Following last year’s post, we thought we’d keep the tradition and briefly report on the reads that kept us sane as we traversed Year 2 (!!) of the pandemic. These are the books we reached out to for comfort, for pleasure, and to make sense of the rapidly-changing world we live in.
HANNAH: You can keep your new book smell. Give me goooood book smell. In our house, a good book is a crime scene. A bath-wrinkled-subway-stinking-bagel-crumbed-greasy-thumbed crime scene.
The most bedraggled looking paperback on my shelf from this year? Easy. NOTES ON A SILENCING by Lacy Crawford. Published last year by Little, Brown, I waited for the 2021 paperback edition so that I could more easily wedge its 400+ pages into whatever I was lugging to the park or on beach-bound trains for the weekend. (In case you were wondering, picnic blankets are book-safe, soda-filled coolers are not.) Lacy’s memoir recounts a sexual assault suffered by the author at her New England boarding school and follows her investigation into similar assaults preceding and proceeding her own. She discovers a long history of the school silencing survivors and the entrenched misogyny (external and internal) at the core. What elevates this memoir beyond any other that I have read of late? Lacy’s voice. She approaches her subject with the rigor of an investigative journalist and the line-level flair of a fine literary novelist. The combination is astonishing. So astonishing in fact that my copy has been relegated to the shadowy bottom bookshelf: it has been made hideous with my love and admiration.
HEATHER: I was hard to please as a reader this year, perhaps even harder than last year which is something of a feat. It’s a year where I remember the reading experience as much as the book so I’ll start with SALT SLOW, Julia Armfield’s stunning, slippery story collection which I read exclusively in the bath on dreary January evenings. It’s bewitching and haunting and by the last chilling, sea-faring story I was afraid I’d be sucked down the tub drain at any moment.
In late August I discovered FEAST YOUR EYES by Myla Goldberg which snapped me out of my summer malaise and made me sit up straight. The novel is structured as gallery notes to a photography exhibit and Goldberg somehow, miraculously, made photographs appear in my mind through words alone. I grew up haunting my art school’s darkroom and nowhere have I seen that quiet magic captured so precisely. The ending, too, made me gasp—I won’t spoil it but it’s a book that I wanted to begin again as soon as I turned the final page.
Finally, when it became clear that no, actually, the pandemic was not going to end like we’d hoped, I went searching for total immersion and N. K. Jemisin’s THE FIFTH SEASON was there for me. The first of a trilogy, this science fiction/fantasy novel takes place on a planet that is constantly ending—what could be more apt? Jemisin is a masterful storyteller and I happily surrendered myself to her capable hands: never have 450 pages been devoured so quickly and completely.
MARIN: This year was a weird reading year for me: it felt like I was chasing after an ever-elusive feeling within my reading experience without really knowing what I wanted. I know… so hard to please!
However, two books thankfully cut through my general state of ennui. The first, Te-Ping Chen’s THE LAND OF BIG NUMBERS, a (brilliant!) debut short story collection where each story is connected to China in some way. I gobbled this up in late February (remember the pre-vaccines times? *shudders*) when it seemed impossible to commit my attention to anything. I was astounded by its rich and expansive range—some surrealism, some realism, some with a light touch of magical elements—together, they offer enduring portraits of Chinese nationals, both in China and its diaspora. I would’ve put good money behind this book being recognized by the National Book Award. Alas, that sadly didn’t happen, but Barack Obama did list it as one of his summer reading picks, so I feel slightly vindicated.
My second pick, which was an accidental encounter (and feels slightly on brand with the title), is CROSSINGS by Alex Landragin. I picked it up intrigued by the cover and ultimately won over by its description as a genre-bending, intricate literary puzzle. I love a book that plays with structure/timelines and CROSSINGS is squarely in that camp. What I adored most is that you can either read it normally or by following a different sequence outlined at the beginning. Apparently, the reading experience is completely different depending on your choice! Wild! Delightfully engaging and transporting, I couldn’t get enough of it.
LUCY: My 2021 "discovery" (a mere 16 years later than the rest of the world!) was the Chief Inspector Gamache series by the magnificent Louise Penny. Within the span of about 4 months, I had devoured the first 16 books, and when the 17th was published in August, I was virtually unreachable for the hours it took to rip through that one, too. However, in spite of my Penny obsession, I also found time for a fairly wide range of other 2021 reads. ASSEMBLY, a novel by Natasha Brown was masterful: short, piercing, laced with a quiet but insistent force. I also turned to essays with Jonny Sun's GOODBYE, AGAIN, which was by turns both moving and hilarious, with a scrambled egg piece that I know I'll be thinking about for years to come. And early in the year, I read a slightly older title: I AM, I AM, I AM by Maggie O'Farrell (I had inhaled HAMNET in 2020, so wanted more of her work, even though the two books are radically different). Her non-fiction was just as gripping and gorgeous as her fiction, and this narrative about O'Farrell's series of near-death experiences delivered (somehow) that seemingly impossible memoir balance of both a fascinating story and exquisite writing.
MOLLY: Hands down, CASTE by Isabel Wilkerson. It offers the most eloquent case possible for reparations that I’ve ever encountered. Her anger is so brilliantly tempered by research, by anecdote, by fact. It’s long and devastating in equal parts but CASTE is among the most important books of the last decade.
And you might be right to wonder how the same brain can accommodate NIGHTBITCH by Rachel Yoder! But I also loved this debut. All novelists are urged to “just please make it fresh” as though that was remotely achievable. And yet here is our heroine, worried about a patch of fur growing busily right on the back of her neck and soon her teeth are aching, can they actually be sharpening?
Finally, I just adored Twyla Tharp’s KEEP IT MOVING: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life; it’s the perfect antidote to the end-of-year lassitude that potentially paralyzes us all, pre-and post-holiday. She’s so deliciously bossy, get UP and MOVE! Here’s a marvelous haiku she quotes from the seventeenth century poet, Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down—now I can see the moon.” What is revealed to us that we couldn’t see before?
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P.S. from TFA: If you feel compelled to pick up a book or two, we highly recommend your local indie bookstores :)