Books I read in 2021

This year, I (mostly successfully) tried to cut down my screen time by giving myself an unlimited budget for books. In total (I’m a pretty slow reader, so I don’t think I’m going to add to the list in the remaining 11 days of the year), I read 14 books. Here they are, along with a few awards:

1. The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel
2. A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel
3. Icebound, by Andrea Pitzer,
4. L’Arabe du Futur, by Riad Sattouf
5. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
6. Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
7. Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe
8. Beneath a Scarlet Sky, by Mark Sullivan
9. Don’t Call it a Cult, by Sarah Berman
10. Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder
11. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
12. The Next Everest, by Jim Davidson
13. Bad Blood, by John Carreyroux
14. City of Shadows, by Ariana Franklin

Awards:

Best Book: a tie between The Mirror and the Light (a historical novel set at the tail end of Henry VIII’s reign), and All the Light We Cannot See (also a historical novel, set during World War II). Honestly I think Hilary Mantel is a once-in-a-generation writer (the only woman to win the Booker Prize twice!), but her writing is so rich and so dense that it lends itself to digging in for several hours, looking tons of historical stuff up on Wikipedia, handling characters with multiple names (their given name, their title, etc.). Whereas All the Light is a little, well, lighter, and some of the chapters are literally three pages long, so I could pick it up for 20 minutes in bed and actually get through a couple of chapters.

Most creative: L’Arabe du Futur (an autobiographical graphic novel by a French-Syrian cartoonist). I don’t think I’ve read a graphic novel since I was in high school, and my sister in law turned me onto this one. I only read it in French so I can’t speak to the English translation, but it was so good. Funny, touching, a perceptive look at complicated family dynamics, and, bonus, I know a translator who ran into Riad Sattouf in a train station in France, and said he’s also a really nice person.

Best plot: City of Shadows (a thriller set in post-World War I Berlin). I’m not much of a thriller reader, but my young adult daughter turned me onto this one, and my husband also read it, so I sort of had to read it for family harmony purposes. But the joke was on me, because I loved it. Ariana Franklin is a former investigative reporter, so the historical details in this book were amazing, and the ending was just jaw-dropping. Highly recommended if you’re into murder mysteries that are a little more cerebral than the average page-turner.

Geez, this is America: This award is a tie between Empire of Pain (the story of the Sackler family and the OxyContin epidemic, by probably my favorite non-fiction writer), and Nomadland (the book that the movie is based on, about nomadic low-wage workers in the US). The name of the award kind of speaks for itself, but I found both of these books enlightening and sobering about the state of the US’s money, power, and legal system. Bonus recommendation: if you like Patrick Radden Keefe’s writing, get yourself a copy of his previous book, Say Nothing (non-fiction, IRA murder story set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland).

I’m digging into Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads over winter break, and then it’s on to 2022 and more books! Any other recommendations from readers?