The best things I read in 2021
This year I just scraped my goal of reading 52 books. This wasn’t some huge project. I did 32 last year, and that felt about usual for me lately. So this year when I passed that in July, I got to wondering: could I average one a week?
As an English Literature student eleventy billion years ago, a novel a week was piss-all. But I have a job, paralysing existential dread, and Warhammer miniatures now, so it’s harder to make the time.
Anyway, here’s ten books I really liked this year, in the order I read them:
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke, 2020
Wandering a half-flooded house full of statues that might be a world, a man whose name is not Piranesi is given - among other things - a cheese and ham sandwich. Beautiful, compulsive. The best thing I read this year.A Complicated Love Story Set in Space - Shaun David Hutchinson, 2021
Anti-capitalist gay teen Red Dwarf, via [spoilers]. Brilliant sinister pulp full of little twists and mysteries. I demand a Netflix adaptation.Rosewater - Tade Thompson, 2016
Afrofuturist psychic thriller. Assholes fight aliens. The sequels are fun, too.Dance On My Grave - Aidan Chambers, 1982
Modernist Adrian Mole fucks. Inspired the movie Summer of ‘85, which is also worth your time. Absolutely brilliant if you can get your ear in to the idiom. Footnote: it’s bizarre looking back to pre-nineties youth attitudes to both university and the labour market.Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, 2021
Weir’s novels are like watching someone build and solve their own big joyous puzzle box. This one gets so much out of its core premise, and features a beautiful, touching, central relationship. This year’s Geek Beach Novel.Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski, 2020
One gilded summer tarnishes slowly into something ugly and real behind the Iron Curtain.A Psalm for the Wild Built - Becky Chambers, 2021
A monk and a robot go for a lovely walk.Scoff - Pen Vogler, 2021
Vogler uses food and food customs to examine class in Britain, the history of British cuisine, and the fact you can’t really separate the two. I read this hoping it would save me writing the book I’ve half had in my head for a year or two now, and instead it gave me the reading list gift-wrapped. Hot damn, this is well-referenced. And really, really interesting.The Past is Red - Catherynne Valante, 2021
I don’t know where to start explaining this. An eco-parable about the danger of what capitalism has us keep where hope should be? An exercise in finding joy in the rubble? It has a wonderful voice.Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021
A robot intuits folk religion in a dystopia built by Silicon Valley soccer moms. A soft, gentle exercise in dramatic irony and slowly unfolding awareness in the middle of something monstrous. Echoes of Never Let Me Go, for sure, but if we slated writers for re-using the theme of offering true love as a bargaining chip to an uncaring universe, we’d be left with business books and fad diets.
I also reread Moby Dick, a book I will happily tell anyone who will listen - at length - is a contender for the finest novel in the English language. Seems a bit unfair to include it in an arbitrarily-capped list though.
Other honourable mentions go to Stanley Tucci’s food memoir: Taste, and the reverend Richard Coles’ beautiful, painful book about losing his husband: The Madness of Grief.
If you’re interested, here’s the full reading list these were pulled from:
Quite a bit of the longlist is queer young adult fiction, and if that’s your bag, I keep a list of recommendations here: Queer YA reading list