2021: My Year In Books
Welcome to the last 2021 roundup list you will read. So it took me more than a month to get around to it — who cares? 2021 is just as gone today as it was on January 1. Besides, I’ve been doing an annual review of my reading for a long time now, and lateness is no reason to break the chain.
Here is the list of the books I read in 2021. The list is chronological, not a ranking. I struggled a bit to keep up my reading pace this past year, because I had to take the Internal Medicine board exam in October, which sucked up a lot of time.
And I’m not a fast reader! I used to think reading books in quantity was a good thing, but, while I certainly wouldn’t mind reading a bit more, I’ve settled on the philosophy that fast reading is like fast eating. You can do it, but what’s the point? Books are meant to be savored, pondered, re-read, and temporized for maximal effect. I’d rather spend two hours lingering over dinner than shoving a power lunch sandwich down my throat in five minutes. And I’d rather enjoy a book at my leisure than drive myself to consume more than I can comfortably digest.
Enough said. The books, January to December:
1. The Swerve, Stephen Rosenblatt
2. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver
3. Jazz, Toni Morrison
4. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
5. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
6. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
7. The Seven Last Words, Fr. James Martin
8. Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, Alec Ryrie
9. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
10. The Dirty Side of the Storm, Martha Serpas
11. The History of World Literature, Grant L. Voth
12. The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall
13. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinland
14. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
15. December Tenth, George Saunders
16. What We Know about Climate Change, Kerry Emmanuel
17. Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius Loyola
18. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
19. How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson
20. Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
21. Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri
22. The Green Room, Eudora Welty
23. Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte
24. Premonition, Michael Lewis
25. The Wide Net and Other Stories, Eudora Welty
26. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
27. I Don’t have the Faith to Be an Atheist, Norman Gisler and Frank Turek
28. Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens
29. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin
30. A Boy’s Will, Robert Frost
31. Frank: The Voice, James Kaplan
32. North of Boston, Robert Frost
33. I am Dynamite, Sue Prideux
34. The Word on Fire Bible, Robert Barron et al
35. Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger, Gary Michuta
36. The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Book of the Year:
Frank: The Voice. It wasn’t necessarily the best book I read last year, but I enjoyed it the most. This massive 800 page biography of Frank Sinatra worked for me because I love Frank Sinatra’s records. When Kaplan would analyze one of Sinatra’s best records, I would put the book down, pick up my headphones and listen to the song, then go back to the story. Perfect.
Book I Liked Despite Being Totally Annoyed by It:
Hitch-22. I despise Christopher Hitchens’s in-your-face atheism, and his arrogance is enough to make the faces of Mt. Rushmore bow down in shame. But his writing style is entertaining and intellectually challenging. And he isn’t always wrong. He packs a lot into a caustic, cruel quip.
Book I Should Have Read a Million Years Ago
Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Like most English majors, I had read a few dozen of Emily Dickinson’s best poems. This is nothing like the experience of reading hundreds and hundreds of them. Dickinson, taken in whole, is not exactly the poet known in her most famous poems. She is more earthy, more conservative, more conventionally religious, and more ragged.
Honorable Mentions: Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights. Nope, had never read neither before. Wuthering Heights is the better of the two.
Fiction Book You Should Read in this List if you haven’t Read It Already
Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy’s last novel is a stunner. One of the most shocking endings I’ve read outside of Dostoevsky.
Non-Fiction Book You Should Read in this List if you haven’t Read It Already
How to Be Idle. I loved this aimless, funny book. Hodgkinson’s point is that most people mindlessly follow the dictates of consumerism and capitalism, devoting their lives to work without realizing they are sacrificing the best years of their lives for the financial benefit of other people. No day of leisure is wasted, or ever will be. There are always opportunities to make money, but a free moment, once gone, never returns. Best read in the dog days of the summer. But the dog days of winter are a good time, too.
Honorable Mention: I Am Dynamite. This is a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche. Even if you aren’t a fan of Nietzsche, you will find he was not the person you thought he was. A long suffering migraineur, depressed, frequently lonely, and estranged from his family and colleagues because of his peculiar views. As ugly as his ideas can be, I could not help but feel compassion for him.
Most Disappointing
Stranger in a Strange Land. Supposed to be a sci-fi classic. I HATED it.
Although I have nothing against sci-fi and sample it from time to time, I have been disappointed with most of the sci-fi books I have read, with the exceptions of Dune, The Martian Chronicles, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I even disliked the Foundation Trilogy. Philip K. Dick is okay, but a bit overrated.)
My Goals for 2022 Reading
Read more poetry.
Keep my pace of at least one Shakespeare play a year. At least.
I need to read V.S. Naipaul.
Finish The Collected Works of Eudora Welty.
End COVID.
