Favorite Books of 2021

 My favorite books published in 2021 were...

Ghost in the throat, Doireann Ní Ghriofa

No one is talking about this, Patricia Lockwood

Fake accounts, Lauren Oyler

Detransition, baby, Torrey Peters

Winter in Sokcho, Elisa Shua Dushapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Tomorrow sex will be good again, Katherine Angel

Migratory birds, Mariana Oliver, tr. Julia Sanches

Interior, Chinatown, Charles Yu

Keeping the House, Tice Cin

 

And overall, favorite things I read this year...

 

 

Garden by the sea, Mercè Rodoreda, tr. Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Bright dead things, Ada Limón

Minor feelings, Cathy Park Hong

The biggest bluff, Maria Konnikova

Dancer from the dance, Andrew Holleran

Collected Body, Valzhyna Mort

BTTM FDRS, Ezra Clayton Daniels and Ben Passmore

Spare room, Helen Garner

Emperor’s Babe, Bernardine Evaristo

Sky country, Christine Kitano

Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, tr Keith Gessen

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

 

Here's to more good books, and more time to write about them, in 2022! Happy New Year, everyone!

Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

 I heard about this one from a Guardian article of best books of the year, chosen by various authors — a format I especially enjoy, and this one seems particularly good. It was chosen by Damon Galgut, whom I haven't read but want to, and was particularly appealing because it was one of two "slender" novels that he recommended. I love a short book! Further research informed me that it's a Christmas novel (but not the treacly kind), so boom, I was sold. And it is very, very good. 

I guess it would best be called a novella, for various technical reasons, but in simple terms — because the plot feels like a contextualized snippet, but the inner world of the character is incredibly developed. Indeed, what makes the book so extraordinary is the richness of the setting. Some of this, I suspect, is the Irishness of it (there's a reason that Angela's Ashes was so popular. Ireland is special.) And this is a wonderfully evocative slice of small town Irish life. It's tender, and tough, and lovely. 

But what really sets it apart is the finely tuned balance of good and evil. The book is a moral drama, a subtle reckoning with the atrocity of the Magdalene laundries and people's complicity and complacence, and the art of it hinges on how it threads the needle of realism and idealism. It's a quietly suspenseful book; one that brilliantly produces a deeply unsettling sense of dread and horror. A powerful indictment of these horrific institutions, but not a bombastic one. Exactly the kind of Christmas story I wanted, in these grim times.

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

 I don't read apocalyptic fiction all that often, but this one, which has a snowy cover and a book jacket that talks about winter looming, kind of called to me as a good onset-of-cold-weather read, and boy was it ever. I listened to the audiobook, which has an especially excellent narrator, and this book blew me away. What makes it so brilliant, I think, is that it avoids a lot of the tedium of having to theorize/explain how the world ends that other apocalypse fictions are essentially centered around, and instead hones in on the question of what it means, really — how does life go on? Because the story takes place on an Anishinaabe reservation, this question is very different from what it would be elsewhere, and the events described are subtly folded into a longer history of the Anishinaabe people. The book is deliciously suspenseful and absolutely riveting, and very very real about the human casualties, but without being sensationalistically awful. It's a remarkable feat of storytelling.

The story begins with a sense of unease — a power outage, phone lines down — but it's a mild one, because after all, as the various characters remark to one another, this kind of thing happens all the time on the rez, just usually not all at once. The beginning of the book moves slowly, doing a lot of the work of world-building, and establishing a sense of isolation and detachment from the Canadian society beyond. We get to know and love our characters, and to learn about their lives. But tension and dread are building. Two young boys return from college in Toronto with grim tidings about the world's collapse, and then a stranger arrives. The community is confronted with the question of how to survive the harsh winter without any electricity or supplies from the outside world. And the rest of the book just dwells in that discomfort, exploring its nuances. It's absolutely brilliant.

In the Eye of the Wild, by Nastassja Martin

 I've got a new review essay up at the KGB Bar Lit Magazine, check it out! On Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild and how the romance of the anthropologist has migrated over to stories of human-animal encounter.

I WIll Die in a Foreign Land, by Kalani Pickhart

Note: what follows is slightly spoiler-y: I don't give away anything specific, but I talk about the structure of the plot, so it tells you something about what will happen (though I suspect many will guess long before they reach the end).

I was just reminding you all recently how much I hate it when a novel does that thing where multiple unrelated seemingly stories turn out to be connected... Thinking about it more, I was reflecting that it's one of the most blatantly fictional devices out there — not that it's unrealistic, exactly, because this is certainly a thing that happens in the world, but that it always feels overdetermined (because, of course, it is!). Whenever it happens in 18th century (or earlier) texts I'm teaching, my students roll their eyes and see it as ridiculous, but they seem to love it in contemporary stuff. Whereas I generally find it charming in those earlier works, but the present-day version annoys the hell out of me.  I think the difference is that in modern-day works, the revelation in laced with dramatic irony: we, the readers, know, but the characters don't. So the point is a kind of wonder at how the world works, that the characters don't get to share in, or respond to, and I suppose the deeper point is to also signal to us that perhaps, we are experiencing such things as well, without being aware of them (in fact, we almost certainly are), wow, isn't the world amazing! I mean, it is, and that is an effective way that fiction can illuminate this aspect, but it's just really, really overused. 

It especially bugged me in this book because it really wasn't necessary! There was already a perfectly reasonable connection between the characters — they were all experiencing the Euromaidan protests in Kiev in 2013, and interacting with each other as a result. That was sufficient! I didn't need more! I think I felt particularly cheated because I enjoyed the book SO much for the first 2/3 of it, and I didn't realize that it was heading in that direction, though of course in retrospect, I totally should have.

But the beginning is great, it totally sucks you in, the characters are complex and absorbing, and it's telling a story about an event that I care about (I was actually in Kiev a few weeks before the protests started, to celebrate my birthday with my good friend who was living there and working on a dissertation, and who was also at the Maidan, and whose book ended up being about the revolution as a result). It was a really big deal, and I suspect that in our fast-moving new cycle, globalized world, etc, etc, not enough people really know about it. Anyhow, this is a very good book, and one that most people without my grumpy pet peeves will absolutely relish — an excellent holiday gift.

Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler

 I've been enjoying Lauren Oyler's critical essays for awhile (this recent one, on the new Sebald biography, is absolutely brilliant), and, full disclosure, have also been enjoying hanging out with her and talking to her about literature and people and life, etc. I hadn't gotten her book yet, despite being curious about it, because I refuse to buy books in hardcover, but then she gave me a copy, so yay, I could read it! And surprise surprise (not really), it's great. 

There are so few really funny novelists working today — the only two contemporary writers who have really made me laugh that spring immediately to mind are Maria Semple and Taffy Brodesser-Akner — so it was such a treat to launch into a book that literally had me cackling on damn near every page. It is very, very funny. Oyler has a razor-sharp wit, and, like the best Millenial authors, finds the perfect balance between a wry irony and a vulnerability that evinces a commitment to being a part of the world; a sense of proportion that ensures that the narrative doesn't remain suspended in the clouds mocking the mere mortals below. 

The novel is surprising, less because of the more spectacular plot fireworks of the opening, as for the slow, subtle work that follows them. It made me reach once again for Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday, a book that brilliantly analyzes (18th-century) realist novels in which characters resolutely do NOT develop (thereby showing us new things about our idea of character, and realism as a form. It's just so smart, and has made me notice things about novels featuring young women protagonists that I otherwise wouldn't), because here, too, we have a story about a character who doesn't know what to do with herself, which therefore turns out to be a story in which not much really happens. Or so it seems, because there isn't the neat and tidy plot of Bildung that we tend to expect — the formative lessons of the Grand Tour that bring some kind of clarity and purpose to the protagonist's life. 

But actually, all kinds of things are happening — indeed, the book is a startlingly accurate portrayal of what it's like to be an American living abroad on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the tidied up Story of An American Living Abroad version. The little frustrations, the odd quirks you notice about the culture, the loneliness, the sense that you're trying to be cosmopolitan and interesting, or perhaps the main character in the Story of An American Living Abroad, while suspecting/worrying that maybe your life... isn't really all that interesting. There was an added pleasure in it, for me, because I lived in Berlin for a year in high school, and have had my own sort of experience of being a confused young woman in that city, and so some things were extra familiar, but also from the perspective of an older person, in a Berlin that has changed in some ways but not others (and is still one of the greatest cities in the world, just saying). 

It's also interesting, as a work of realism, for the way that it minutely describes various things that seem utterly obvious, but are of course incredibly of-the-moment. So, for instance, what an iPhone home screen looks like, how you open an app, how instagram works. It's startling at first, and then incredibly fascinating (and really well done — if you've never tried to write descriptions like that, I'm telling you, it's HARD. I used give my comp students an assignment along such lines and I stopped because they were terrible and reading them was no fun). In many ways, the novel is a really precise ethnography of a very specific cultural moment.

Finally, amidst all this apparent lack of action, things are happening conceptually, as the ideas that the book circles coalesce and combine in really intriguing ways. I guess people probably think of this as a novel about social media and inter-personal relationships in the internet age, and it is that, but it's more broadly a novel about identity, authenticity, and social life. The internet gives a particular inflection to those issues, sure, but they also aren't fundamentally different simply because they're mediated through Tinder, I don't think. Perhaps because I know Lauren, and thus could recognize parts of the story as drawn from her life, and because we've had a lot of conversations about auto-fiction (and what that term even means), I was also musing on the book's own playful blending of fiction and reality, which is heightened by the moments when the narrator pauses to comment on the form of the novel. 

The ultimate effect, for me, is a text that dazzlingly brings together literary form and self-presentation, and playfully questions (challenges?) the notion of straightforward honesty in both art and life, and the idea of intimacy. 

It's a cool novel, definitely on my top 10 of books published in 2021. Check it out.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel

 Every year in my Intro to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, I teach Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" and ask my students whether the sex in the story is consensual. And every year, but increasingly more so, over the course of our classroom discussion I am distressed to realize how much work the notion of consent is doing in current cultural conversations about sex, such that it seems as if they have no way to conceptualize sex that is consensual, but bad, or consensual but unwanted. It is, however, very difficult to convey such notions without verging on sounding like a rape apologist. Or without potentially undermining the very positive and worthwhile work being done by all those who are promoting notions of affirmative consent.

So I appreciated this book so much, because it did an absolutely spectacular job of explaining why the idea of consent, though very important in some ways, is not the gateway to liberation that it is often presented as being. As Angel convincingly argues, to rely so heavily on the notion of affirmative consent is to demand, not only that people express what they want — but that they know what it is, exactly. Such a demand is not only unrealistic, is also fails to account for the ways in which desire is both responsive, and social. It's a really powerful meditation on what we actually want from our "sexual revolution", and how current approaches are falling short. The book is definitely centered on the experiences of cis-het women, but it's up-front about that, and is also careful to acknowledge some of the complications attendant to thinking about sexuality for woman of color, especially Black women. 

A short, compelling read, well-researched, and with some great examples from a variety of films (and some really good ones at that). Strongly recommended!