I can’t believe I called last year’s reading post “reading in a hellscape” when 2021 was lurking around the corner. Is 2021 worse than 2020? By sheer dint of not being dramatically better, yes, yes it is worse. This has been a shit year of rollercoastering. I know Biden says this isn’t March 2020 and it’s not, but it is December 2021 facing another winter of isolating and feeling like you can’t avoid covid even though you already waited hours and hours for your first vaccine and then the second and then the booster and waiting for a vaccine to approved for maybe some of your children, and then maybe your younger children, and then will they ever find something that works for the youngest kids and who is getting boosters and how are you feeling, anyway, can you come into work tomorrow we’re very short staffed and customers/readers/students are yelling and cranky.
So how does reading fit into all this? For me, it meant that I read a lot less—barely 50 books, well under my peak of 100+ and under what I think of as my typical rate in the 70s or 80s. This is partly because I just didn’t want to read. I was restless. I wanted to escape but also I was tired of escaping. I also, to be honest, spent a lot of time self-medicating myself through pandemic anxieties and loneliness, and so I wasn’t always in a condition to really dive into reading.
the full list of
books I read in 2021
But I also read some really great things. I joined a librarianish book club and although I haven’t always managed to read our monthly selections, I have read book-related books that I might not have otherwise, and I have vastly enjoyed the company. So for the first time, I’m including some workish/non-fiction in my reading round-up, which shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I haven’t read any work-related books in the past handful of years, but that this is the first year in which the category of reading-that-is-exciting-and-enjoyable-and-potentially-bibliography-related-but-fun-even-if-not is a real one. I keep meaning to write a post about my thinking around feminist bibliography and how that connects to mutual aid and other pandemic lessons, and I maybe actually will. But in the meantime, this is the first year in ages for me to really feel sparks of excitement when reading things about book history and I am really happy about that.
But the main point of this reading list is to keep track of my fiction reading, since that’s what I tend to lose track of. It’s weird, that fiction can be such a blur for me. Not all of it—the ones that hit stay, if not in all their details, in some larger picture that makes sense of why it made an impact. But there’s so much of what I read that just mushes together. I don’t read for self-improvement, I don’t read because I need to keep up with the discourse, I don’t read because I think I should. I read because I want to lose myself in a book. Sometimes I only need a book to occupy me during the minutes I’m reading. Sometimes I crave a book that will pull at my brain and heart while I’m not reading it. Sometimes I don’t know which book will be which until time has passed. Add to that my habit of sometimes reading so fast I can’t retain what I’ve read more than a short period of time, and sometimes I can’t actually remember what a book was or what I thought of it if I don’t have it written down. And I have PhD in English that, as I tell my kids, gives me a license to make up new words and, I guess, to feel okay about how I read, because all forms of reading are what you make of them, and if you want to scold people for never reading when what you mean is they don’t read the same works you do, then I am here to tell you that you’re full of it.
Anyway.
Here’s what comes to mind from my year of reading in this year of fear and hope and disappointment and ennui:
Arkady Martine. I read her first book, A Memory Called Empire, over the summer and am just now starting the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I had seen a bunch of recommendations for Memory but brain farts made it hard to feel ready to pick up. But!!!! For someone who thinks of herself as a reader and who thinks about allusions and literary echoes and who also is interested in archives and memory-keeping, this really hit the spot. Not to mention the details around how empires are built and maintained and and and and. What I’m saying is that if you’re interested in these sorts of things, this is a series that explores those questions and their intersections with identity and community and love.
Dean Spade. I got really into mutual aid this year. Not just as an idea, but as an ethical and daily practice that I’m trying to shift into. You might have seen me post on social media about a group that I’m part of and how it’s fundamentally changed my sense of how we can be in the world. (The Consistent Money-Moving Project! It’s based on the premise that a small, steady, pool of money can make a significant difference to people’s lives; you can follow us on instagram and someday on our website, when we get around to focusing on that instead of redistributing money.) I hadn’t really thought about mutual aid before the pandemic. I knew about it from the Black Panthers and the various Occupies. But as a way about thinking how we are responsible to and for each other and how we can make our own just worlds? That was new to me. (And for real, it has had a big impact on how I’m thinking about FemBib, and that post really is actually coming.)
Becky Chambers. I got so many recommendations to try the Wayfarers series and this year I jumped in. I’ve only read the first two—my SFF child devoured the entire series as soon as I told him to try the first—but I am pretty sure that I will continue to love them. The one that really sticks with me is the second in the series, A Closed and Common Orbit, which is about artificial intelligence and bodies and what makes a body your housing and what makes a family your family and a home a home. Could you get more important questions?
Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology is about the same things but from the direction of a series of lectures by a materials engineer and feminist and pacificist. I don’t remember why I thought if I read this that it would me think about feminist bibliography, but it did. (My guess is that this is due to Deb Chachra and I am really looking forward to her book on infrastructure.) It also helped me understand why the science fiction books I’m drawn to are the ones that speak to me. I’m not really interested in toys, but if there are new technologies that help us imagine new communities that get us one step closer to a reparative and equitable world? I’m there.
Kelsey McKinney’s God Spare the Girls is not about what might come to mind when we talk about technology, but it is about systems of faith and gender and how a young woman negotiates the chasm that is widening between how she thinks the world is and how she is recognizing it and herself to be. Gentle and fierce, more complicated than it initials presents as, and compassionate even as it judges—it’s a book I keep recommending.
And Stephen Graham Jones‘s The Only Good Indians is a genre I don’t usually read (I love a murder mystery; I hate horror) but it pulled me through the scare and gore (it actually felt usually like gore in service of the story) and the result was a story about community and history and destruction and the power of stepping outside settler frameworks and categories to reclaim the past and redress wrongs.
Catch me on a different day and my choices might change. But when I close my eyes and remember 2021, these are the ones that float to the top. And when I imagine what the world of 2021 will have created, what I hope is that these lessons about communities and reparations and equity are the ones we will prioritize.
Here’s to building a future that we are excited about.