2021 reading recommendations

(for auld lang syne, i've maintained a habit of reflecting on the books i read in a given calendar year. here's what i wrote in 2020, 2019, and 2018.)





it's difficult for me to cull the 34 books i read this year into a shortlist of favorites. i churned through far fewer this year because i wasn't exactly churning through them: i abandoned shit with abandon and savored what made the cut. another year of upheaval both personal — new home! new job! — and societal — vaccination with no renaissance in sight — must've left me too drained to bother slogging through writing that wasn't working for me.



savoring meant embracing my slothy reading pace. it also led to prolonging my experience with a book beyond its final pages. i sound-bathed in author interviews and talking head book banter during my long walks. (incidentally, the meditative pleasure i derived from ambling through/to bookish podcasts convinced me to revisit audiobooks.) i reflected on my relationship to what i'd read before spamming the good folks of my goodreads network with a review, keeping up the streak i'd started in the fall of 2020.



like a coach inundated with too many prospective athletes but too kind to turn anyone away, i'll share both first- and second-string recommendations from a year of good reading (pun intended) and invite you to check out my annual goodreads roundup for the rest. each bulleted book links to my review.



books that i still mull over with regularity, recency bias be damned:

• how much of these hills is gold by c pam zhang

• we ride upon sticks by quan barry

• braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer

• piranesi by susanna clark

• writers & lovers by lily king

• milk blood heat by dantiel w. moniz

• peaces by helen oyeyemi

• intimacies by katie kitamura



books that once stood out to me but whose piquancy has waned in my life, recency bias be damned:

• heavy by kiese laymon

• beowulf: a new translation by maria dahvana headley

• inheritors by asako serizawa

• how to do nothing by jenny odell

• gold diggers by sanjena sathian

• the memory police by yōko ogawa

• the beadworkers by beth piatote

• sharks in the time of saviors by kawai strong washburn



friends and family members might wonder: where are the cookbooks??? i simply didn't consume them like i did in 2020. that's not to say i didn't consume them at all: i continued to daydream about the possibilities they proffered (and even got my cheffy enginerd takes published!), but i smothered my urge to complete them cover to cover just to shelve them as read on goodreads. that said, i haven't yet shaken my aggrandizement of goodreads as Arbiter of Reading, so i failed to record all the books i cooked from or thumbed through.



time for a perspective check! (i remain indebted to carrie tian's 2018 book list for this segment.) of the 34 books i read this year,

• 28 were written by women (~82%, up from ~67% last year),

• 1 was written by a nonbinary person (~3%, not measured last year),

• 22 were written by people of color (~65%, up from 50% last year),

• 5 were written by queer folks (~15%, not measured last year),

• 3 were published before 2000 (~9%, down from ~15% last year),

• 5 were read by me as audiobooks (~15%, not measured last year), and

• 3 were read by me as works in translation (~9%, up from ~4% last year).



i read roughly two times as much fiction as nonfiction, which seems unusual when held up against 2020's near-even fiction/nonfiction split but reflects that i ceased systematically guzzling cookbooks just to check a goodreads box.



in 2022, i'd like to disentangle my definition of Read from goodreads and ring in bookish holidays (e.g., jólabókaflóðið, sant jordi day) with a community of fellow bookworms.