2021 Reading

My reading life changed quite a lot this year, round about March. Newborns will get in the way of your reading and no mistake. Given that I do not have as much time to read these days, I finally made a change I’ve been meaning to make for some time — now, if I’m not feeling a book, I abandon it. I’ve always been a completer, but life’s too short and I’m too busy to be compulsive about reading for no reason. If I’m not enjoying a book, I don’t have to choke it down like vegetables.

Also, once I had Edith, all my reading switched to ebooks, on my phone, so I could read them in the dark while she’s sleeping (which is where I do most of my reading now). I don’t know that this made much difference to the way I read or the type of things I read, but it’s a big enough change to seem significant. I think it’s harder to focus when reading on a device; it’s too easy to flip back over to email or Twitter or Slack. It’s not an immersive experience. So I maybe read less also for that reason.

I read at least part of 72 books this year. Of those, I abandoned 4, so I read 68 books in full.

The books I loved included:

• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, trans. Gregory Rabassa
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
• Calypso by David Sedaris
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (yes, I’m aware she was canceled)
• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
• No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennet
• Ace by Angela Chen
• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (my favorite of the year)
• Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner
• The Hunger by Alma Katsu
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (second favorite of the year)
• Luster by Raven Leilani
• There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, trans. Polly Barton
• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
• Plain Honest Men by Richard Beeman
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
• Several of the Miss Marple novels by Agatha Christie, specifically:
  • Murder at the Vicarage
  • The Body In the Library
  • The Moving Finger
  • They Do It With Mirrors
  • A Pocketful of Rye
  • 4:50 From Paddington

The following books were fairly enjoyable or interesting, or else just ok:

• Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
• Mirror Lake by Thomas Christopher Greene
• Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
• Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, trans. Andrew R. McAndrew
• Spooner by Pete Dexter
• Holy Skirts by René Steinke
• Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman
• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
• Nice Try by Josh Gondelman
• I’ll Be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamara
• Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous
• Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
• So Sad Today by Melissa Broder
• Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Lavery
• Singled Out by Bella DePaulo
• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
• Some Trick by Helen DeWitt
• White Is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
• How Should a Person Be? by Shelia Heti
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
• Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
• Night’s Master by Tanith Lee
• Sync by Steven Strogatz
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
• Louisa the Poisoner by Tanith Lee
• The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams
• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
• The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
• A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (not as enjoyable as most Marples)
• Several of the Jeeves novels by P.G. Wodehouse, specifically:
  • Thank You, Jeeves
  • The Code of the Woosters
  • The Inimitable Jeeves

Then there were those I did not enjoy:

• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
• Fury by Salman Rushdie
• Queen Takes King by Gigi Levangie Grazer
• Doubles by Nic Brown
• G by John Berger
• Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

And then the four I didn’t bother to finish:

• Wrack & Ruin by Don Lee
• Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
• Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn
• Cast a Bright Shadow by Tanith Lee

So overall, having a baby hasn’t completely put a damper on my reading, but it has obliterated my ability to think about, digest, and certainly to write about what I have read. For example, I would like to share some additional context for some of the books above — what I especially liked about a number of them, for example — but I’m fucking exhausted and I have to go to bed instead.

Maybe next year!