Constant Reader discussion

What were your favorite reads last year?
It doesn't have to be published last year.
It doesn't have to have been a best seller.
You don't need a specific number.
Just your favorite books from your reading list for 2021.

Here's mine, in no particular order:

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
When All Is Said by Anne Griffin
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Wonderland, Joyce Carol Oates
Apeirogon, Colum McCann
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib
Anathem, Neal Stephenson
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V. E. Schwab
Imaginary Friend, Stephen Chbosky
The Bees, Laline Paull
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
The Trespasser, Tana French

I didn't read very many books last year, and there were only 3 I gave 5 stars to:
Piranesi
Hamnet
The Anomaly

Mrs. March came close, very close. In fact I'll go on and add it to the list.

Thanks, Tonya, that reminds me to pick up Hamnet, which I bought earlier in the year. Like you, I didn't get a lot of reading done this year. But a couple books stuck out: A CHILDREN'S BIBLE, by Lydia Millet, and THE WESTERN WIND, by Samantha Harvey. Loved both of these amazing novels.

I had sixteen 5-star reads last year but I will list here my absolute favorites from that list and the books that have stayed with me the most:

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird

A short list:


The Historians: Poems

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

frank: sonnets

Homeland Elegies

Winter Recipes from the Collective

Orwell's Roses

I never give many books 5*, as I leave that for those exceptional reads which make a truly lasting impact.
Not including my rereads of the magnificant Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of HillsAn Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, the following are my most interesting reads of 2021 and were all by new to me authors
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Your 2021 most interesting reads do indeed look interesting, Sheila. On to the tbr they go! I have Lerner’s The Topeka School on my shelves but haven’t gotten to it yet.

Sheila, If by "lasting impact" you mean that the book's characters or particular scenes surprise you, sneak into your thoughts, at unexpected times, even many, many books later, that is what earns 5star ratings from me too. In fact it is why Mrs. March has to be up-starred -- I didn't expect it to do that, but here we are months later and thoughts of her still pop up. Poor Mrs. March!

Not all of the books that initially earned 5 stars from me have that lasting quality that you described, Tonya. So those that are still thought about many months later become my “favorites of the year.”

Donna wrote: "Not all of the books that initially earned 5 stars from me have that lasting quality that you described, Tonya. So those that are still thought about many months later become my “favorites of the y..."

I can't believe I forgot to put Transcendent Kingdom on my list. I am definitely still thinking about it well after finishing it. I'm going to edit my list to include it.

My favorite fiction books for 2021 were:

The Sympathizer by Nguyen

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Doerr

Hamnet by O’Farrell

When All Is Said by Griffin


My favorite non-fiction books were:

Lindbergh by Berg

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Isaacson

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese by Norman

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Wilkerson

I also liked Transcendent Kingdom very much. I am adding Saunders A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life to my TBR list.

Not necessarily 5 star reads, but books I that seduced me while I was reading and that lingered for days afterwards. A few were second reads and held up very nicely.

Fiction

Père Goriot, Honore de Balzac (2nd read, 50 years after reading it in high school. I loved it then, even more now.)

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (2nd read, about 20 years after first one. Such lovely writing never loses its power.)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (2nd read, a year after 1st. Just gets tighter and richer.)

The Queen's Gambit, Walter Tevis (2nd read, one before Netflix series, one after. Better and better.)

Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan (will definitely be rereading this one!)

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (just when I thought I couldn't read any more about this history ...)

Nonfiction

The Life of Monsieur de Molière, Mikhail Bulgakov (two writers four centuries apart with much in common: trying to please easily offended tyrants without compromising their integrity; how is it I've gone this far in life without reading Moliere!?)

The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley. (inspires me to read all of his collections)

Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Priscilla Long (excellent blending of science and memoir; Long deserves a much wider audience)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, George Saunders. (do you love short stories? then read this book!)

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars, Jo Marchant (excellent storyteller, prose stylist, and expositor of complex ideas)

2021 was an outlier reading year for me. I started listening to audiobooks back in February. I listen at 2x-3x speed (depending on which app I'm using) and so I finished 325 books (30 on paper, 1 on Kindle, everything else on audio). I also started, but didn't finish another 100 books.

I felt that I've never fully gotten my reading groove back after law school. In 2018, '19, and '20 I exceeded my 52 book reading goals, but I didn't find many of them satisfying. One thing about finishing a ridiculous number of books in 2021 is that it helped me to see what kind of books I most enjoy right now.

I gave 5 stars to 58 books, 4 stars to 112 books, 3 stars to 133 books, 2 stars to 21 books. As a general rule, I don't finish books that would be 1 and 2 star books for me. The 2 star books that I did finish were ones I was reading with friends or I didn't have hands to change to something different (like I was driving) or I was enjoying the book up until the ending.

Anyway, my favorite books of 2021:

Fiction
Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig
The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
A Spindle Splintered by Alix Harrow
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict
This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab
The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
The Art Forger by Barbara Shapiro
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Nonfiction
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gann
Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

I love this tradition on CR. Thank you to everyone who posted or will. I get great ideas and reminders from your lists. This year, I am surprised to see that so many of my favorites were nonfiction, very unusual for me.

Nonfiction:
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam
Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau

Fiction:
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Billie Dyer and Other Stories by William Maxwell

Audiobooks:
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride

I always enjoy seeing your lists, Barb. PERSUASION is probably my all-time favorite Austen. I read James McBride's THE COLOR OF WATER a long time ago and was blown away by it. I am looking forward to the discussion of McBride's Deacon King Kong next month.

Nice to see someone reading Maxwell’s short stories, Barbara. They typically get overlooked in favor of his novels.

Tom, I'm a lover of short stories and of William Maxwell's writing so it was a good fit. What prompted me to remember this collection though was a great article about Maxwell by A.O. Scott in the New York Times Book Review in which he highlighted it.

Ann, I tried to read Deacon King Kong a while ago and just couldn't get into it. I feel like I'm missing something major since so many others liked it. I am going to read the discussion to see if something motivates me to try again.

And, aren't these lists a great CR tradition? Thank you to Mary Anne for posting the first note.

It took me a while to get into, Barb, but I kept going because I owned the book. I really ended up liking it. He pulled a lot of threads together. I always admire that.

My favorite books from 2021 are:
Oh William!
The Fire Next Time
Boy Swallows Universe
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
The Murmur of Bees
Transcendent Kingdom
Mornings in Jenin
Beloved
Greenlights
Chocolat
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
When All Is Said
The Good Muslim
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Apeirogon
Shuggie Bain
The God of Small Things]

It doesn't take much to make me happy.

Stephen wrote: "

An easy question for me. It was far and away the unfortunately titled novel Stoner by John Williams. Other Constant Readers beat me to this one.

My review."

I absolutely loved this book, too.

My favorites in fiction in no particular order:

Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó; translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.
The Door by Magda Szabó; translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny
Stoner by John Williams.
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.
Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir; translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon.
The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller translated from the German by Philip Boehm
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy.
Shadow by Karin Alvtegen, translated from the Swedish by McKinley Burnett.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk.
Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan; translated from the French by George Miller.
Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo.
Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley (re-read)
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford.
Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan; translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (a re-read)
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder.
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng.
The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems by Threa Almontaser (poetry)
The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore.
Crimes of Conscience: Selected Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer (a re-read)
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop; translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The White Book by Han Kang; translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (a re-read)

My favorites in non fiction in no particular order

Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir by Michael White.
Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way by David Barrie.
History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History by Samuel Noah Kramer
The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga; translated from the French by Jordan Stump.
Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad by Ibn al-Sai, translated from the Arabic by Shawkat M. Toorawa
A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America by Leila Ahmed.
A Night in the Emperor's Garden: A True Story of Hope and Resilience in Afghanistan by Qais Akbar Omar.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights, translated by Yasmine Seale with an introduction and annotations by Paulo Lemos Horta.

Stephen wrote: "

An easy question for me. It was far and away the unfortunately titled novel Stoner by John Williams. Other Constant Readers beat me to this one.

My review."

Maybe you've already found the Reading List discussion of Stoner in 2014, Steve, but if not, here's a link:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Of the books and collections (short story or poetry) that I read last year (in 2021), my three favorite were:

1) The Great Alone. It was the first that I had read of Kristin Hannah.

2) Something Wicked This Way Comes. I love the way Ray Bradbury writes.

3) Call Us What We Carry. This collection of poems by Amanda Gorman just absolutely blew me away.

Stephen wrote: "

An easy question for me. It was far and away the unfortunately titled novel Stoner by John Williams. Other Constant Readers beat me to this one.

My review."

I rated this novel 5 stars. Such a great read.

I love these lists of favorite books! They give more ideas to add to my every expanding TBR list.

Tamara, I haven’t read most of the books on your lists, but of the ones that I have read, I particularly liked:
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Door by Magda Szabó
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Stoner by John Williams
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Steve,
It's great to see you back. Discussions are always more lively - and entertaining - when you're around.

Stephen wrote: "Lynn wrote: "Maybe you've already found the Reading List discussion of Stoner in 2014, Steve, but if not, here's a link..."

How kind of you, Lynn. Of course I had not discovered that discussion. T..."

Okay, now you've got me curious - I'm going to have to go back and see what Katy and Ann D were up to on Jan, 18!

Stephen wrote: "Lynn wrote: "Maybe you've already found the Reading List discussion of Stoner in 2014, Steve, but if not, here's a link..."

How kind of you, Lynn. Of course I had not discovered that discussion. T..."

Oh my, yes... especially Katy's summary. It was also fun to see comments from people like Dale and Robert who haven't participated here for quite a while. Kinda like you, Steve :)

Ann D wrote: "I love these lists of favorite books! They give more ideas to add to my every expanding TBR list.

Tamara, I haven’t read most of the books on your lists, but of the ones that I have read, I partic..."

Ann, I like to read a lot of books in translation, so I'm always on the lookout for those.

I've been a "lurker" in this group for many years and although I don't often comment, I deeply appreciate all of the insights into books and the recommendations I have taken to heart because of the faithful members.

My favorite reads from 2021, in no particular order:

Virgil Wander

The Absolutist

The Glass Hotel

Shuggie Bain

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

K,
I enjoyed VIRGIL WANDER too.

Tamara,
I noticed that many of the books on your list have been translated into English. I think I need to broaden my horizons. I checked and my library has some of them on your list.

Ann,
Unfortunately, I can only read books in English. But I love reading translations because it exposes me to different cultures.

I don't know what type of books you enjoy reading, but I recommend you take a look at Iza's Ballad or The Door by Magda Szabó (Hungarian). I wasn't as keen on her Abigail.

If you enjoy "feel good" books, I loved Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, a Russian of Armenian origin.

Another absolutely delightful one, which I read a few years ago is Baba Dunja's Last Love by Alina Bronsky. I've enjoyed every book of hers I've read, but this was my favorite.

And one of my all time favorites is An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, a Jordanian. Everyone to whom I recommended this book just loved the central character, an elderly woman called Aaliya. She is eccentric and delightful and immerses herself in literature. In fact, looking back at this list, all of these books have just amazing, quirky, elderly women as their central characters. Maybe that's why I enjoyed them so much :)

I have posted reviews of all these books on goodreads and on my website in case you want to know more about them.

Happy reading, Ann. And I hope you'll let us know what you think of them if you read any.

Thanks for the suggestions. I love books about other times and cultures. It lets me do a lot of armchair traveling.


I like Szabo. We read Szabó Magda's The Door and Abigail here on Constant Reader.

Here is the link to our THE DOOR discussion: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I have ordered a used copy of Iza's Ballad and got Three Apples Fell from the Sky on my Kindle.

Great! I hope you enjoy them.
Thanks for the discussion on The Door. I'll check it out.

K wrote: "I've been a "lurker" in this group for many years and although I don't often comment, I deeply appreciate all of the insights into books and the recommendations I have taken to heart because of the..."

A nice list, K. I’ve added several of them to my tbr.

I always use these lists to make my reading decisions.