The best books I read in 2021

Plus some other favourites

As usual, almost everything I read this year was fiction. I’m aware of the wildly imbalanced nature of my consumption habits. I listen to like three podcasts a year, I’ve never listened to a single audiobook, and I very rarely read nonfiction longer than a New Yorker feature or— let’s be honest— a Wikipedia entry. This year I also pretty much stopped listening to music, and if my coworkers didn’t drop playlists and albums in Slack I’m sure that part of my brain would have atrophied entirely.

I did read a lot of fiction— of the 59 books I finished this year, 50 were fiction (three short story collections, the rest novels). I was trying to round up my ten favourites for you until Veronica’s year-end recap reminded me I don’t have to choose a tidy number, so here are the eight books I enjoyed most of all.

A Ghost in the Throat - Doireann Ní Ghríofa

This almost counts as nonfiction, blending memoir and history with literary scholarship to create a hybrid genre that felt genuinely, stunningly original. That’s an overused word in book descriptions but I mean it here— Ghríofa, a harried mother of three (and then four) very young children, pieces together fragments of the life of Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in her spare time, trying to solve the mystery of how one of the greatest poems of the 18th century disappeared from the historical record. . Ghríofa is a poet who transforms the scant information about her subject into a rich text by layering it with her own identity and perceptions through bewitching prose.

No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood has always written like a highly intelligent alien lifeform with a fantastic sense of humour who learned about human culture exclusively online. I mean this as a compliment; she is insanely perceptive and wildly weird in a way that I don’t think a writer who was formed in the crucible of a prestigious MFA program rather than the cesspools of Twitter and poetry forums could pull off. (Also this tweet plays on a loop in my brain.)

No One Is Talking About This is a work of autofiction that draws you in with lucid, hypnotic descriptions of professionally killing time on the internet before pivoting sharply into a family tragedy: the narrator’s sister is pregnant with a baby who has a rare genetic disorder. You would not expect a book that features a cat named Dr. Butthole could possess such emotional power, but such is the peerless talent of Patricia Lockwood.

Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder

I’ve had uncanny luck in picking up novels about parenting where the protagonists are caring for children exactly the same age as Maeve— Emily Gould’s Perfect Tunes when Maeve was nine months old, Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State when she was 14 months, and Nightbitch when she had just turned two. I don’t read any actual books about parenting or child development so maybe that’s why it feels so extraordinary to see the minutiae of each stage mirrored on the page.

Speed is not necessarily a correlate of enjoyment, but I read Nightbitch over two evenings because I could not get enough of it. The pace is propulsive, even frantic, which spurred me along— appropriate for a novel about a woman who is alienated from her creativity and identity by motherhood, mired in the repetition and boredom of spending all her waking hours alone with a two-year-old, and also literally turning into a dog.

This book really leans in to its most outrageous elements, which means parts of it are outrageously graphic and gory (but still fantastic). It’s also a perfect distillation of the alienation and surreality of being a parent, where you often feel as though you are literally losing your mind. So much so that I would hesitate to recommend it to friends who are struggling with full-time parenthood, but I would heartily recommend it to everyone else. Apparently Amy Adams is going to star in the screen adaptation; please let me know, once you read this book, if you agree that this is a terrible casting decision.

The Sentence - Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is one of the greatest storytellers alive (her last novel, The Night Watchman, was one of my favourites in 2020) and The Sentence is a gorgeous, hyper-current novel about pandemics, police brutality, hauntings, and the threat (metaphorical, literal, supernatural) of white saviourism.

Like everything Erdrich writes, it’s a story about stories, though even more so than usual: the protagonist, Tookie, spends ten years in prison after stealing a body in a fit of romantic devotion. She survives by reading voraciously, and when she’s released she starts working at a bookstore in Minneapolis owned by a woman named Louise (Erdrich also runs a bookstore in Minneapolis) and marries the man who arrested her. Flora, an elderly white customer obsessed with her imaginary Native roots, dies and starts haunting the bookstore, and Tookie in particular; Tookie becomes convinced that the book Flora was reading at the time killed her and has supernatural powers.

That’s enough plot for one novel, but the timeline of the book also overlaps with the murder of George Floyd and the onset of the pandemic. It’s always disarming to read a novel about the present, and whether or not you need emotional distance from our current events will probably determine if you enjoy this one. I thought it was glorious.

Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters

My notes from reading this book in March say “Edith Wharton if she were alive in 2021 and trans.” The basic premise: Ames, who used to be a woman named Amy, has just impregnated his boss Katrina, and along with revealing to her that he is trans he also wants to convince her and his ex-wife Reese that they should all raise the baby together.

The result is a very sharp comedy of manners where the characters spend a lot of time politely circling around uncomfortable topics, trying to gauge their relationships to one another, performing their expected roles, and inwardly panicking about expectations. Peters is devastatingly funny and adept at writing tender, excruciating, intimate sex scenes. If you read Sally Rooney for the sex scenes, you can get your fix here without all the idle chatter about Marxism.

True Grit - Charles Portis

Mike Hingston recommended this book in his BOOK PERSON interview, promising that it “ does not have an uninteresting sentence in it,” which is blessedly true. Every sentence is flawless, purposeful, and efficient, but the story is also marvellous. A lot of books are composed of beautiful sentences but fall apart at the plot level, or the fundamental story is interesting but the prose is clunky. This book, in the voice of heroine Mattie Ross recalling her quest to avenge her father’s death, has gorgeous rhythms and arguably one of the most perfect first paragraphs in fiction.

Something New Under the Sun - Alexandra Kleeman

This is one of the last books I read this year, and while it’s incredibly bleak— genre-wise, it’s a detective story bleeding into a horror novel about corporate deception and the climate crisis— I was in a bleak mood when I read it so I found it perfect.

The gist: a writer named Patrick leaves his depressed wife and precocious daughter to go to LA and serve as a production assistant for the film adaptation of his novel. The timeline is indistinct, but near future: California is perpetually on fire and has run out of water and everyone now drinks WAT-R, a manufactured alternative that one character describes as “more social” than the regular stuff. Weird things start happening, on set and off; Patrick and the film’s star, a disgraced former teen starlet named Cassidy, begin investigating. Kleeman has a dry, ironic, almost chilly prose style, which is very in vogue lately (e.g., Lauren Oyler) but here it serves to balance out the absurd and devastating elements of the story.

Other things I enjoyed this year:

• Newsletters, including Marisa’s Plain Pleasures, Vero Reads Books, Molly Young’s Read Like the Wind, Chris Cheung’s editorial project Under the White Gaze, Friday Things for pop culture analysis, and sometimes Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study.

• My hummingbird feeder, a daily source of joy.

• Watching How To With John Wilson, and City of Ghosts with Maeve.

• Wearing these slippers 90% of the time.

• Stovetop popcorn with melted butter, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and black pepper.

• The weekly search for Leif Penguinson.

• Roller skating, partly for sheer bliss and partly because it’s a wonder to discover new physical capabilities after 34 years in this rickety carapace.

If you made it all the way down here— thank you for reading BOOK PERSON this year! I hope you found a book or two that provided you with pleasure, insight, escape, solace, or another flavour of transcendence.

I’m grateful for the time that people have spent telling me about their favourite books, an endeavour that has made me feel less lonesome during a difficult year.

See you in 2022!