Year in Reading: 2021
- Journal
I read 26 books this year, nine more than last year. I read more fiction books than non-fiction, but that’s mostly because I wanted to read some sci-fi, The Expanse and The Interdependency being the two series I spent the most time with this year. I also read through all three of Sally Rooney’s novels, which I really loved.
Against Everything was a really good book of essays I read at the start of the year, but the one book that really blew my mind open was Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I’m still thinking about this book almost a year after I’ve read it. How to Resist Amazon and Why gave me the fuel I needed to not only shop less from Amazon but also change my shopping habits completely, and Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song helped me think about creativity in a new and more mentally-healthy way than before.
2021 was a different type of year for me, one that a reading log can’t quite capture completely, but each of these books shaped my life in some way, and I’m grateful for all of it.
- Cibola Burn by James S.A. Carey
- Against Everything by Mark Greif
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
- Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
- How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- A World Without Email by Cal Newport
- The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey
- Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey
- Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey
- How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine
- Why People Photograph by Robert Adams
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
- The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
- The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi
- The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
- Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
- How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy
- The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
- Inhabiting the Negative Space by Jenny Odell