Books Can Save Us
Hello, second winter of our discontent (thank you, Eugene O’Neill, for the title). After the spring, summer, and fall of our discontent, it’s only fitting to make it a full two years of unshakable exhaustion over the pandemic, politics, and the renewed cases of mass shootings.
I’ve put band aids on all year only to rip them off when they prove useless. There have been sweet days of gratefulness followed by a string of claustrophobic fog-laden afternoons when it just feels right to throw a blanket over my head so the sadness doesn’t find me. Reading was my refuge when writing seemed not only torturous but pointless. I guess that’s the definition of tortured writing.
As I write this, family and friends invited to our Christmas Eve dinner are dropping like flies due to COVID positive tests, or exposure to someone with it.
Pandemic or no pandemic, books can save us from our loop upon wobbly loop of worry and fatigue. These dumpster fire years have given us so much great reading. Lots of great music, film, and television, too. The arts, as they have done ad infinitum, coming to humanity’s rescue once again.
While the end of the year is a time when some of us look with hope at opening our blank 2022 calendars, I am a junky for reading favorite book lists from the year. What great books flew under the radar? What do I have to read? Sure there are the givens, Anthony Doerr and Lauren Groff’s 2021 releases, but outside of a few overlaps, the lists are full of lesser known authors with exceptional works.
I rounded up some of the lists for you.
Can Reading Make You Happier?
But first off, can reading actually make you happier? Read this to find out because we can all use a dose of happy:
“Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.”
The Books That Help Us Embrace Middle Age
And if you’re middle-aged or, uh um, on some far, far away planet in the middle-aged solar system, this list might interest you:
“In the familiar coming-of-age tale, a young adult experiences an emotional journey or a rite-of-passage ordeal that propels them towards maturity. Along the way there are obstacles to overcome – it is often a baptism by fire. But increasingly in contemporary writing, there is another kind of coming-of-age story, in which the protagonist is not an adolescent but a middle-aged woman who undergoes a transformative process, gaining a new emotional maturity, a clearer intellectual perspective and an evolved sense of identity. In these coming-of-age stories, it's the grown-ups doing the growing up.”
New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2021
NYT: 100 Notable Books of 2021
How many have you read from this list? Me? Eleven. There are so many others that didn’t make the cut. You have to wonder what the selection process is like. Editors sitting around a table…..
But then they narrowed it down to 10. This is how:
By The New York Times
Published Oct. 28, 2021Updated Nov. 30, 2021
How do editors of The New York Times Book Review choose the annual 10 Best Books list? Which fiction and nonfiction works made the cut, and why?
This year, Times subscribers were the first to find out.
On the morning of Nov. 30, before the list was published, The Book Review announced this year’s 10 Best Books list in a virtual event just for subscribers.
The event began with a welcome from the actor, writer and producer Lena Waithe, who is starting her own book imprint. Then, the Book Review editor Pamela Paul gave an inside look at the yearlong process of determining the list.
The editors Gal Beckerman, Lauren Christensen, Greg Cowles, Emily Eakin, Elisabeth Egan, MJ Franklin, Tina Jordan, Dave Kim and John Williams announced and discussed this year’s selections. They also shared some of their own personal favorites that didn’t make the cut.
Here are the ten they picked: NYT — Best Books of 2021
New York Times: Best Historical Fiction of 2021
Into historical fiction? Here’s the NYT take on the best: NewYork Times Best Historical Fiction of 2021
THE ART OF LOSING, by Alice Zeniter. Translated by Frank Wynne. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 448 pp., $28.) In this prizewinning French novel, a young Parisian attempts to reconnect with the Algeria that shaped and silenced her paternal grandfather.
CATHEDRAL, by Ben Hopkins. (Europa, 624 pp., $28.) A nimble mesh of intersecting plots that rest on the slow but not so steady, generations-long construction of an enormous church in medieval Alsace.
LIBERTIE, by Kaitlyn Greenidge. (Algonquin, 366 pp., $26.95.) In Reconstruction-era New York, the daughter of a Black female doctor struggles to reconcile her own independence with her mother’s deeply felt vocation, traveling all the way to Haiti before coming to a difficult resolution.
THE MAGICIAN, by Colm Toibin. (Scribner, 512 pp., $28.) A masterly evocation of the life and times of the great German writer Thomas Mann, showcasing his relations with his contentious family and his intensely private sexual yearnings.
MATRIX, by Lauren Groff. (Riverhead, 272 pp., $28.) In this novel inspired by the 12th-century poet Marie de France, an impoverished English nunnery is the setting for a stirring exploration of the many forms of devotion.
NORA, by Nuala O’Connor. (Harper Perennial, 496 pp., paper, $16.99.) A lively fictional rendition of Nora Barnacle, the minimally educated, blue-collar woman who propped up one of literature’s most challenging highbrow writers, James Joyce.
THE PROPHETS, by Robert Jones Jr. (Putnam, 396 pp., $27.) The emotional wounds of the inhabitants of a plantation in antebellum Mississippi are laid bare in a swirl of fiercely poetic prose, impelled by the dangerous bond shared by two enslaved men.
SEND FOR ME, by Lauren Fox. (Vintage, 272 pp., paper, $16.95.) A trove of letters discovered in the American Midwest reveals the agonizing experiences of a German Jewish family separated by the steady rise of Nazism.
THE SINGING FOREST, by Judith McCormack. (Biblioasis, 302 pp., paper, $16.95.) A young lawyer in present-day Toronto grapples with the moral reckoning of war crimes as she probes a mass murder committed by Stalin’s security police in 1930s Belarus.
TENDERNESS, by Alison MacLeod. (Bloomsbury, 640 pp., $29.) This ambitious blend of research, guesswork and fabrication is centered on the creation and reception of D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
NPR’s Books We Love of 2021
Of course I have to include NPR’s exhaustive list of just about every genre: NPR’s Books We Love — 2021
Just a few of the many books listed.
The Guardian’s Best Books of 2021
And The Guardian’s list which includes crime and thrillers, politics, and children’s categories: The Guardian’s Best Books of 2021
“The most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber), launched on a tide of tote bags and bucket hats. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novel-writing – in a world on fire.
Rooney’s wasn’t the only eagerly awaited new chapter. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo) reached English-language readers at last, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen, beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads (4th Estate); Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (Faber) probes the limits of emotion in the story of a sickly girl and her “artificial friend”; and acclaimed US author Gayl Jones, whose epic of liberated slaves in 17th-century Brazil, Palmares (Virago), has been decades in the making.”
The Paris Review: Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2021
The swanky editors of The Paris Review weighed in with these: The Paris Review — Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2021
Some Paris Review contributors—from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast—give us a peek into their reading habits.
“I still got that list of books on my fridge that I’m working through (one of the first pictures on my Twitter). Made it a few years ago. Classics and famous books I hadn’t read yet. When I finish one I circle it on the list and whenever I wonder what to read next and feel stumped, I just walk over to the fridge. This year I read The Brothers Karamazov, which amazed me. It was hairy and funny and, as always with the books I love, not what I expected. Easily one of the best pieces of art added to the little thing called my life. I’d read other Dostoyevsky novels and didn’t connect with them on that same crazy level I felt connected to Brothers Karamazov. The copy I had was 776 pages and I couldn’t imagine cutting it down at all.
Right now I’m reading Malone Dies, the second novel in Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). I’m halfway through and just astounded. Molloy was amazing, too, a very funny book, laugh so hard you cry… It reminded me a bit of The Sound and the Fury, when Jason Compson is chasing his niece around. In Part II of Molloy, it becomes a metafictional Smokey and the Bandit. I don’t want to give anything away, spoil anything for new readers of it. There’s a big payoff. All the things I’ve heard about Beckett, nobody ever told me how funny he is.”
The Best True Crime Books of 2021
Or if your thing is true crime: The Best True Crime Books of 2021
Leslie Pietrzyk’s Best Books (she read) in 2021
And my friend and beautiful writer, Leslie Pietrzyk’s Best Books (she read) in 2021. I’ve found some real gems on her year-end lists. Her latest, ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE, is on my nightstand and I can’t wait to deep dive into it over Christmas break. Her list: http://www.workinprogressinprogress.com
The Books I Loved in 2021
The books I loved this year: The Carrying (poetry) by Ada Limon; Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson; Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark; Hamnet: A Novel of the Plaque by Maggie O’Farrell, Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy, and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.
Lit Hub’s: The Ultimate Best Books of 2021
Still trying to find the one? Here’s an exhaustive list of bests Lit Hub put together: https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2021-list
So, hello, there’s got to be one or two or three somewhere here to pick up at your indie bookstore or library?
When all else fails—including COVID tests—there are books. Thank god for words.
Stay safe. Stay healthy. Here’s to a hopeful 2022.
xoxo robin
About Robin
Robin is a former music journalist turned fiction and essay writer. Her debut novel, Invincible Summers, was published by ELJ Editions in June 2016. Since its release it has been awarded a Shelf Unbound 2018 Best Indie Notable 100 Book; Runner Up 2018 in General Fiction at the Florida Book Festival; and received Honorable Mentions in 2017 at the Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Beach Read Book Festivals.
Before its publication, Invincible Summers was a semi-finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Award & John Simmons Short Fiction Award for 2014.
Several of the chapters in Invincible Summers were published as stand-alone short stories in Slice Magazine, Redux Literary Journal, The Homestead Review, Willard & Maple, and others.
Early on, before writing fiction, Robin worked as a freelance music journalist and interned as a research assistant at Rolling Stone magazine.
Her essay, “Rejecting Rejection,” was selected for Behind the Plot an anthology forthcoming in 2022. She is currently chipping away at yet another rewrite of her second novel.
Robin is one of three editors on Wide Open Writing’s Editorial Services team. Visit her book review blog at www.robingaines.net.
Wide Open Writing
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WOW First Sunday
WHEN: The first Sunday of every month (unless otherwise stated on Our Calendar)
NEXT MEETING: February 6, 2022
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Join Robin Gaines on Sunday, February 6, 2022 for Wide Open Writing’s internationally acclaimed WOW First Sunday Write. The zoom session begins with introducing ourselves to each other and then an introduction to the theme. We’ll share a writing prompt(s), related to the theme, and then follow with a longer write. You’re welcome to use the prompt however you choose or to ignore it entirely and go off on your own writing journey. Readings of your work are welcome but not mandatory.