What did you read in 2021?

I read Michael Newton's new BFI monograph on Rosemary's Baby (slightly disappointing after his brilliant entry on Kind Hearts and Coronets) and then went back to the film, and then read the novel for the first time. The film really is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book, ever - nothing is added, and almost nothing taken away (just a tiny amount of non-essential backstory, really). The masterstroke of Rosemary's Baby the novel (and by extension the film) is the modern-day, even 'modish' setting, and the way that the Satanists are old and uncool - and lethal.

Agree that Levin's hit rate is pretty astonishing, and that the big twist in A Kiss Before Dying is all-time, although I can't find a good word to be said for his very late sequel to Rosemary's Baby.

I did a double-take for a moment there, thinking it said “Michael Nesmith’s new BFI monograph.” #onethread

I have a running list, I’ll post it in a few days.

My full list of 75 (including business/software books I read for work that are presumably of no interest) is on goodreads. Quite a lot fewer books than last year, mostly due to my reading two volumes of Caro on LBJ and the 1000+ pp Gotham.

Here's my favorites (in order read)

FICTION

Assembly by Natasha Brown
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Philips
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Fisherman by John Langan
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Contact by Carl Sagan
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Smiley's People by John le Carre
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

NON-FICTION

Means of Ascent by Robert Caro
The Path to Power by Robert Caro
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell
How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Gotham by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace

my goodreads list https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021/80167070

of those, the really good things that i didn't see anyone else here mention that i would pretty much unconditionally recommend are:

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Assembly by Natasha Brown (caveat that i haven't lived in the UK for 12 years and haven't visited since 2018, both seemed very good on post brexit post colonial (?) britain)

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell (soothing?)

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies (highly recommended for parents).

mookieproof is right that Piranesi by Susanna Clarke doesn't quite spot the landing, but the first 5/6 are magical, wonderful narrator, and it would be a great christmas read imo.

Fiction

Autumn - Ali Smith
The Man with the Getaway Face - Richard Stark
Breakout - Richard Stark
Ask the Parrot - Richard Stark
Nobody Runs Forever - Richard Stark
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Nada - Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914
Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell (worst book I read this year)
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
Unity - Elly Bangs
Get Rich Quick - Peter Doyle
The Burnt Orange Heresy - Charles Willeford
LA Confidential - James Ellroy
Temptation - Janos Szekely
Libra - Don Delillo
The Sibyl - Per Lagerkvist
The Ax - Donald Westlake
Kusamakura/The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki
The Thin Red Line - James Jones
Wolf Among Wolves - Hans Fallada
Miss Pym Disposes - Josephine Tey
The Fourth Island - Sarah Tolmie
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)

Non-Fiction

George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door - Graeme Thomson
Beeswing - Richard Thompson
The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
This is Your Mind on Plants - Michael Pollan
Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm
Dreamland - Sam Quinones
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind

With any luck/concentration should be able to finish The Tree With No Name by Drago Jančar and finish rereading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Books I need to finish that I set aside
Stalingrad - Vasily Grossman (after like 600 pages, i don't know what's wrong with me)
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd

and yeah, agree on Piranesi, I wanted a little bit more from it but once I got about 10 pages in it hooked me, kept a really nice balance where there was enough tension and suggestion of horror to be unsettling, but never so unpleasant that I needed a break from it.

Is that 2 different people read Everybody loves This Town this year. Was there a republishing of it or something?
I'm thinking I read it about 10 years ago but not thinking what else was on around the same time I read it.
Good book though.

actually did a better job this year than i assumed, though spring, summer, and fall were filled with gaps of not-reading. counting every volume of the george miles cycle because i can, only closer and period truly felt short

heavenly breakfast by samuel delany
lolita by vladimir nabokov
closer by dennis cooper
frisk by dennis cooper
try by dennis cooper
guide by dennis cooper
period by dennis cooper
women and other monsters by jess zimmerman
luster by raven leilani
sentimental education by gustave flaubert
the driver’s seat by muriel spark
malina by ingeborg bachmann
in a lonely place by dorothy b. hughes

will likely, finally be finishing in a lonely place today, giving me time to reread harriet the spy before the end of the year

first book of 2022: the hearing trumpet

gonna be in the upper 40s for new books -- the most in a long time -- plus maybe a dozen re-reads

of course they were mostly science fiction or something similarly escapist because that's all i can handle lately

The 52 books I read in 2021 (in the order that I finished them):

Chronicles, Jean Froissart (medieval history)
Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes (shameful Oregon history)
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville
Hindoo Holiday, J. R. Ackerly
Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell (re-read)
Crampton Hodnet, Barbara Pym
Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Georges Simenon
Song of the Lark, Willa Cather
A Journey Round My Skull, Frigyes Karinthy
Five T'ang Poets, selected and translated by David Young
Chess Story, Stefan Zweig
Psmith in the City, P.G. Wodehouse
My Dog Tulip, J.R. Ackerly
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Gringos, Charles Portis
Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns
The Monkey's Voyage, Alan de Queiroz (evolutionary biology)
Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson
The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford
The Means of Escape, Penelope Fitzgerald (short stories)
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
Strange Beauty, George Johnson (bio of Murray Gell-Mann)
Notes From an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell
World Light, Halldor Laxness
World of Wonders, Robertson Davies
The 39 Steps, John Buchan
The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis (WWII memoir)
The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson (essays)
Rocannon's World, Ursula K. Le Guin
Maigret in Montmartre, Georges Simenon
A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz (US pop history)
Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian (re-read)
A Coffin for King Charles, C.V. Wedgewood
Open Doors & Three Novellas, Leonardo Sciascia
The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson
Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness (Penguin Classics compilation)
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, Béla Zombory-Moldován
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford (re-read)
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
Highland Fling, Nancy Mitford
Kindred, Octavia Butler
Which Lie Did I Tell?, William Goldman (Hollywood insider memoir)
The Plague, Albert Camus (re-read)
The Madman of Bergerac, Georges Simenon
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell
The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
Treason by the Book, Jonathan D. Spence (Chinese history)
The High Window, Raymond Chandler

Currently in progress:

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Misc Odds and Sods:

Misc short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
Misc short stories by Muriel Spark
Misc short stories by PG Wodehouse
Misc short sketches by Mark Twain
I also dabbled about in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

Notable Fails/Rejections:

Lincoln in the Bardo, Geo. Saunders
Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson
The Hot Gates, William Golding (assorted occasional pieces)
Love's Work, Gillian Rose
Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman (recap of decades-long political horror show)

Yeah, I don't know if I could make it through Saunders' novel either; I wasn't that into most of the stories in Tenth of December/. May try some of the nonfiction.
if you liked that Horwitz book, which I haven't read, maybe try Confederates in The Attic, based on his research, as a reader and traveler, into Civil War subcultures: it's entertaining, but also, he tries to come to grips, as much as anyone can, with the enduring weirdness of the CW era (part of its appeal, natch). Ta-nehisi Coates: "Don't say you know what you would have done then."

I read Confederates in the Attic many years back and liked it rather better than the 'Voyage' book I read this year, which wasn't a bad book but was awfully loose knit and lacked a center of gravity.

I got Lincoln in the Bardo the year it came out and never finished it. Every chapter feels like I've read it before. All of his short story collections are essential though.

I was looking at a copy in a charity shop a couple of weeks back. Thought I knew the name. Thought it was supposed to be good but don't think I grabbed it.

Most recently finished first:

Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Annie Ernaux - A Girl’s Story
Miles Franklin - My Brilliant Career
Michel Houellebecq - Lanzarote
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Peter Biskind - My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Karl Ove Knausgård - The Morning Star
Eula Biss - On Immunity
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Michel Houellebecq - Platform
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall
Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon In Retrospect
Raymond Carver - Fires
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Karl Ove Knausgård - Spring
Bri Lee - Who Gets To Be Smart
John Bell - Some Achieve Greatness: Lessons on Leadership and Character from Shakespeare
Meghan Daum - The Unspeakable, and Other Subjects of Discussion
Loudon Wainwright III - Liner Notes
Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Tina Fey - Bossypants
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Pamela Paul - My Life with Bob
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Karl Ove Knausgård - In the Land of the Cyclops
Michel Houellebecq - The Map and The Territory
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls: Part One
Steven Hyden - This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A...
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between
Karl Ove Knausgård, Fredrik Ekelund - Home and Away
Jenny Erpenbeck - Not A Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections
Anne Helen Petersen - Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts
Martin Amis - Inside Story: A Novel
Tobias Wolff - This Boy's Life
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Bill Bryson - The Body
Kerry Egan - On Living
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

Started and didn’t finish:

Michael Mohammed Ahmad - The Other Half of You
Lydia Davis - Can’t and Won’t
Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Karl Ove Knausgård - So Much Longing In So Little Space
Marilynne Robinson - What Are We Doing Here? Essays
Gustave Flaubert - Sentimental Education
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Woody Allen - Apropos of Nothing

The most enjoyable experiences I had this year were in finally getting around to some classics: The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, East of Eden, and the Dickens and Waugh novels. Most of the 2021 releases I was looking forward to didn’t disappoint: Franzen, Knausgaard, Cusk, Cohen and Ishiguro were all satisfying. Lockwood’s novel was solid, but maybe not quite as good as I was expecting due to the high expectations I had from Priestdaddy and her essays. Oyler’s novel was a little disappointing, but I found enough in there to get me through to the end.

There were many other books I abandoned in addition to the list I’ve got here, but those are the ones I got a decent way into before giving up on for various reasons, sometimes because the book got boring, but mostly because of my waning attention span when work or life got particularly stressful.

so, David Copperfield or Great Expectations?

The first one.

Not sure if this si complete.
& may have a couple added by the end of this week

Books wot I have done read this year

Angela Saini Inferior
Ibram X kendi How To Be Anti-Racist
Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse:The Strange Man of the Oglalas
Cheyenne Autumn
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Charles C mann 1491
Paul Ortiiz An African American and LatinX History of the United States
Pragya Arghawal Sway
Alexander Mitchell New Jim Crow
Paolo Friere A Pedagogy Of Hope
Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket vol 1
Raymond Queneau We Always Treat Women Too Well
Odile
Sarah Ahmed Living A Feminist Life
bell hooks Ain’t I A Woman
Arthur Miller Echoes Down The Corridor
Walter benjamin Illuminations
Merle haggard My House of Memories
Patrisse Khan-Cullors When They Call You A Terrorist
Nic Cheeseman How To Rig an Election
Kehinde Andrews New Age Of Empire
Alexandra Wilson In Black & White
Reni Eddo-Lodge Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Robin DiAngelo White Fragility
David Olusoga The World’s War
Mark Mordue Boy On Fire
Clinton Walker Stranded
Octavia Butler Dawn
Deborah Frances White The Guilty Feminist
Richard Thompson Beeswing
James Fearnley Here Comes Everybody
Daniel Goldmark The Cartoon Music Book
Larry Kirwan Rocking The Bronx
Craig Werner A Change Is Going To Come
David Kerr African Popular Theatre
Audre Lorde The Cancer Journals
Ta Nehisi Coates Between The Buried and Me
Bob Gluck You’ll Know When You Get There
Kwame Anthony Appiah The Lies That Bind
Ken Kesey The Last Go Round
William Goldman Adventures In the Skin Trade
Matt Ruff Lovecraft Country
Mary Robinson Climate Justice.

currently reading Ibram X kendi Stamped from the Beginning which I will probably finish in a few days.
& Caste by Isabel Wilkerson which I will probably take longer to get through
Audre Lorde Compendium which I may get through too. collection of 3 of her books so may have Sister Outsider done at least
Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain again not sure will be done by New Year.
& possibly about 100 others that I've started but need to find the right time for.

Also a long way into the Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
set up a number of orders from interlibrary loans several of which will hopefully come through on the 4th of January.
One already in the local library which is closed apart from a couple of days this week and came in a day after I was last in town
Anita Loos Gentlemen prefer Blondes /But Marry brunettes which i think is 2 different volumes of diary like entries by Lorelei .
Saw the film yesterday. Not sure if I was thinking it would inevitably be on over Xmas.

xpost, re: Dickens.

Loved both, but reading David Copperfield was the more enjoyable experience. The characters are better drawn and have more distinct voices. But mostly, it’s just funnier. Every section featuring Micawber is a riot.

pah!

This is a 1/3 of what I normally read in a year, but in some ways I made up that time to read some bulky books by Pontoppidan, Drnic, Sterne, Levrero and Eliot for the first time. Chaibi and Jaeggy also v good and it was finally great to get round to The Makioka Sisters, after reading everything else by Tanizaki. Poetry-wise I discovered Tamil poetry via Nammalvar.

Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Joao Cabral de Melo Neto - Education by Stone
Giuseppe Ungaretti - Allegria
Juan Carlos Onetti - Complete Short Stories
Euripides - Grief Lessons: Four Plays (tr. Carson)
Laurence Sterne - Tristam Shandy
Dasa Drnic - EEG
Guillevic - Selected
Beowulf (tr.Heaney)
Fleur Jaeggy - Sweet days of Discipline
Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human
Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters
Driss Chaibi - The Simple Past
J. Rodolfo Wilcock - The Temple of Iconoclasts
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia
Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?
Baudelaire - Intimate Journals
Mario Levrero - The Luminous Novel
Nammalvar - Endless Song
Johann Grimmelhausen - Simplicissimus

not the dudebro beowulf? how behind the times

What's that lol?

the headley translation, new this year. i think it's very silly.

https://i.imgur.com/Jc7ywEX.png

yeesh, that first line is painful to read.

WHY???

https://i.imgur.com/nLGQgoN.png

It’s no Skinhead Hamlet, that’s for sure.

joyce carol oates - carthage
joyce carol oates - breathe
joyce carol oates - beasts
joyce carol oates (as rosamund smith) - the barrens
updike - memories of the ford administration
eugene oneill - 6 short plays
eugene oneill - beyond the horizon
molly brodak - bandit
blake bailey - roth bio
patricia lockwood - no one is talking abt this
michael lewis - the 5th risk
rene stauffer - the roger federer story
john o'hara - the ewings
john o'hara - hope of heaven
murial spark - realities and dreams
david roberts - jean stafford bio
thomas mann - death in venice
frank macshane - john o'hara bio
anna wiener - uncanny valley
blake gopnik - warhol bio

abandoned:
james cain - career in c major
henry miller - tropic of cancer
arthur phillips - the king at the edge of the world
knut hamsen - hunger
jackie ess - darryl

Notable Fails/Rejections:

Lincoln in the Bardo, Geo. Saunders

Aimless did you ditch this bc you didnt like it or for external reasons? I was kind of surprised at how much it didnt work for me, considering that i generally was/am a fan. maybe i just grew out of his whole thing.

add me to this list of ppl who generally like(d) saunders work but tried and did not finish lincoln in the bardo

Aimless did you ditch this bc you didnt like it or for external reasons?

My reasons noted here: Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

abandoned:
jackie ess - darryl

noooo i loved this one

also the saunders book has a main character called HANS VOLLMAN which is too far for me and i liked the name kyle boot

saunders’ story collections before tenth of december still slap, i just think the overwhelming sentimentality of his recent work kinda neutralizes the whole effect. i didn’t finish bardo either

if you reread “adams” i’m sure you’ll find it’s still dope

yeah im sure youre right. after all the hype bardo got when it came out i felt like the only person in the world who wasnt charmed by it, this is validating. it was just disappointing bc it felt like such a classic case of a short story person extending their very familiar & well-honed bag of short story tricks to novel length and it not working due to the obvious reason that novels are more than just long short stories, and i assumed saunders was be smart enough not to fall into that trap but i guess not.

"was be smart enough" = "would be" ffs, lol

xpost Yeah, I vaguely recall a review of Bobbie Ann Mason's debut (maybe only) novel, starting with a sympathetic comment about Creative Writing writers being under the same pressure as anybody coming up through what's left of the popular press: that book publishers (and literary agents) really really really want you to emit a novel, otherwise you're considered prestige loss leader at best, unless you stick to/are stuck to the smalltime publishers, and even they would like a novel, probably. Reviewer went to describe the stretch from her short stories to the novel...And she seemed to pretty much fade away after that, not that I keep up all that well, but used to come across new stories pretty easily.
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain How is this?? Seems like it might be good, since he's a teacher, hopefully using some of this (about Russian novels) in his classes.

I have a colleague who is using that Saunders book (About the Russians) to teach some shorter Russian novels to high schoolers this spring. Sounds like it will be perfect for that purpose!

I'm also interested in why/how someone could drop Darryl, but I'm severely biased because Jackie is a pal

I found swim in the pond in the rain a bit of a joyless slog for me read back to back but it did seem like a great teaching tool if you’re dipping in and out.

re: Bobbie Ann Mason, I thought In Country was pretty good! Not perfect, and with some cheesy YA novel moments, but I liked it. They made an ok movie out of it too iirc (or maybe I just liked it because it had Bruce Willis in a major role and a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack, and I can't say no to a movie with double Bruce.)

Thanks, Lily Dale, will check library for that (book, since my DVD drive has given out)---the review was not totally neg, but made me a bit sad, like here was a fairly accomplished short story writer starting over, and being obliged to, in reviewer's take---so I just wandered on, as might well have anyway.
Xpost Yeah, could see Saunders' book as useful in between reading/re-reading of the novels themselves, and I think he includes excerpts, extensive quotes---?

(Grace Paley and Alice Munro seem like leading examples of good short story writers who made it through whole careers w 0 novels---Paley said she started one, threw it away, dunno about Munro, but wouldn't be surprised if she didn't even bother to start one, knowing she was on an extended roll w the stories.)

re: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I enjoyed it. Mostly for the excellent short stories themselves (which are included in full), all of which I’d not yet read, except for one of the Chekhov ones. After (or during) each one, Saunders analyses why the stories work, or where they fall short. There’s plenty of helpful advice for fiction writers, but I think it’s also a helpful tool for criticism and getting better at articulating your own response to a work. I’ve often struggled to put why I do or don’t like something into words, but there’s some great examples here on how to best approach that process.

Sounds good, thanks!

think this is about it

nick pinkerton - goodbye, dragon inn
robert walser - walser on painting
sebald - a place in the country
gaskell - north and south
hebel - the treasure chest of rhinish tales
le carre - the honourable schoolboy
le carre - smiley's people
katherine angel - tomorrow sex will be good again
jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
balzac - a gondreville mystery
balzac - pere goriot
balzac - vicar of tours (and other stories)
walser - the tanners
walser - the assistant
sontag - illness as a metaphor
stendhal - the scarlet and the black
seelig - walks with walser
tolstoy - resurrection
gottfried keller - a village romeo and juliet
gottfried keller - green henry
gottfried keller - three tales of seldywa
amia srinisvan - the right to sex
patricia lockwood - no one is talking about this
nan shepherd - the living mountain
anne carson - autobiography of red
pavese - the moon and the bonfire
euripidies/anne carson - grief lessons
hardy - the woodlanders
hardy - jude the obscure
raymond williams - english novel from dickens to lawrence
hardy - tess of the d'urbervilles