fucking shame that it will likely never find a publisher.

 

My reading list, in reverse order for posterity:

 

The Soul of Kindness
Mediocre
National Provincial
The Plague of Doves
Always, Rachel
The Fox's Tower and Other Tales
The Five Wounds
Christmas at High Rising
The Summer Book
Sea of Poppies

The Man Who Lived Underground
Echo Mountain
Tortilla Flat
Marion Fay
Lawn Boy
Here We Are
Our Time is Now
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
All the Devils Are Here
Legends of the North Cascades

Where Stands A Winged Sentry
Lolly Willowes
Scrapbook of a Year and a Day
Islands
Black from the Future
The Belton Estate
The Shortest Way to Hades
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Glass Magician
Excellent Women

Bird Cottage
Whereabouts
The Constant Rabbit
Simon the Fiddler
Howl's Moving Castle
The Western Wind
The Architect's Apprentice
This is How You Lose the Time War
Mr Scarborough's Family
Parable of the Sower

The Belly of Paris
A Better Man
The MacDermots of Ballycloran
Kindred
Klara and the Sun
Ophelia's Ghost
The Song of Achilles
Shuggie Bain
Marling Hall
Machines Like Me

Lady Anna
The Mystery of the Blue Train
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Kingdom of the Blind
Abigail
Nightbirds on Nantucket

Glass Houses


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